Thu, March 28, 2024

Masters Week: All In or All Out?

 

Don MacNeil is the former Marketing Director of Windsor Jewelers and long-time on-air radio professional.

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Is it just me, or…

Masters Week: All In or All Out?

If you’re reading this, chances are you have some degree of self-promotion planted somewhere and at some cost. This would be the moment – nearly your last – to consider whether running your ads during Masters Week would boost your business or be a waste of time.

Consider: A significant number of our neighbors leave town for the week. Are they demographically your core customer? Or any significant percentage of that? You might consider putting your ads on hold for the week if the answer is yes.

Ditto if your place of business is near enough to the Augusta National that we locals are probably going to give a thumbs down to trying to get to you. If you are that close to the action, chances are you’re going to enjoy a ton of accidental business anyway.

For the majority of us small business folk, whatever marketing we’re doing is mostly on autopilot. We may have other things on our minds than whether we’re about to waste a week’s worth of ad dollars.

What if the opposite is true? What if you see the influx of golf patrons as a once-a-year business bonanza? If you do, getting the attention of visitors is a challenge.

Is Masters Week a boon or a black hole for marketing your business?

A billboard on Washington Road? Chances are they were booked months ago at premium prices, typically swept up by national firms. Online? You may want to look into the various tournament results sites, but it’s getting late. Social media? Sure, but again, time isn’t your friend.

Even here in 2022, you can still make the case that one of the first things strangers do, especially given the “getting around” challenges that week, seek out the local all-information radio station. They’re looking for traffic and weather advice, what the entertainment options are, and most especially, for restaurant ideas. WGAC may be where you want to be. Local TV does great work too if you have a video ready to go.

In the early Windsor Jewelers years, we booked in special shows like the ancient Spanish gold and silver treasure from the lost galleon, Atocha, hoping to pull in the curious, but soon realized that the swirling throngs around us were solely focused on getting in or out of the course. That’s when we switched to positioning the store as Augusta’s other must-see.

This led one year to our poking fun at the official road signs that pop up for the week whose job it is to spread course-bound traffic around to alternate entrance routes across the CSRA. I don’t know about you, but I laugh when I see them, imagining the circuitous journeys unsuspecting visitors are being sent on. The resulting tongue-in-cheek radio spot featured the sound of crickets with the suggestion that some golf traffic was being routed through Grovetown, a gag not appreciated by one irate local.

So this is just a heads up to spring you to action. Is Masters Week a boon to your business or a black hole? Either way, from an advertising standpoint, it’s certainly not business as usual.

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