Of all the industries to learn from, I’ve always felt golf holds some of the closest, most insightful parallels.

So from fall 2014 to spring 2015 I studied golf resort marketing as rigorously as I do ski, collecting a long list of examples to learn what they’re doing well and what they’re not. This week I’ll be sharing three of those lessons.
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Ski resorts have conditions that can dramatically change the product and, thus, the marketing in the space of days or even hours. So being, it’s little surprise that timely, relevant information is a big part of content strategy.

But what about the other times? What about the normal days. The sunny days. The no pow, no rain, no wind, no ice days? Well, maybe a sport like golf, where conditions are more or less static, can teach us something.

One Tweet
This lesson start with a simple tweet posted on December 4, 2014. This tweet:

Check out this #BandonDunes video we produced. What is your favorite memory from Bandon Dunes? → https://t.co/2az6SO3hv3

— Bandon Dunes (@BandonDunesGolf) December 4, 2014

Simple, beautiful footage combined with a clean soundtrack, this content instantly moved Bandon Dunes a few spots up my golf course bucket list.

It was really good content and really good marketing.

Looking Closer
But what intrigued me most wasn’t the video itself, it was its upload date because it had been uploaded over seven months before that tweet was shared.

At the time, yes, most of the 16,000 views had come from their website.

But when you looked at the daily view stats, the website-driven 40+ daily views were regularly interrupted by spikes. Spikes that correlated perfectly to days like December 4, 2014 when they shared this video on their social media outlets.

And I say days (plural) because it wasn’t just December 4, 2014, it was days like July 17, 2014.

Check out this video we produced for #BandonDunes. What is your favorite memory from this course? https://t.co/2az6SNuDkZ

— Bandon Dunes (@BandonDunesGolf) July 17, 2014

Or October 7, 2015 when they updated it.

Check out our updated #BandonDunes course video here → https://t.co/JCQpaoibAS Any shots we should add next time?

— Bandon Dunes (@BandonDunesGolf) October 7, 2015

But sharing the same content over and over, people would catch on, right? Perhaps, but when you look at the stats, every time there’s a share you see the same spike in both views but also engagement on the post.

The Lesson
I think this is a brilliant move and so simple to execute.

Real-time content is absolutely a cornerstone of ski resort marketing, but I also love the concept of creating a pool of evergreen marketing – 5 or 10 pieces of content that tell your story really, really well no matter the conditions – and drawing from that pool on off days to keep the stoke up and content-creation needs down.

In fact, I bet if you took a fifteen minutes right now and combed your archives, you could find a half-dozen videos that would fit. No Throwback Thursday required.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.