Danish Golf Union
Engagement and member growth through branded content
OUTPUTS
CHALLENGE
Driving engagement and membership growth across a broad national association with more than 163,000 members.
Solution
Ongoing serialized entertainment formats designed for immersion on Facebook and Golf.com
Challenge
In the fall of 2020, we got in touch with the Danish Golf Union. They were receiving good results on videos on Facebook, but wanted to take it to the next level. They wanted more active time with members and they wanted more traffic to their news media.
The challenge was therefore to understand a complex audience with a wide age range and make films that they would immerse themselves in. At the same time, the challenge was to create concepts that were easy to duplicate and where serialization and mass production was an advantage.
Solution
Since the start of our collaboration in 2020, we've developed and produced over 126 minutes of video across 36 films, 3 campaigns, 1 documentary series and much more.
The first project we launched was the "Denmark's most strategic golf holes" campaign. It was an 18-episode summer series in 2021, with the primary purpose of driving local engagement and exposure to member clubs. Here, we deliberately chose to use familiar faces from the clubs themselves and add a new angle that we knew would attract a large part of the target audience: the strategic aspect of golf.
Since then, we have further developed the serialized branded content format, and in 2022 we produced a 9-episode summer series with Lars Ranthe with an average of 20,000 organic plays per episode. The series continued in 2023 with the second season, which featured even more club visits and more hours with Lars Ranthe in front of the camera. With an average of 100,000 plays per episode across all media, this season set new heights for performance.
Last but not least, we have been developing an entertainment series with Marcus Hundebøl and Oliver Helligkilde. Only one episode has been released as a test. However, this episode has received 34,400 organic views, and we expect to build on the series in 2023.
The result
In 2021, DGU broke the membership record and had the largest membership growth ever with almost 10,000 members from 2020 (154,800) to 2021 (164,100). However, this was a membership number that was sure to fall again, as a large part of the new members were attributed to corona. Therefore, we have worked a lot with branded content in 2022 to retain all the new members, and there are still 163,900 active members as of December 2022.