Craig T. Nelson and Inbound Marketing in Baton Rouge
Four years ago a good friend and I started our own golf tournament. We wanted a good reason to play 72 holes in 48 hours. That’s right 36 holes a day, for two days, all over one weekend. We chose the last weekend in June to have our contest. With dreams of this being an annual activity, we knew this weekend of golfing bliss needed a name. With no other ideas, we opted to name our little tournament after American cinema and television icon…Craig T. Nelson.
Flash-forward to today and we are embarking on the 5th Annual Craig T. Nelson Open, just as I’m finishing my second month at BlinkJar Media. With this being one of my favorite times of the year, and my mind is flooded with ideas about golf and thoughts about inbound marketing, it’s only natural the two started to mingle. What I’ve learned in my first 60 days at BlinkJar has shown me that golf and inbound have a lot in common.
Think of the golf ball as your message. A four dollar, fresh from the sleeve, crystal white ProV1. This ball, this message encompasses everything about you and your brand, and your only goal is to share it, make sure it gets where it belongs. Where it belongs is a simple place. In golf it’s the green. It’s a big piece of lush grass, standing perfectly still, waiting for you. For your brand it’s an interested, curious, needing customer.
As everyone learns in marketing class, at last count, we are all inundated with messages and impressions, over 5,000 each day. Those are a lot of obstacles distracting your message from getting to the right people. Look at a golf course; from the time your ball is teed up you have to negotiate trees, wind, water, sand, rough, so on and so forth. Your message has very little room for error before it gets buried, pushed around, plugged or sunk.
Coming from a television background, I’m very familiar with idea of blasting your message across a wide audience. Being very broad and covering a lot ground. I’m also aware of how easy it is for that message to get lost somewhere in those 5,000 impressions, amongst the audience that’s not interested. Just like in golf, you can address the ball with your driver, take a big swing and that ball will likely go a long, long way…but in what direction?
Inbound marketing offers precision. It’s a 9-iron you leave pin high. You take the trees, water and sand out of play. You put your message where it belongs, with the customers and potential clients that need it. You put the ball where it belongs, in the hole.
Through creating content, optimizing search engine results and by organically making Google work for your brand and your company, you shorten the golf course and make the hole bigger. Taking a focused approach and leveraging technology that is at everyone’s fingertips, makes your brand become a relevant, reliable, trusted source. This isn’t to say there’s no room in your game for a big swing. If you combine the precision of inbound marketing with the reach of traditional media correctly, you can dramatically expand your efforts with each.
It’s been a beautiful 4 years of the Craig T. Nelson Open. It’s been an enlightening and fulfilling 60 days at BlinkJar. I look forward to many, many more of both.
