Santa Barbara Polo Club Benefits From Marketing Intern PDI
Santa Barbara Polo Club
Hello, my name is Wiley Uretz, and this past Spring I worked as a marketing intern at the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club. I am currently enrolled at Westmont College in Montecito, California, where I am majoring in Business/Economics with an emphasis on Business Law and a Minor in Spanish. Therefore when I was asked to add the marketing internship to my already held position of Assistant Manager I was more then happy to, since it gave me a chance to apply many of the things I was learning in school. Another reason why this internship fit me is because I have grown up playing polo, and I have played Intercollegiate/Interscholastic as well as professionally, so I have many contacts that I was able to use to spread the word around.
This helped especially since what I was marketing was the Coaching League, which like many things in polo has a very small target audience. The Santa Barbara Coaching League’s main goal was to give people a safe environment to transfer from the arena to the grass, and hopefully add to the polo members of the club. Where my contacts really paid off was on Facebook, because many of the people that we were looking for were people from other arena clubs around the area that were only familiar with their club players and pros. Therefore since I knew many of these players and pros I was able to write on their walls on Facebook and get them to like the page I created for the Coaching League, so that those other people we were targeting would see that and hopefully join. This worked with a number of people, and it actually boosted the number of players in club chukkers as well, since many of the more advanced players at the arena clubs did not know that they could play without being a member.
More specifically the coaching league ended up being at a canter to slow gallop level with one pro on each team coaching and hitting the ball up. We ended up with 7 people that were more or less consistently in the coaching league, and from those people we got one person who bought horses, and is playing consistently in the club chukkers, and will hopefully be a member next year. Additionally there are two other people that are thinking about becoming members thanks to the coaching league, and a few other people that were already family of members who will start playing more now. Overall everyone who did the coaching league for more than one session saw real improvements not only in their ball skills but importantly in their strategy and thinking of the game.
I also created some flyers for the coaching league, club chukkers, and and Polo Training center clinic programs, that were used to update the website to better introduce new members to that available programs.
If the Polo Club decides to hire me again next year as a marketing intern for the Coaching League, there a few things I will do differently. First of all I will start the Facebook ads sooner, since it is better to get people interested before it starts, and have them plan and be ready to go when it starts, then have them want to do it but not have any time or only be able to do it once since they saw it so late. Second, now that I know what the coaching league will be like, I will know what types of people to try and get, and I will use the pictures we took to help promote it to those people. Finally, I will not spend as much time on the website coupon sites as that did not work very well for me this time.