Cutting Edge Golf Equipment Meets Cutting Edge Social Media Marketing

We serve a lot of clients in a lot of different industries. Some of them are fairly generic eCommerce merchants that simply need more visibility to push more of their products. 

Others are more specialized. One of our accounts is a company that researches and develops leading golf equipment, specifically golf putters, wedges, woods and shafts. 

This is not a golf retailer or pro shop that simply sells the shafts and clubs that other manufacturers produce. No; this is one of the leading manufacturers in the industry and one of the better-known names in the sport. 

That being the case, there are corners of the market in which this client has a strong position, and with such strong products, such as composite putter shafts that flex and balance like steel, and wood shafts that drive farther and straighter, for this client, marketing is more about visibility than it is competing on level ground. 

The Client 

As stated, this client has developed truly innovative products in the golfing industry, including first of its kind composite putter shafts and uniquely balanced putter shafts, woods and wedges. 

For other golf retailers, marketing might be more about getting to the top of page one and competing on price, or on fitting services.

That dynamic doesn’t apply here. What this client has, few if any other manufacturers or retailers can rival. Our goal for them was to meet target audiences that had the need for their products.

So, for instance, some potential customer profiles might be: 

• Golfers that wanted lighter, stuffer putter shafts.
• Golfers who wanted to putt more accurately without making significant changes to their form.
• Golfers who wanted a wood that would let them drive farther with less strain. 
• Golfers who wanted to improve their short game and consistency with optimized wedge shafts. 

This is just a small cross-section of the types of target audiences we wanted to reach, but it served as a jumping off point. 

Social Media Advertising: The Approach

Search engine optimization provided a runway that was too long, and pay-per-click marketing, at least search PPC, was too nonspecific. We wanted to reach users on platforms where we could tailor ads to their interests and directly to the problems they had on the course. 

All else being equal, social media marketing offered the strongest opportunities to reach those potential customers with targeted ad creatives, and offered a more interactive approach than Google PPC (or any search PPC).

Plus, unlike strict organic content marketing, social media advertising, specifically Meta advertising (through Instagram and Facebook) would enable superior targeting, tracking and optimizations. 

When this client signed with us, they were already running some social ads, and the first hurdle was that too many ads were running to gather sensible feedback for learning purposes. There were also some account setup issues that we had to address and rectify. 

Once we cleaned that up, we had to introduce proper campaign segmentation, with audience segmentation, according to relevant demographics and interest profiles. 

In addition to reducing the overall number of ads running, we cut back on the number of ad sets, specifically because many of them were cannibalizing each other, which made it difficult to interpret the actual metrics associated with the campaign, not to mention the fact that digital marketing cannibalization is doubly harmful because it makes campaigns less cost-effective. 

We also added a dedicated brand awareness campaign with its own unique goals: to spread brand awareness, to gather page followers, and to use those followers for remarketing efforts, for customers that might not buy the first time they interacted with an ad.

Our PPC experts set up a dedicated remarketing campaign which featured special controls for add-to-cart and purchase exclusions. 

And on top of that, we polished existing ad copy and creatives to make them more professional and appealing to the client’s intended target audiences. 

The Results 

As in any social media marketing case study, the results generally speak for themselves. In any case, compare the following screenshot, which shows overall campaign results in November 2024…

…with the next screenshot that showcases overall campaign results in November of the following year, which was 2025: 

As you can see, the campaign performed well overall and its performance improved on several key metrics. 

Notably, reach increased by a factor of nearly two, and impressions rose as well, though not by as impressive a margin. Our eCommerce PPC management team also improved unique link clicks and increased click-through rate, too, which is a difficult metric to increase in addition to higher impressions, as to gather more impressions, generally the click-through rate falls. Our creatives, copy and targeting all improved, driving not just more overall visibility, but a higher percentage of clicks from those potential customers our ads reached in the first place. 

Most importantly, despite the higher spend, we boosted ROAS by nearly 50%, from 2.02 to 2.95, improving the profitability of the campaign. 

Wondering How You Can Improve Your Paid Social Media Marketing?

Like search PPC, social media advertising can be an effective way to reach new interested target audiences, gather leads, and close sales. The keywords there, however, are “can be.” 

Creatives and copy must be aligned with target audience expectations; you must understand the problems faced by potential clients, and you must target appropriately, among other considerations. 

Working with an agency that has seen success can be the right step in turning around an existing but sluggish set of Meta ad campaigns. Get in touch with our Facebook advertising services experts today and we’ll go over your options, and in the meantime, consult our existing collection of eCommerce case studies.