PGA European Tour

WePlay were appointed by The European Tour as their digital marketing agency to develop a dedicated direct-to-consumer strategy to support attendance and revenue growth across their event calendar. This case study is for one of the key events in their calendar, the 2018 BMW PGA Championship.

As with any strategic planning, the first step is to assess market demand and historical activity to define opportunities and tactics. Growing audiences and revenues year on year requires a strategy that targets new audiences. Understanding this brief, we developed the strategy that would target five key audience segments. This included local, regional and national golf fans, as well big eventer and family audiences. Once the strategy was in place, our team developed the creative messaging and formats to attract attention and drive purchase consideration.

We began working with the European Tour in April 2018 and this event was the following month,  therefore we needed to be super efficient. We developed an efficient strategy that enabled us to convert not only the European Tour’s connected fan-base into paying customers, but also drive revenues from new audiences. Overall our strategy supported the European Tour in achieving record numbers, with 110,000 people attending the event, making it the second highest attendance since 1955.