With the help of Karelia UAS students the finnish project team collaborated with Karelia Golf to help the club to find new customers from different target audiences with new kind of marketing solutions. The club was looking for new customers especially from younger audiences, since the average age of the players is rising as older players quit the sport more often than younger start it. That leads to lower income and therefore weaker facilities and playing conditions. That is the main reason for Karelia Golf to find new audiences.
Karelia UAS students made a virtual tour with Karelia Golf. The tour was made for Virtual reality glasses, but it was also transformed to work in web browsers with Thinglink-production. The virtual tour can be found here: www.thinglink.com/mediacard/1326149454050361347
About Kontiolahti Golf
Kontiolahti Golf Oy is the company running the management of the golf courses hosted by Karelia Golf club. Kontiolahti Golf takes care of one 18-hole golf course, one 3-hole golf course and one indoor practice facility. All the facilities are located in Joensuu and Kontiolahti. The course with wonderful lake views attracts golf enthusiasts from all around Finland.
Website: kareliagolf.fi/
Facebook: Karelia Golf
Instagram: @kareliagolf
Youtube: Karelia Golf
The content of the virtual tour
The virtual tour consisted of multiple 360-images, 360-videos, infographics and 2D-videos. The content was chosen to make the sport and the golf course more accessible to new players. Therefore, the content had information about the course and golf techniques. The final product of co-operation was a virtual tour combining all the elements mentioned. Some elements were also suitable to be published individualy in social media. The content was first built to suit VR-glasses, but to get more users outside exhibitions and other similar events, the tour was transformed to be published in Thinglink. That will help gain more viewers for the tour, as the tour is available in all browsers.
The virtual tour in Thinglink: www.thinglink.com/mediacard/1326149454050361347
Example 1, a video about footgolf: youtu.be/WmvmmC0fxxo
Example 2, indoor practice facilities: youtu.be/KSwpvIo-eg0
Green aspects
Karelia UAS will go through environmental aspects of all the companies participating in the Digi2Market-project. If the company has lately done an environmental review, further analysis is not necessary. The content of the environmental review is used when creating content for marketing purposes. In Kontiolahti Golf Oy case, the most noteworthy environmental aspect was the detailed practice of taking care of the golf course, which earned the club a recognition from Finnish Golf Union in 2017. The club was the sole receiver of that year’s environmental award.
The co-operation was done in the end of golf season 2019. Due to covid-19 situation, the real effects of marketing were hard to analyze as season 2020 was affected by the restrictions related to pandemia. Kontiolahti Golf Oy has public plans to focus especially on attracting new players, so this marketing solution supports the future target as well.