"How much should we be spending on marketing?" It is the question every board asks, and the honest answer — "it depends" — is useless to someone who has to write a budget by Friday. So let us build a number properly, from the club's own figures rather than a rule of thumb.
Why the percentage rule is nearly useless
The standard advice is to spend somewhere between 5% and 10% of turnover on marketing. It is repeated constantly and it is almost meaningless for a golf club, for three reasons.
First, turnover at a club is dominated by subscription income you have already secured. Spending 7% of last year's subscriptions tells you nothing about what it costs to win a member you do not have.
Second, it is circular. A struggling club has lower turnover, so the rule tells it to spend less, precisely when it needs to spend more. A full club with a waiting list is told to spend a fortune it does not need.
Third, it ignores the only two numbers that actually matter: what a member is worth, and what one costs to acquire. Get those two right and the budget calculates itself.
Start with lifetime value
Lifetime value — LTV — is what a member is worth to you across their whole time at the club, not what they pay this year. Most clubs dramatically undercount it because they only count the subscription.
Work it out like this, using a real example from a members' club we worked with in 2025:
| Annual subscription | £1,140 |
| Average bar and catering spend | £310 |
| Competition and society fees | £95 |
| Pro shop spend | £140 |
| Guest green fees introduced | £180 |
| Annual value | £1,865 |
| Average tenure | 7.4 years |
| Lifetime value | £13,801 |
| Gross margin (after cost of servicing) | ≈ 62% |
| Lifetime gross profit | ≈ £8,557 |
That last line is the one to write on the wall. Every full member this club recruits is worth around eight and a half thousand pounds of gross profit. Not eleven hundred.
Pull last year's accounts and work out your own annual value and average tenure. It takes about forty minutes. Nearly every club that does this discovers its members are worth roughly double what the committee assumed — which changes the entire tone of the budget conversation.
What a member should cost to win
The rule of thumb from subscription businesses is that you should be willing to pay up to a third of first-year value to acquire a customer, or roughly a tenth of lifetime gross profit, depending on how patient your cash flow is.
For the club above: a third of £1,865 is about £620. A tenth of £8,557 is about £855. So anywhere up to roughly £600–£850 to recruit a full member is a defensible spend. Most clubs flinch at £150.
Here are the benchmark ranges we see in UK golf, per acquisition, across paid social and search combined:
| Objective | Typical cost per lead | Typical cost per sale |
|---|---|---|
| Green fee / two-ball offer | £3 – £9 | £9 – £22 |
| Society day enquiry | £12 – £30 | £45 – £120 |
| Flexible / country membership | £14 – £35 | £70 – £190 |
| Full membership | £22 – £55 | £140 – £480 |
| Corporate / stay-and-play | £35 – £90 | £200 – £700 |
Note the spread between cost per lead and cost per sale. That gap is entirely determined by your follow-up. Two clubs paying the identical £30 for a membership lead can end up at £140 and £480 per member depending on whether somebody rings back within the hour. This is why we push team training before we push budget.
Working the budget backwards
Now the budget builds itself. Start with the goal, not the money.
Say the club needs 40 net new full members this year, and currently loses 55 a year. So the recruitment target is 95 — unless you also fix retention, in which case the target might be 65. (Notice how quickly retention becomes a budget line.)
| Full members needed | 65 |
| Expected cost per member (mid benchmark) | £240 |
| Acquisition budget | £15,600 |
| Add green fee and society campaigns | £7,200 |
| Creative — film, photography, design | £4,000 |
| Tools — email, landing pages, CRM | £1,100 |
| Total annual marketing budget | £27,900 |
| Expected gross profit from 65 members | £556,000 lifetime |
| First-year gross profit from those members | £75,100 |
That is a budget you can defend in a board meeting, because every line traces to a number the club already owns. It is also, incidentally, about 4.5% of a typical £620k turnover — so the percentage rule was not wildly wrong. It just could not tell you why, and it could not tell you what to do if the answer came out uncomfortable.
The spending order when money is tight
Most clubs cannot start at £28,000. Fine. Spend in this order, and do not move to the next line until the one above it is genuinely done.
- £0 — Fix reply time. Name an owner, set a one-hour target, measure it. This routinely doubles conversion on the leads you already get, at no cost.
- £0 — Publish your prices. Green fees, membership categories, society packages. Free, and it filters out the enquiries that were never going to convert.
- £400–£900 — Photography and a handful of clips. Every campaign that follows depends on this. Advertising with bad creative is buying a megaphone to mumble into.
- £500–£1,200 — One landing page and follow-up sequence. Not a whole website. One page that converts, plus the emails and texts that follow it.
- £600–£1,500/month — Paid ads on one objective. One. Usually green fees or societies, because they convert fastest and fund the next thing.
- Then scale. Add the second objective only once the first is producing a known, repeatable cost per sale.
The clubs that waste money are almost never the ones that spent too much. They are the ones that spent at step five while step one was still broken.
Reporting that survives a board meeting
A marketing report full of impressions and engagement rate will get you politely ignored. Report these seven lines instead, monthly, on one page:
- Spend, by channel
- Leads, by objective
- Cost per lead
- Median reply time
- Leads converted to tour / booking
- Sales, and cost per sale
- Revenue booked, and lifetime value booked
Two of those seven — reply time and lead-to-tour rate — are not marketing metrics at all. Include them anyway. They are usually where the money is being lost, and putting them on the marketing report is the fastest way to make them somebody's problem.
Do this for two quarters and the annual budget conversation changes character entirely. You stop arguing about whether marketing is worth it and start arguing about how much more of it you can afford — which is a much better argument to be having.
