How To Take Someone From Visitor to Member After the First Interaction

How do you take someone from visitor to customer or member after your first touchpoint with them in a crowded marketplace? What’s most important with your potential customers is to maintain the relationship and continue the conversation well after the first touchpoint. People buy wine from people; not businesses. How do you follow up? How to do you keep in contact with new guests even if they don’t make a purchase? It’s important to audit your communication with customers so you can build meaningful connections far beyond the initial conversation.

Real Life Tactic: Provide incentives to your guests if they provide you with an email or social media follow. Follow up with them that day and continue the conversation well beyond the initial conversation. With over 27K followers, Frank Family Vineyards still finds the time and does an amazing job with continuing that conversation on a majority of their social media posts:

Quick Tips to Get More Followers & Tags on Your Family Owned Winery Social Media

The first thing you should do is clean up your digital footprint. Setup your pages and ensure each social media page is consistent across all platforms. Claim your Google business listing. This is your Google my business page where you can begin to collect reviews, reply and post relevant events and photos to help you stand out as potential customers begin to find their next adventure.

Do your best to have the same social handle across all platforms. If a user tries to tag you, they want to tag you once and not have to worry about figuring out the correct name across all media. If you’re just starting with social media, just focus on a couple of social media platforms. You’ll want to do 2 very well, than all 7 or 10 poorly. Most importantly, as Amber said, “and please, DON’T just post bottle shots.”

Using Your Winery Marketing Email As The Quickest Way to Sales

Although email marketing has seen a decline from what it’s been in the past, email marketing has still proven to get a lot more direct sales than social media. Social media should be used as a platform to make connections and tell your story.

Direct email is a great way to create exclusive offers, so it’s important to maintain and build your mailing list. While social is great for telling stories and conversing with your audience, email marketing can provide immediate results with offers and incentives.

Real Life Tactic: It may be tempting to just start blasting your email list with offers and events (whether virtual or in person). The key is to start with developing your winery’s business goals, how you will use your marketing efforts to support those goals, and then begin with how email marketing can simply be an avenue towards building awareness around a particular campaign.

Here is an amazing example of one of our favorite wineries and their email newsletter: Click on the hot spots to learn more about why we love this email

How to Make Your Brand Look 10X Better Without A Lot of Cash?

A lot of wineries think producing content is really expensive. Photos. Winery video production. Web Design + Development. The list goes on. It doesn’t have to be expensive to get outstanding quality and a brand that looks much higher quality than what you’ve invested.

Amber notes that you can spend money on the photography and video, put those assets in a basic template and your website will look much more awesome than what a lot of the competition is doing.

Real Life Tactic: In order to save on time and costs, ask your agency or content producer how much content can be produced with a full day of shooting. You might find yourself surprised about how much they can tackle.

Photographers and video agencies can capture a lot in one day and can provide you with enough content to not only fill your website, but up to a quarter or 6 months worth of high quality social media content.

What Winery Marketing Content Boosts Wine Tasting Traffic?

The best winery marketing content you can create is that which involves storytelling. Social media is a lifestyle platform. Wine sales don’t happen unless you have relationships. If you think bottle shot after bottle shot is going to get you a sale, you’ll be disappointed. Show them who you are, and that you care.

The more shareable your content is, the more you’re going to rank on search engines and social media. The more you rank, the more people who didn’t know about you before, soon will.

Real Life Tactic: Winemakers think winemaking is boring, but people love behind the scenes. They love seeing what’s happening at the vineyard and what this process looks like. Introduce those on your team that do not always get the lime light (those other than your CEO’s and winemakers).

The Full-Length Video Conference

How to Get Way More Customers to Join Your Winery’s Virtual Tasting Room Experience

Generate more buzz and what Amber calls, intentional “stumbling upon.” Develop a theme and catch wine customers’ interest by being more intentional about how you name your virtual wine tasting room. You want people to look for your wine with intent. Remember to think outside of the box and begin to do things that are not conventional marketing. 

Learn more tips from Amber about how to have a more successful virtual wine tasting experience here.

What Content Increases Winery Followers and Likes on Social Media

We’ve seen it a lot; bottles, vines. Bottles and more vines. Establishing shot. But what get’s potential winery customers truly excited about wanting to engage with your brand both on your website and social media?

It’s not always about the wine; it’s important to tell your story and allow customers to get to know who is behind the brand.

You often hear the saying, “X amount of people have touched this wine along the winemaking process.” However, as a winery, you can start to reveal what’s behind the mystique, behind the curtain of the winemaking process.

Show your customers who is behind the wine and allow customers to get to know the faces on a more personal level and you’re likely to see in uptick in social media followers and likes. Ask your customers to make a connection with your brand by showing customers that they’re buying “John’s” work or “Jill’s” work.

What is The Best Selling Point About Your Winery? Hint: It’s Not Your Wine…

Every touchpoint you have with your consumers is an opportunity to show your potential customers what make your winery unique. How can you connect with potential customers in a more meaningful way.

Amber says, “You’re not selling anything different if you’re just selling great wine.” The most unique story you have that other wineries do not, is your personal story and your people. Leverage that.

What Can Smarter Winery Marketing Do for Your Winery?

Why should established wineries continue to invest in marketing if it’s difficult to measure the results on day one? Why should wineries looking to grow their brand invest in long term marketing strategies when they need sales today?

Investing in marketing allows the winery to move forward. Marketing is creating an internal motivation to continue to move forward, to continue to reach for more, and to ensure your success for the long term.

Planting seeds with potential customers is not always a measurable metric with regards to immediate results, however, it’s important to invest in marketing for the long term.

The Full-Length Video Conference

Time Stamps:

01:45 – What is SpitBucket and who is Amber LeBeau?
03:45 – Why is it so important for wineries to invest in marketing and what works
04:33 – The power of YouTube and how your winery can take advantage
06:34 – How can wineries reduce the noise and provide more value?
06:44 – Making good wine alone is not good enough to get more sales
07:32 – Wineries are not only competing with their neighbor or other labels
08:38 – What can wineries be doing to capture more attention?
09:16 – Winery video creates connection and engagement in the midst of the shutdown
10:42 – What your winery might be doing wrong with social media and Instagram marketing
12:08 – Make your content meaningful and stop potential customers in their tracks
12:55 – How can wineries incentivize more people to engage with their virtual tasting room?
14:50 – Sell your brand, not just wine. Jackson Family Estates and The Wine Makers on Radio Misfits – The Wine Makers
17:58 – What video would you want to see created to make you take action and buy a winery’s wine?
20:50 – The easiest thing you can do to start winery marketing right
22:34 – Show people who you are, build meaningful connections with everyone within your winery
25:15 – Wineries should be asking their customers what they want
27:54 – Why it’s important to move forward and innovate with marketing even if you have a reputation
30:01 – What is branding and what does that mean for a winery?
32:00 – If you give people a reason to give a damn, they will give a damn.
32:14 – What’s Amber’s favorite wine?

Step 1: Define Your Winery Marketing Goals and Budget – Be Specific

Before beginning any marketing initiatives with your winery, the first thing you will want to do is define your goals, along with what budget you will be allocating toward these marketing goals. 

All too often, we see a number of wineries who start to do marketing because that’s just what you are supposed to do in order to get the word out. And so they start investing in this newsletter, or this digital magazine to talk about their upcoming events and wine releases. They start to get more images, more graphics and then post on social media. Post and share, rinse and repeat. Although these tactics are not all for nothing, they are sometimes performed without a specific goal in mind and it becomes harder and harder to even measure how effective these marketing tactics are. So first things first, define your goals and begin to form your budget around what it might take to achieve those goals. 

As you could imagine, there are a number of different goals you can set for your winery. There’s not one right way to set goals, however, we’d suggest to begin with those goals that moved you to want to perform marketing in the first place. What problem are you seeking to solve that marketing might be able to handle? Is there a number you need to reach or number of bottles you need to move with regards to revenue? Are you wanting more visitors to step foot in the tasting room? Perhaps you want to sell more wine online? Remember, be specific about these goals. 

For example, your goal might look something like this: I would like my winery to increase online wine sales by 30% by end of year. 

From there, you can begin to ask yourself a number of questions for you to be able to move into what marketing plan you should put in place to make sure (best you can) to achieve that goal. 

What does that revenue number look like? Based on current traffic and conversions to sales, how many more visitors to my website would I need in order to increase the number of sales I have online? What am I willing to invest in order to see that outcome?

Step 2: Define Your Audience – Attract The Right Buyers and Club Members

Once you are able to establish your goals, you are going to want to make sure that you define the audience who will help you to achieve those goals. How old are they, where do they hang out? How do they interact with content online and how can you better serve them and their needs before they come to the tasting room? 

Just like we worked through with your goals above, you are going to want to be very specific about your audience. As we briefly discussed in our previous blog, “How Winery Commercial Video Marketing Can Increase Wine Sales” you must be very clear as to who your ideal customer is and to understand the “anyone who drinks wine” isn’t going to cut it. You need to show your audience exactly who they are, what they think and who they look like, so every touch point they have with your winery brand is relevant to them. One way wineries can think about defining their audience, is by building a tribe you want them to be a part of.

For instance, when you think of Nike, those who wear their clothing are a part of a tribe. Why do their sneakers cost more than brands you haven’t heard of? Why do I feel more like an NBA player when I wear their shoes in a basketball game? Nike has made me feel like I am a part of a particular tribe by how they market themselves. They’ve defined their tribe and it consists of the athletes I see on television who represent that brand. “If you buy our clothing, you’re one of us.” Don’t mistake targeting your audience with having to discriminate against others, because Nike’s mission is all-inclusive!

“Our mission is, To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.” – 

What Is Nike’s Mission? | Nike Help 

So who is your audience? What tribe are you inviting tasters to be a part of? It’s okay to have an inclusive market, however, be very precise with your touch points with each of your potential customers. 

Step 3: Create Better Winery Marketing Content – Not More Noise

We’re almost half-way there, and this is the fun part! Time to create content that engages your audience and hits those goals. As you know, when it comes to social media and the web, there is a lot of noise and not all of it is helpful. Nor engaging. A lot of content is great, however, the way in which we deliver content does not always get their attention.

How can you start creating better content?

With absolutely zero bias, we recommend a video marketing strategy.

According to Hubspot,

(Wordstream, 2018) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

Remember that sample goal above with regards to selling more wine online? The use of winery videos on your website can increase conversions by 86%. That’s a lot more sales. 

A couple more stats that show how others have taken advantage of commercial video marketing content: 

 (My SMN, 2017)

(Forbes, 2017) (Source: HubSpot)

In short, let’s develop better content; video content. Developing content that moves the needle and makes an impact on your marketing efforts is key so you can achieve the goals you’ve set out to accomplish. Tell your story, show your tasting room, and give your audience a reason why they should visit or buy through winery commercial video production.

Step 4: Create a Winery Marketing Campaign

Let’s put everything we’ve covered so far together (goals, audience, and content) and create your marketing campaign. Once again, the key to creating your marketing campaign is to be specific, organized, and strategic. 

How long should a marketing campaign be? Well that depends on your goal, audience, and content type and how aggressive you would like to be in reaching that goal. 

To continue with the example we’ve used before:

Goal: Increase online wine sales by 30% by end of year

Audience: The discerning wine taster age 35 to 45

Content: Winery Brand Story Video Production

Marketing Campaign: Before you kick off your winery marketing campaign, start with a schedule and ask yourself: How will I share my content and where? 

Making sure you promote your content is key and so important to launching an effective winery marketing campaign. Ever hear of the latest product that solves your x, y, z needs? Probably by way of a marketing campaign. Share the content you’ve created for the right people. This is why we recommend working with a winery marketing agency you can trust like our friends at Vinbound Marketing. They offer a full range of digital marketing and branding services to grow tasting room traffic and help you to sell more wine. 

Step 5: Measure the Results and Be Flexible

How did your winery marketing campaign perform? Did you reach your goal? If not, where do you see areas for improvement? 
Measuring the performance of your campaign is important to note so you can be flexible in how you approach your next marketing effort. Marketing, like everything else, is about making sure you’re always improving and simply getting better. For instance, if you did not see as much traffic as you would have liked, find out why. Ask yourself how you can make better use of the content you have on hand. Moreover, you may realize that your marketing campaign was delivered in the best way, but you might have to be more realistic with your upcoming goals and expectations. Or maybe you exceeded all expectations and blew your goal out of the water and it’s time to set your sights even higher, make it more challenging. Whether you missed your goal by a landslide, or over performed, take note and adapt for your next marketing efforts to pack your tasting room in 2020. 

If you would like to learn more about how commercial video production can impact your marketing plan for 2020, let us know and send us an email. We’d love to hear more about how you are video marketing today, what’s worked, and what hasn’t. Learn More

1. The Virtual Tasting Room Exists Wherever There’s Internet: Everywhere.

The first reason for why your winery can thrive with a virtual tasting room is that it is no longer confined to the 4 walls of your space. Your winery is no longer limited to who can fit into a tasting room at one time, nor the timing for which your customers show up. Your tasters can also be wherever you ship your wine meaning they can taste with you wherever they are in the world as long as they have an internet connection. With winery video production, you can bring the tasting room to the comfort of your customers homes. You can also host an on demand Q and A creating a direct line of communication with your tasters. If they have questions, you can answer them online. Remember, the event does not have to be live in order to serve your customers through a virtual tasting room. You can host a pre-recorded event, and host the tasting similar to a webinar and be on demand without necessarily having to perform another tasting on video. 

The Benefit:

Reach more customers, in a shorter amount of time while still being able to build a meaningful relationship with your tasters. 

Real Life Application Tip:

Professionally pre-record your private tasting room event so you can laser focus on how you would like to deliver the tasting experience. Live events can have their hiccups, so being able to pre-record and perform based on a predetermined strategy can showcase a much more customized and premium experience for your tasters. Your winery can also continue to use the virtual tasting room commercial video production in future marketing endeavors throughout the year, so you are not limited to a specific time and location. 

2. Educate A Larger Audience with Virtual Tasting Rooms

A winery virtual tasting room also gives you the ability to educate a larger audience about your wines. Instead of being limited to the size of your tasting room, you can now walk tasters through each of your wines, how they’re made, what qualities to pay attention to, along with what they can be paired with. The sky’s the limit with the amount of tasters you can reach because there is no boundary to how many fans can taste with you online. A lot of wineries we’ve spoken with have found the most success of their sales are by word of mouth, but now they’ll have the ability to share your tasting room with even more families and friends. They’ll be able to hear directly from your most trusted team member about the wines they’re tasting, and what makes them different. By bringing the experience online through video production, you can truly scale your business. 

The Benefit:

Bring the tasting room experience to a larger audience and scale your sales at an exponential rate, versus only being able to speak with those directly in front of you in the tasting room. 

Real Life Application Tip:

You can still apply all of the perks of what it’s like to be in your tasting room, such as exclusive wine discounts and club membership incentives. Remember, you’re just bringing the unique experience of your winery tasting room to their home. 

3. The Wine Tasting Experience on Video without Leaving Home

With a virtual wine tasting room, you can now provide a guided tasting experience without any of your customers having to leave their home. Your winery’s tasting room can remain open without having to physically be open. This is incredibly important and relevant at a time when California has been ordered to close all essential businesses to the public for health and safety. As reported by Silicon Valley Bank, 30% of wineries income comes directly from the tasting room¹ so it’s understandable why it’s very scary when you can’t have the tasting room available for your members and customers. However, with a virtual tasting experience, you don’t have to stop doing business. Customers can enjoy your tasting experience right at home, and they can have a direct line of communication with you to purchase even more wine. Get live feedback, and answer any questions from your home to theirs. 

The Benefit:

Whether we are in the midst of a pandemic, simply find it challenging to visit the tasting room because of taster’s location or inclement weather, you can bring the tasting room straight to your taster’s home. 

Real Life Application Tip:

Build a video marketing campaign to attract and incentivize tasters to be a part of your virtual tasting room experience. As important as it is to create the VTR, it’s even more important to let potential customers know it exists. 

4. Rise WITH Other Wineries and Don’t Fall Behind

The fourth reason why your winery can thrive with a virtual tasting room is by being able to rise with the competition. Wineries, at least the good ones, are constantly thinking of new ways to innovate in the industry. How can we continue to deliver a better customer experience for our tasters? How can we make our experience more unique? 

Many wineries are jumping on board and already have the ability to bring the tasting room to their customers’ devices. Visit Napa Valley² is compiling a great list of those wineries in Napa county alone. With the world going digital, wineries are doing their best to keep up and enhance their online experience. The virtual tasting room is proving to be the perfect way to do just that.  

The Benefit:

As mentioned above, with the current pandemic and the needs to close physical doors to the public, wineries are becoming much more creative about how they can still have the tasting room experience replicated without being open to the public. 

Real Life Application Tip:

Partner with a commercial video production agency who can help you to be creative about how to approach your winery virtual tasting room. Review what the competition is doing and put your own spin on it, just like you’ve done with your wine. 

5. The Virtual Tasting Room Experience 24/7/365

A lot of wineries are performing live tastings online through their virtual tasting room, which is great, however, you don’t have to stop there. Use the tasting experience over and over again by way of a professional video production. 

How can our winery do that? 

As suggested in our real life application tip above, pre-record your tasting experience, and do not just limit access to the one time experience for your guests. Instead of having a live experience, record professionally and continue to use the video as marketing material throughout the year. You can allow guests exclusive access 24/7 on their own time, at their own leisure. We all know that the more our customers learn about your wine and your story, the more wine they buy. 

The Benefit:

The virtual wine tasting video can be used throughout the year rather than just a specific live event time. 

Real Life Application Tip:

Work with your video production partner to use the footage captured in the wine virtual tasting room for other areas of your winery video marketing. You can use the footage in your various social media campaigns, on the website, and any other marketing campaigns you will be running. We’d also recommend creating a video that helps to promote the virtual tasting room so customers can see what it’s like to actually participate. Building trust with video of the VTR is key in building momentum. 

What We’ve Covered So Far:

Are you considering a Virtual Tasting Room video for your winery? We’ve got a lot of ideas on how to make this possible and how to bring an amazing experience to your customers. Amber LeBeau at Spit Bucket has written an excellent piece on the subject in How Can We Make Virtual Wine Tastings Less Sucky?  Despite the tactic and approach you take with your Virtual Tasting Experience, she says this as the key to remember:

“The key to remember is that even when you’re not selling bottles, you’re still selling your brand. You’re selling your passion, personality and insights.“

We talked a lot about the virtual wine tasting room and how you can take advantage of video production. If you would like to learn more about how you can bring the tasting room to your customers online, let us know here and we would be happy to answer any questions you have.

Why winery commercial video productions?

If you are not utilizing video with your winery, why start now? Not everyone invests in video productions in their marketing efforts and we can all agree, this does not happen much in the wine industry. 

According to Hubspot’s most recent study on marketers who use video,

It looks like video marketing is working, and it’s working really well. With a lot of wine drinkers spending their time on social media or browsing online, video is proving to be one of the biggest needle movers when it comes to building awareness through their marketing channels. We understand it’s tough to try something new and something we don’t know for sure whether it will work or not, but that’s exactly why you should start. Because there are only a select few wineries who are beginning to take advantage of telling their unique story through video productions.

What You Can Do Today:

According to Wine Enthusiast, “Wineries have beefed up efforts to connect with customers in new ways in order to increase direct-to-consumer sales outside of winery visits. This includes … virtual tastings and no-contact local delivery.”² Commercial video marketing can be a great way to bring the tasting room right to wine tasters fingertips so they can experience what it’s like to taste with you before they visit or make their next purchase.

Where to start with winery videos

Get to know your wine buying audience.

Getting to know your audience is the first thing you need to do before you produce any content. That’s right, before pictures, videos, or catchy headlines, it’s important to define who your wine buyers are.

Does this sound familiar? “We know exactly who our buyers are. It’s anyone who drinks wine.” Or. “It’s the older crowd.” Unfortunately, that’s not what we mean by getting to know your audience.

As Hubspot puts it,

When defining your audience, it is important to understand their buying behaviors, their buyer’s journey. Only then can you begin to see exactly what your ideal buyer persona looks like and what they’re interested in.

For instance, can you see the difference between what a buyer for a Honda Civic or a Porsche Turbo looks like? Can you see a difference in the marketing message and how they’re advertised to? The “anyone who buys cars” logic can be quickly challenged as a potential buyer for a Honda Civic and a potential buyer for Porsche look very different. Not only with regards to budget, but each buyer has different lifestyles, different areas they hangout, the list goes on.

It’s important to note that one car company is not “better” than the other. Both are extremely successful. One’s marketing is not better or worse than the other, both companies sell a lot of cars! However, the type of content and how that content is served is simply different. It’s targeted toward a specific audience type. So for you, whether you sell your wine for $5 a bottle, or $1,000 a bottle, understand your buyer audience and learn more about what type of content they consume and what they’ll engage with on the big screen; or Youtube or the website.

How can commercial video productions impact your wine sales?

Good question! Let’s start here: Why do multimillion dollar companies still invest in video marketing? Once again, it affects their sales. Marketing and sales alignment can be one of the biggest problems in the industry because one hand is not talking to the other. There’s a disconnect. That’s why it’s extremely important that the first thing you do, before you invest in any marketing, is figure out exactly what the problem is that you’re trying to fix. If you want to increase wine sales, find out why exactly your sales are not where you want them to be. Where’s the disconnect within your own team and ask yourself how marketing could potentially help. Then ask yourself, how much more wine sales do I want?

Once you are able to establish measurable goals, you can then begin to tackle how you want video marketing to play a role in that. As we saw above, an overwhelming percentage of marketers saw a positive ROI with video being implemented into their marketing efforts. If not a lot of people know about your story, how you came to be or why you started in the first place, share it through video. Make it personal. If you have a number of wine releases scheduled, let people know why they should taste them, why they should buy. Make it easy for people to consume the reasons why you do what you do and they’ll respond. They’ll buy more wine.

What should you look for to make sure your winery commercial video production’s done right?

As with everything, there’s reservations about not making the right decision about how to approach your video marketing. It’s new. So the first thing you will want to do is find a partner who understands your goals, both for the business and marketing, so the right foundation for the video can be put in place. Doing winery video marketing for the sake of doing video marketing is never a good approach. A lot of video production agencies after just one phone call, suggest a price, bring a drone, and show up to do that video production thing.

It’s important to slow down the conversation and find a video production partner you can trust to not just perform high quality video work, but a partner who makes sure that your needs are met and that your vision is understood. You also want to make sure that in addition to fitting into your overall business goals, the video is going to be created to move people. To get them to engage with the content and have them feel compelled to ultimately engage with your winery. Because that’s why we all started this winery business in the first place right? To build relationships and share a glass with a friend or two.

In Summary:

If you want to learn more about how you can boost wine sales through winery commercial video productions, let us know and we would be happy to help answer any questions you might have.