So you made it through harvest and crush and your wine humming along nicely. Everything is coming together and you’re on target to have 10,000 cases ready to bottle by mid-Summer. Problem is, your distributor still has 3,000 cases unsold and sitting in their warehouse.
With 6,000 brands all competing for shelf space there’s no way you’re going to get repeat customers without a constant give and take of relevant information between you and your customers. They may pick your label out of the sea of labels once or twice, but it’s not likely. With so many choices, why would they? Who wants to go on the same vacation over and over?
These days it’s essential to have an online presence. The internet is a powerful tool. It can reach millions of potential customers with a minimal amount of investment of either time or money. The number of wineries that don’t use this medium to its fullest extent just amazes me. Okay, pretty much everybody has a web page or site that has a pretty picture of the winery and maybe a shot or two of the cellar. Usually there is an “About Us” page that tells the story of the owners and the unique way the winemaker plies his craft. Some have on-line ordering through PayPal or an 800 number to call to order. This is good. It’s a great start. But it’s by no means the end of the story!
You need an e-marketing strategy.
The beauty of e-marketing is that you can custom fit the medium to your specific needs. And the most important aspect of the medium is that you can track the campaign in real time to see if you’re going in the right direction! You can communicate with your target audience instantly and you may even find an audience you didn’t think you had.
So what’s the trick to getting the most out of your e-marketing budget? The answer is different for everyone. You have to figure out what your reason for being online is in the first place. Are you trying to make a buzz in the community to attract walk-ins? Are you looking for a way to take your brand national? Are you trying to make your brand appeal to a younger audience?
Once you’ve answered this question, you can begin to build an online strategy that works for you.
Good luck, and get online!
I have to agree that the Internets are a wonderful tube to get information to the people, certainly more personalized than television or radio (and forget about print advertising for boutique products). However, even more so than TV, there is a bit too much of the "SHAM WOW!" pitch on the internet, so I think you need to be careful how you build out your pitch and spread it around.
ReplyDeleteAt first glance, the "viral" approach seems like the most appropriate way to go with something as esoteric as wines, but even there I've been led astray by well-intentioned, but ill-informed "friends" who insist that this thing they just sampled is the best thing ever. They badger and cajole me to join in on their next greatest thing ever, and I drag along, sometimes finally succumbing, I get "there" and find that while interesting or appealing in some way it's not "all that" and of course by then, they've moved onto the next thing anyhow, and the cycle starts all over again. A few rounds of this and I'm getting a bit cynical and tired of my "friend's" enthusiasm for new things and that door slams closed. The key to a successful viral infection is finding the right initial hosts: infectable, gullible, credible, with a lot of high affinity, intimate relationships across a wide spread of the population.
Nevertheless, you need to keep in mind that, as with all advertising, the only pitches that actually work are those that address one (or both) of two primal needs, viz "buy this product and you will get laid," or "buy this product or you will die," modulating the intensity of each with modifiers like "get laid more, more often, by a higher quality of partner, in a raunchier way, in a way you've never been laid before, etc.," or alternatively "it will take longer to die, your death will be more pleasant, you will have more enjoyment before you die, etc."
The few truly successful "industries" that rely on the internet are pornography and insurance. They sell endlessly replicated, low overhead products that represent nearly 100% profit after the first few sales, with nothing but profit thereafter. Short of initial production costs, there is virtually nothing that needs to be paid out to replicate to a nearly infinite scale (a great combination of low fixed costs and low variable costs).
Wine, can serve both core criteria for successful advertising (longer, more enjoyable life and [possibly] a more satisfying sex life). As you point out elsewhere, taking the recession angle, who couldn't use a bit more of these during these hard times? But on the latter point, there are high fixed costs to making a product that may or may not be any good, with a readout on quality not happening for what could be years after commitment of sunk costs, and a near impossibility of replicating the [rare] highly successful run. So what you are selling is, for the most part somewhat ephemeral and not as tangible as you would hope it could be.