When it comes to distillers marketing, genuine brand messaging and the uniqueness of it, can be the differentiating factors that gets the bottles into the hands of key decision makers, distributors, and many people who loves it.
In the past years, distillers have been experiencing a boost in profit due to the rising popularity of cocktails and increasing consumption of liquor and spirits. But, even considering the boost in demand, brands must focus on the right marketing strategy to pitch a distributor and new loyal customers, especially when the competition is growing. In today’s world, every successful business is going digital. Digital Marketing is a tool that allows you to get more clients, make business more profitable and competitive.
To have a successful distillery you must prove your value that the distributors can choose you to add to their portfolios and the public to buy your product, knowing your quality and unfitness taste. For distilleries, marketing is like a cocktail, if you do not use quality ingredients or use only one ingredient – like social media, then will not be a valuable cocktail and cannot be even named a cocktail, in this case a successful business.
21st century is characterized as a rise of the digital marketing, the easy and cheaper way of promoting your business direct to every person who has access to the internet, not just locally or nationally, but internationally too.
Marketing entails more than social media and that is why you need a full-scale marketing plan in the development of your brand in your customer’s mind.
Why a marketing strategy plan is so important?
Marketing strategy is important because it defines the way you communicate your value to others and will highlight the path you are taking to achieve your objectives and goals.
It says that “failing to plan is planning to fail” and if you do not fully integrate digital marketing into your marketing plan, then will happen these:
- Losing out to competitors
- Losing market share to existing and start-up competitors
- Retaining fewer customers
- Neglecting on opportunities for better targeting and optimization
- Your competitors will pose more of a threat, filling in the gaps that you are missing
Here you can find my list of 6 things you will not want to leave out
1. Create a professional website
Living in the digital world, a website is crucial for your business, it is your marketing tool. Your website is the tool that can be used to accomplish many different marketing strategies to help your business grow.
Many people are researching purchases online before buying in-store, these consumers will judge your company based on your website.
Your website is the center of your business’s online presence where you are advertising it on social media networking sites, forums and through pay-per-click advertising program.
Does your website engage the consumer and create trust? The response you have already in your mind, and if you do not than just have a look on your success until this point.
Having a website and online presence strategy, will allow you to market your distillery online and to establish credibility on your customers eye. But… until to get to this point, you must create a good website.
Here are 7 steps that you should fallow in creating your online success that JotForm is suggesting you:
- Keep your design balance
- Compartmentalize your design by using grids
- Pick two or three base colors at mot for your design
- Try to make the graphics go well together
- Improve your website s typography
- Make elements stand out by adding white space around them
- Have all elements connected
Besides fallowing the rules of graphics and esthetic, we cannot forget the importance of providing a map and directions to your business, the visibility of your phone number, email address and your social media accounts connected to it.
It is very important to register your business in Google My Business that is a free and easy to use tool that will manage your online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. Having your business registered there, you help your customers to find you easily.
Be smart, give to your customers or your first visitors to your website, all the information that they are looking for in an extremely easy way that will make them to trust you. Nowadays, people are busy, they go online to buy things because is easier. Here you must come out and prepare your creditability, your value and the quality of your products displaying them with all the information needed on your visit card, I mean, your website.
Having a well-designed, informative, and updated website will add credibility and strengthen to your brand.
If you are looking for the success in the modern marketplace, then you need a professional website.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media is important, thinking that nowadays everybody from one side to another of the globe can reach each other through a click and this is a great opportunity to make a business known by millions of people from different countries and continents.
Using social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter has a consequence of engaging the targeted audiences in interaction and influence their behavior. On Facebook you have the chance to create an account on Business Manager that will allow you to create ads that will attract even more customers.
Nowadays social media became is a platform for people to purchase experiences and to share opinions. With the help of a marketing plan well established, all these opinions and purchase experiences can be spread in a positive way word-of-mouth through social media and in the same time will increase the conversion rates.
With the huge advantage of being low cost and with a high response rate, it will be a petty not to use it in your benefit.
Do not use all the social media available on the market, and if you do, at least be ready to post every day. My advice is to choose a few of them and to be active and filled them with creative content, catchy and news every day. And if you are bogged down by posting so much, considering using a scheduling software such as Dashboard, Buffer or Later.
Like in a cocktail, you can not use all the ingredients that you have, you must choose a few that gives you consistency, flavor, and a nice look. In this case valuable information, attractive posts that can catch the persons eye, with good messaging tone and then you can convince them to purchase your product.
3. Research your competitors
To give the best possible chance to your distillery to grow, you need to understand who your competitors are, including their weaknesses and then devise a plan to go and stand out.
To know exactly in which path your business goes, you need the marketing plan strategy to know on which aspect do you have to work to attract the success.
If there is a group of people that want what you have, then the chances that are many other competitors that are already serving those people. That means that you need to understand that group of competitors because you need to understand what your audience already has available to them in the marketplace because you do not want to offer the same thing, you want to stand out.
You need to be different, to give to the audience something that they do not already have as an option in the marketplace because if you just go out into the market and offer the same as what is already out there, you are not giving your target niche a reason to look towards your products.
Here you can find a few things to research:
- Where are competitor products sold?
- Are competitors’ running social media campaigns?
- What kind of events do they plan?
How many people visit distilling industry websites?
- Which keywords they rank for in Google searches?
- How many people follow them on social media?
In finding all information regarding your competitors, you can work with a marketing agency or a 3rd party website such as SEMrush.
4. Analyze, optimize and evolve
Today you have a huge advantage that gives you the opportunity to compare and analyze with the help of the data that is available. Analytics is especially useful tool and is important to understand the power of analytics and be able to analyze that data so you can see whether needle is moving or not and then is the case of optimizing, improving, evolving, do more of what is working and less of that is not. That is the way to find out if your audience is responding to what you are working on or doing more to make them happy.
In achieving this section, Google Analytics comes in to give you information about user behavior that can be critical for your business. It is a free tracking tool offered by google where you can see how many visitors you have on your website, from where are they come from and many other information that can help you in your marketing strategy. For a better understanding on how does it work, have a look on this website that explain you everything about it.
5. Personalized Email Marketing
sing a personalized message to customers and persuading them to make purchases through the email marketing is a must. Creating an email marketing campaign having on the base an opt-in email list that comprises email addresses of individuals who have shown interest in services or products offered by an organization.
Find out more here how to make your emails to stand out and to have a positive feedback from your customers.
6. SEO and Content Marketing
The content is an especially important tool when we talk about the marketing in the 21st century. Every business who wants to improve, use search engine marketing techniques to reach target customers online.
Creating a high-quality, unique, and valued content is essential for website to achieve high ranks on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. For instance, the google search engine is emphasizing quality content when ranking websites.
Having a good content marketing strategy, will help your distillery to achieve objectives such as engaging customers, persuading them to make purchase decisions and developing a famous grand identity.
But now you must know how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) exactly it is and how does it work. The basics of it are quite simple and thinking that more than half of the web traffic comes from Google, it worth learning.
For a better understanding of the basics on how to rank your website and to get succeed, Hoshua Hardwick had a particularly good guide that provides you with all the tips.
Knowledge is power, and after you finish reading this post, your business will have a leg up over the competition, raising what exactly is missing on your way to the top of the success.
You will also be ready to overcome the initial hurdles that are common when trying to come up with a marketing strategy.
To wrap all the marketing strategy suggested by me
- Create a professional website
- Social Media Marketing
- Research your competitors
- Analyze, optimize and evolve
- Personalized Email Marketing
- SEO and content marketing
Author: Anamaria Bogdan
Posts created in Canva
References:
1. The Importance of a Marketing Strategy for Businesses Today – Digital Marketing (lyfemarketing.com)
2. SEO Basics: Beginner’s Guide to SEO Success (ahrefs.com)
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4. 5 Categories to Include in Your Distillery’s Marketing Plan | Distiller Magazine (distilling.com)
5. Distillers Marketing to Millennials: It’s All About the Experience | CMDS | CMDS (cmdsonline.com)
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7. Distillers Marketing to Distributors: Pitching Your Brand | CMDS | CMDS (cmdsonline.com)
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