If you have all the tasting room customers you can handle ... or if you’re maxed out on the number of wine club members you can manage ... or if you’re selling out of every last bottle of wine you produce ... then go ahead and keep doing what you’re doing! It’s obviously working for you!
If, on the other hand, you want more customers and want to sell more wine, then you should look at incorporating a social media marketing strategy.
According to The 2011 Social Media Consumer Trend and Benchmark Report by Experian Marketing Services, 91% of online adults today, or 129 million individuals, access social media in a typical month.
How many of them are your customers? How many of them could be if they knew more about you?
The goal of a good social media marketing strategy is to increase your online visibility, your credibility, and ultimately, your profitability. The ultimate goal of a good social media marketing strategy for those in the wine industry is to sell more wine.
How are you going to do that?
Engage With Your Customers
Any business person will tell you that it’s easier to keep the customers that you have and even increase the business that you do with these existing customers than to get brand new customers.
If you’re selling any wine at all, you have existing customers.
So how do you engage with your customers?
Do you send them a newsletter? How often and at what cost?
Do you send invitations to events? How often and at what cost?
Do you send food and wine pairing suggestions? Recipes? Updates about what’s going on at the winery? Progress of the current vintages?
Do you encourage them to share your information with their family and friends? And do you make it easy for them to do so?
Do you run contests and recognize your “Top Fan”?
You could do all of these things and more -- affordably -- online with a good social media marketing strategy.
Add More Customers
How powerful do you think a personal recommendation is?
When one of your customers tells someone else about the great bottle of wine they enjoyed, how likely is it that that someone else may get a bottle of their own to try?
When one of your customers tells someone else what a wonderful experience they had in your tasting room, how likely is it that that someone else may decide to visit at some point in the future?
Both of these situations are much more likely if your prospective new customer hears about you and your wine from a person they know than if they’ve never heard of you before.
That’s what social media is all about! Sharing information with others. And the more valuable, or entertaining, or engaging your information is, the more it will get shared.
Promote Events
In addition to engaging with your existing customers and getting exposure to potential new customers, wineries can use social media to promote winetasting events.
For example, what winery with a tasting room didn’t have a tasting event for Valentine’s Day weekend?
So how did you promote it? And at what cost?
If you had promoted your event and created a buzz on social media – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, etc. – might you have had even more exposure, resulting in even more visitors and more sales?
Utilize Social Media to its Fullest Potential
It’s not enough just to put your logo on a Facebook page and say you’re using social media to reach customers.
You must learn to utilize social media to its fullest potential. You must create and follow a social media marketing strategy.
Or you must find someone who can do it for you.
Remember those 91% of online adults who are accessing social media? If they’re on social media networking sites, shouldn’t you be there, too?
Engage with them, provide them valuable “insider” information that they will share with others, build a relationship with them, and then watch as your customer base increases along with your sales figures.
Now, don’t expect overnight results – you’re building a relationship, after all, not having a one-night stand – but if you do it right, results surely are bound to follow.
Social media is, indeed, that powerful.
