The 7 Digital Marketing Tenets that Build Buzz for Your Brand

From the pillars of your platforms to influencer marketing, these time-tested top tips should be applied in any digital strategy.

Navigating a constantly changing marketplace is never an easy feat; trying to do so in the digital space can be even more challenging. The shape and scope of digital marketing has expanded immensely in the last decade and it feels like we’re all just trying to keep up. As a marketer tasked with using online advertising and marketing to build and sell a wine brand can feel like a time suck, with no guaranteed, or even measurable, return on investment; but with some core ideas in mind, brands can use online community engagement to their advantages.

The following best practices and thoughts were compiled from Wine Institute’s annual marketing and PR workshop, Wine MarCom, which took place in April. These strategies can help wine-centric brands implement digital media, social media and video to connect new and old customers with the winery.

1. Create a Digital Strategy

The first and most important practice is likely the most obvious: Create a digital marketing strategy. Like with any other marketing or production plan, having a thoughtful discussion and putting together a content calendar, as well as assigning tasks to team members and creating budgets for individual efforts, is essential to a successful implementation. It doesn’t even have to go into day-by-day detail.

A content calendar that focuses on weekly, or even monthly endeavors, will help keep everyone on task and deliver higher returns on investments than no calendar at all. The easiest way to start is to look at holidays and wine releases and plan around those events. What other events are happening in your area and how can you use things like outside concerts, tastings, conferences and more to reach new audiences? Plan a campaign around a new tasting room being built or the founder’s birthday wine. Are sales in August slow? Try a promotion or contest. These are just examples but let your creativity soar.

Calendars and strategies can also be a huge help in one of the most frustrating and effort-thwarting components of digital marketing: the image gallery.

“We found that we were scrambling. We had great content, we had great campaigns, we had great ideas and the last step was ‘What image are we going to use?’ and that was really difficult,” said Rhonda Motil, vice president of marketing at J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines. “We’ve invested in some of our own photography. We tried to be really creative and thoughtful and forward-thinking about various times of the year to make sure we were taking enough varied pictures in the vineyards during harvest so we can leverage them in future years or in future campaigns. We also employed a service called Shutterstock.” By planning out campaigns, Motil is able to ensure that when the photographers are on-site, they’re taking the right type and number of photos to fulfill the image requirements and have a wide selection to choose from in the future.

2. Use Your Brand Pillars to Deliver Authentic Messaging

Motil constantly reminds her team that all social media and digital advertising needs to reference back to the three pillars of their brand: family, place and craft. “Any time we post anything about the family, engagement is off the charts. People love our family story, and this goes not just for family as in immediate family, it also goes for extended family,” she said. Examples can include an introduction to a female sales director for Women’s Month, or a story of the vineyard manager’s journey toward organic grape growing during a sustainability campaign.

When the team has veered from the pillars, they have found that their engagement has suffered. Motil related a story about the marketing team’s enthusiasm for the recent NCAA March Madness tournament spilling onto the company Facebook page with posts about drinking J. Lohr while watching the games, to receive practically zero engagement from their audience. As she put it: “It wasn’t adhering to our key messaging points. I know that my audience on Facebook is typically female in that 35- to 55-year-old demographic, they’re highly educated, they’re busy, they’ve got kids—they were not watching the games. Do we venture off and get off the path? Of course. We’re human, but those three pillars, family, place and craft, do really well for us.”

Even though you will not be engaging with a digital audience in the same way you would face-to-face, people can tell when you aren’t staying true to your values. “They are a part of your network and your community because they believe in who you are,” said Motil. Efforts that don’t align with your known and stated core values will fall on deaf ears.

Another example of delivering authentic messaging through your brand pillars is Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants. One of their core values is using human touch to connect with their guests. Katherine Wojcik, director of bar programming and systems at Kimpton, said that any and all contact with guests and potential guests must have that human element, even in digital communications. For the Kimpton brand, that means that even though they send text messages to guests staying on a property, there is a real human behind it. Personable technology is the way they manage to build their brand digitally while keeping true to a core value: human connection, personal experiences and surprises. For more on this philosophy, and an interesting and creative digital ad strategy, search #stayhuman, or youtube.com/watch?v=AHLP_dyovI8.

3. Find Collaborators with Similar Values

There’s a new style of marketing making the rounds that you have probably heard of, one that focuses on prominent individuals rather than target markets: influencer marketing. Born from the idea that someone with a large, dedicated following will be more effective in delivering an “authentic” message, without the constraints and ethics required by traditional members of the media, influencer marketing relies on an individual to reach potential buyers and clients. Over the last 10 years, the “influencer” market has grown: eMarketer and BI Intelligence report that 84 percent of marketers have devoted some dollars to influencer marketing, amounting to a total spend of anywhere between $5 and $10 million by 2020.

Influencer marketing is still a very new concept, and many marketers are understandably hesitant to spend dollars on someone who may not be “hot” in a few months’ time. There is an element of risk when relying on an outsider to sell your brand and your story. Juliana Colangelo and Shanika Hillocks, both of wine industry PR firm Colangelo & Partners, said that there are ways to mitigate those fears, but one has to be smart about how it’s done.

The majority of influencers are lifestyle focused: they’re looking at current trends with cultural relevance that fit into their “beats.” This is one area where influencer media and traditional media overlap—you have to know their audience and how your brand fits in. Some are more receptive to technical and educational ideas surrounding wine, while others want to know about wine as it relates to home entertaining, for example. Find the influencer who has a similar personal brand or philosophy as you do.

It’s important to keep in mind that fake influencers do exist. It is easy to create a fake account with purchased followers and obtain brand sponsorships. Though Instagram has made strides to eliminate this type of behavior and the government has placed some regulations on how sponsored content is displayed, it would be smart to use a company with experience in the space to help you select and vet potential collaborators.

Once you have determined an influencer that is a good fit, it is important to create a contract. Colangelo and Hillocks reported that they routinely sign contracts with their influencer collaborators, which spell out exactly what their client (the winery) will provide and the content and deliverables from the influencer. Because influencers are their own editors/publishers, have a conversation with them about what’s expected, potential angles, timing and more—most are open to that type of relationship and partnership. Costs can vary based on the size of the influencer’s following, how much original content they need to create and how often/the types of posts made.

Next, is sending samples. Colangelo and Hillocks said that the packaging of the samples is almost as important to the wine contained within (unboxing/unwrapping Instagram stories are a “thing”), but diversified content is important as well. Think of events, philanthropy and educational tours as great opportunities to showcase your brand and give them something else to write about.

“Due to fluidity, organic success can be garnered at the mid-tier level. At the same time, microinfluencers have rates for partnerships that they stick to. A large part of influencer marketing is about putting your negotiation hat on. Don’t hesitate to be upfront with your budget and see what can unfold with potential partners,” the Colangelo team reported.

It’s important to keep in mind that an influencer is different than an organic collaborator: someone who interacted with your brand independently of any one-to-one marketing efforts, and posted about it to their various channels, as well as recommended you to their friends. Both types of collaborators are important to your brands.

4. Small Budgets and Big Ideas: Create Multi-purpose Content

Digital doesn’t need to be for the wealthiest and largest of companies. There are a number of ways to find new content without breaking the bank:

• Use stock imaging for last-minute, general posts: Did the rains start a little earlier this year? Find an image of a couple sitting by the fireplace and talk about how it’s the season to cuddle up with a loved one, glass of Cabernet in hand. Is there a great picnic shot you can use to talk about how a Rosé pairs well with summer basket foods?

• Use snippets of existing video. Motil showed a great example of how a 30-second J. Lohr video commercial for the website (featuring their winemaker and a couple other employees) was cut down into a 10-second spot to be used as an advertisement on other sites.

• The #Repost: Find organic content from your community. Did a recent guest post a charming or well-composed photo while on your property? Ask them for permission to repost. They’ll more than likely say yes!

• Find new crops or filters to add interest to an otherwise uninteresting photo.

• Convert print advertisements to digital. Sometimes you can just use the same ad, other times you would need to make minor adjustments to make it digital friendly.

In the end, be creative with how you use and re-use images, video and text.

5. If You’re Bored with it, So Are Your Viewers

If you find that you’re looking at a photo and feeling like you’ve seen it one too many times, whether in an ad or as a posting on social media, chances are your audience is tired of it too. If you look at a photo and your first thought is “eh,” chances are a potential customer is feeling the same thing.

A photo now needs to convey a feeling, and one that grabs attention quickly. At Kimpton, Wojcik is tasked with telling a story of what it’s like to stay at one of their properties or dine in one of their restaurants, all with one image. That photo must convey the experience. People make decisions emotionally, not rationally. Words take time. Images create emotion.

So how do you learn about what experiences and emotions your customers respond to? Elaine Chukan Brown, a writer for JancisRobinson.com, Wine and Spirits Magazine, Hawk Wakawaka Wine Reviews and Wine Business Monthly, provided the best advice: Simply listen.

Don’t walk into an event or interview with pre-packaged information based on the assumptions you have about what they would want to know. Let the collaborator/writer ask the questions. Let them tell you a bit about themselves and what they are interested in. If you listen, you might find out that writer just came back from, say, the Rhone Valley and was impressed by what they saw. That might be the perfect time to pull out your Syrah, and not the Cabernet Sauvignon your winery is known for. They might feel like they’ve made a discovery and whatever they post or write about will convey that sense of wonder.

“Show writers your people. That genuine connection is their narrative,” she said. “The risk is in being yourself. They want to connect. Don’t be safe and don’t be homogenous.”

6. Microcontent is Better Than Sterilized Content

If there is one thing the wine industry can learn from The Real World, The Bachelor, American Idol and every other reality show, it’s that people want the nitty-gritty. How else could shows like that be successful, asked Mike Ganino, a hospitality executive and digital storyteller. Audiences want to be immersed in an authentic story.

“We want the behind-the-scenes. We want your stories not to be beautifully produced stories about ‘Grandpa came over from Italy.’ We want the real thing that’s going on in a day, we want the microcontent inside of your brand,” said Ganino. “What we want is the real experience of being one of your customers. Of being one of the people supporting your brands in restaurants, in stores, in the off-premise.”

Use YouTube, video, Facebook Live or Instagram with whatever technology or equipment you have. Monique Soltani of WineOh TV said that many try to do video in such a big way that it never happens. She advises those interested to start small. “Your phone is amazing and capable of doing video,” she said, adding that utilizing video helps build trust and connectedness with a viewer.

That said, sound quality is an important factor to be mindful of. To this day, Soltani’s viewers will take the time to mention any sound issues. Purchasing a $100 microphone is a small investment with a large payoff. Lighting is also important, as is the camera angle—horizontal for websites, YouTube and advertisements, vertical for Facebook Live and Instagram Stories.

7. Engagement Happens When Your Content is Engaging

To put it bluntly, Ganino said: “In our lives we are starving for story, for meaning and for connection. They need stories. If you aren’t getting engagement through social media the issue isn’t that people aren’t engaged, it’s that the content isn’t engaging. It’s because the stuff we’re putting ads behind is boring,” he said. “The issue isn’t that people don’t want messaging. They want relevant messaging, they want stories that connect them. I learned this really early on.”

If you want to sell wine, you have to have a compelling story. That is not a new marketing concept, and one that was echoed repeatedly throughout the conference. Ganino asked attendees how much of their content in tasting rooms, on websites, on tech sheets is memorable? Is there a compelling story with a personal experience behind it that begs to be remembered? Is it tailored to the audience? If you’re selling to sommeliers, for example, they don’t need any more geek sheets; they need a story they can sell back to the customer.

When dealing with media or an influencer, remember that they’ve been fed a lot of the same content as well, and that they are looking for something new and exciting to bring back to their own audiences. You have to create a moment for them to reminisce on later, or evoke some sort of emotion they can build a story on.

Give Them Something to Feed On

In summation, your content has to feed someone’s sense of wonder.

“Oh, I learned this really cool thing today” is going to create a more lasting impression than “Their Grandpa came over from Italy” in Ganino’s example. And while vineyard shots are beautiful and will always have a place in wine marketing, keep in mind that they may not be enough. “We don’t want the photos of all the vineyards that all start to look alike, but the real story of what you’re up to,” said Ganino.

Giving people what they want and making them want to share your stories was the single piece of advice echoed by all. And once you’ve given that reason, you have to make it easy for them to do so, like Colangelo and Hillocks’ point to provide great places and time to take pictures with good lighting. Follow up with media and other key visitors with information pertaining to the visit, or with notices for the next event. Find ways to make it easy for them to share in the love of your wine.

This article originally appeared in the June 2018 issue of Wine Business Monthly.