The key to winery social media success is to stay consistent and keep up-to-date with your fans by posting comments about your winery. It's easy to open a page and be committed to it for a while, but then feeling it's too time consuming, or getting stumped with writers block, you begin to slowly drift away and hope that the page is running itself. We previously posted a blog about a program we offer, where you can effectively spend 20 minutes a week on Facebook promoting your winery to your customers and now we have a plan to help you utilize those 20 minutes by engaging those clients with 5 Great Topics to Post to Your Facebook Page.

The web has changed so much in the past 10 years that winery website redesigns have become frequent occurrences. The changes in direct to consumer laws, social media, software integrations like Vin65 and ShipCompliant have each been the inspiration of so many winery redesigns. And now mobile and tablets have changed the experience of how users are viewing a winery website. According to Vin65, year 2012 saw an increase from 5% to 17.5% of mobile visitors to winery websites and it is only going to keep growing.  

While using social media or any kind of mail, e or snail, it can be difficult to stay on the correct side of the line between "how very interesting" and "report spam." When done right, postcards, email and Facebook can be great ways to get the word out and keep your audience clued in about your winery's upcoming events.

Converting tasting room customers to wine club members doesn't have to be limited to visits to your winery. Think of the first flight as an introduction, an opportunity to engage with them. With a wine club marketing email drip campaign you can continue to captivate them and convert them to a wine club member. The average taste to wine club conversion is 6% (Bennet Valley Group, 2012); with our strategy you should able to bump that percentage to at least 8%, which can lead to earnings of over $100,000 a year for many wineries.   

Write about Wine Events

Hook members of your local wine community by letting them know about exciting events you have coming up. You'll want to inform your fellow wine lovers in the area about:

5 Ways to Improve Your Winery's Facebook Cover Photo.

The double edged sword of designing a brochure for your wine club is the cornucopia of possibilities before you. Just like wine making, there are many things that can go wrong. More often than not, though, the simplest answer is the best. 

For me, the most stressful tasks are the ones where I don't have a plan. If I don't know what is expected of me or what comes next I become overwhelmed and, to tell you the truth - I procrastinate. But if I can lay out a simple plan for myself - I just do it. And learn from my mistakes along the way and make adjustments so they don't happen again. It is called persisitance and it is how dreams become reality. 

Running your own business often means working on the weekends. Thankfully, we chose to work in the wine industry! My buddy, Ross Goodwin from Bennett Valley Group, a wine consulting firm, decided to do some research on wine tasting room marketing strategies. According to Goodwin's own research that he conducted with Cakebread Cellars, they have superior metrics when it comes to their tasting room visitor to wine club conversion. While its true that they have amazing wine, their conversions are largely due to their strategy. So we spent our Saturday afternoon at a 45 minute, appointment only tasting at Cakebread Cellars. Here is what we discovered: 

What to Share with your Facebook Fans: Product, Process, People, Place

Your Facebook page is up. You have a nice cover photo of the vineyards. Your logo fits neatly into the profile picture box. Hours, location, website – check! Now what? Many companies hesitate at this point, not knowing what to share with their Facebook fans. What will they relate to and how do you get them to be interested in what you have to say? Coming up with
creative content for your wine social media marketing is the biggest challenge I see for companies. You want to not only inform your Facebook fans about your product, but also engage with them to build a relationship. Here I have focused on four subject matters that directly relate to the wine industry that will help you get the ball rolling on coming up with creative social media content.  I always suggest a visual with your Facebook posts to help quickly engage your Facebook fans. 

Product

Product might be the most obvious subject matter of this bunch. Your business objective is to make money by selling your product: Wine! So share your product with your customers often. If you are like most wineries, you have a variety of different types of wine, each offering the customer something unique. This fact alone gives you numerous starting points for informing your fans about your product. Tell your customers about your wines, but also engage them with your product.