Three Social Tips To Get Noticed.
Marketing is such a critical, but often over looked aspect of running a business. I’ve been guilty of not giving marketing enough attention in my own business. I’ve got a long list of to do’s competing for my time and attention.
Not to mention, my two little kids and my husband need to eat, every day – what nerve! I have spent years managing marketing for large corporations like Wells Fargo Bank and Starbucks so I know what needs to be done and how to do it right. But now that I’m running my own business, I wear a ton of hats (mostly cute hats) and have become a jack of all trades many times over. But, I know how important marketing is, so I prioritize those tasks and put them at the top of my to do list instead of the bottom where they often live.
Wine and marketing have both been longtime passions of mine and after years of a successful consulting business across all industries, I wanted to pursue my passion and focus on doing what I really love – social media marketing for wineries. Wine makers, you can relate. Most of you got into the wine business because of a love of wine, the thrill of the craft and enjoying the fruits of your labor (literally) with friends and family. Several of my winery clients have become close friend and I have gotten the most joy helping them grow their business through quick, easy to implement marketing ideas. When thinking about the future of my business and how I wanted to spend my time, marketing for wineries was the obvious choice. Enter The Social Sip! I transitioned my multi-industry marketing consulting business to just one singular focus – marketing for wineries and more specifically, marketing for boutique wineries.
Enough about me.
The biggest problem any business faces is visibility. If people don’t know you exist, they can’t buy your product. No matter how much time you spend on your product, how much money you spend on sourcing the most premium ingredients, if you don’t tell people about this, they can’t possibly buy what you’re selling.
The marketing landscape as well as how consumers receive and process information and messages has changed drastically. With social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, consumers are inundated with thousands of product messages each day.
Here are three, super simple things you can do to get your winery noticed in this digital world:
1. Show up! Make sure your winery is on social media sites where your customers are. If you’re on Facebook, great. You need Facebook at a minimum, but what about other sites like Instagram? It’s estimated that Instagram has over 300 million active monthly users. Instagram users have shared over 30 billion photos to date, and now share an average of 70 million photos per day*. Instagram was released in 2010, and in under six years we’ve shared over four times more photos than there are human beings on earth.
2. Be active! Post several times a week. Respond and engage with your followers. People want to know you’re reading what they’re posting. Like their comments and respond when appropriate.
3. Create engaging content! Think before you post. Is what you’re putting out there more likely to get shared or deleted?
Your customers are already talking about your winery on social media. They are checking in at your winery when they visit for a tasting. If your winery isn’t on Yelp, chances are a customer has created a Yelp page for you and has posted their review. They’re probably using a winery hashtag to see conversations and posts from other customers. Even if your winery isn’t active on social media, your customers are and they are talking about you. Why not join the conversation? Are you still with me? Great! Chances are, reading this blog wasn’t on your to-do list for the day, but hopefully you’ve gleaned some nuggets of winery marketing insight that was worth the brief break in your day. I’ll wrap this up by saying this one other thing - there are over 2 billion active social media account users, so why wouldn’t you want to grab just a small percent of their attention? Let The Social Sip manage your marketing so you can manage your business.