You have beer—good beer. Check.
You have an inviting, comfortable taproom and outdoor patio space. Check.
You have a great logo, look, and feel for your brand. Check.
Now what? Here’s where digital marketing efforts will provide you with the brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions you need to become an even more successful brewery.
While there are many methods you can use to create impactful digital marketing strategies, start with these five approaches to get your brewery moving in the right direction.
Some might think a strong website presence isn’t all that necessary for a brewery. After all, most of your revenue likely comes from "non-eCommerce" sales. However, a website is one of the best ways to digitally expose your brand. The more web traffic you bring in, the more foot traffic follows.
When creating a website, it’s important to put your audience first, providing the best digital experience possible. Why? Because your website is a window into your brand. Done well, you can create an inviting "digital space" that guides users toward your best-known products, new launches, team members, locations, history, and what makes your experience unique.
This is your opportunity to tell your story, while also giving consumers an easy way to find the experience they’re looking for. Whether they are looking for a brewery to visit while on vacation, need a new local hangout, or want to order a growler, your website is the portal for all these needs.
Featured Tip: You can significantly increase both your digital and foot traffic by promoting your locations and products on the free cloud marketing site MarketMyBrewery™ . MarketMyBrewery™ helps connect you to new and existing customers who are searching for breweries to visit!
Another approach to boosting your brand name awareness and generating new customer leads is paid digital advertising.
The beauty of paid digital ads is they don’t have to cost a fortune to get results and you can switch them up anytime to test different keywords, phrases, and styles to discover which are most effective. Many social media ads start from $5 - $20 and Google AdWords are even more accessible at $2.32 per click.
Google Ads, the most popular platform for paid advertising, are simple to set up, monitor, tweak, and manage—and you get insights into how your ads are performing, can view data about your audience, and compare results from different ads.
With the right keywords, tactics SEO (we’ll get to that), and specific goals fueled by user intent (the motive users have when searching terms in a search engine), your ads can get you real traction on the digital front.
Some things to note: Google Ads can be time-consuming and at the beginning, you will spend a good amount of money figuring out what works and learning how to bid effectively. If you aren’t working with a flexible budget, it may be a good idea to opt for a cheaper alternative. Boosting social media posts and creating brand awareness content can help you achieve leads without the high price tag and time investment.
Emails were one of the first digital marketing methods to emerge, and it remains one of the most impactful and the most powerful. Why? Email campaigns are easy to execute and allow you to build relationships with your audience on their terms. Email campaigns can have some of the highest ROI with every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $40.
Your audience chooses if and when they open an email from you, which means when they do, they want to read what you have to say. This is your opportunity to share everything from new brews, expansions to your location, partnerships—anything that will deepen connections between you and your customers.
The key to email marketing is ensuring your content is not only informative and relevant but entertaining and attention-grabbing. People’s inboxes are inundated each day. To stand out, you must craft content that will make them take notice. To do this, make sure you follow these tips:
SEOdoes live up to its hype if you use it wisely and check it often. Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your website to get organic traffic from the search engine results page (SERP). This means if a user is looking for a brewery with different IPAs and they search "breweries with IPAs on tap," and your website mentions your IPA offerings, there is a greater chance your site will appear on the SERP page for this user based on the correlating keyword: IPA.
Keywords are exactly that: keywords or phrases that search engines look for when a user types in an inquiry. Search engines "crawl" millions of sites searching for the keywords a user enters in a search. If your site and the sites you put your products on have these keywords, it stands a chance at appearing in the SERP.
The more keywords in the more locations, the greater your chance. The more you use the higher quality keywords (words and phrases that are specific to your industry, brand, and what consumers want), the stronger your chances of appearing become—but here’s the catch: you must have balance.
If you coat your website pages with keyword after keyword and repeat them over and over throughout your content, you walk the line of being flagged by search engine crawlers. These crawlers can detect when keywords are not being used naturally.
When they find this misuse, your ranking goes down. It’s important to be natural and intentional with your keywords, ensuring you have a good amount throughout your website, but not so much that users will feel like they’re being scammed.
Take advantage of free services like MarketMyBrewery™ and Google to add your products on multiple sites. The more you can add key terms and associate them with your brand and products, your SEO chances continue to boost and develop organically.
SEO keywords can change. Make sure you are keeping up on the shifts by using tools to search for keywords and check if you are using the best ones for your brewery. Everything from your location to your beers to your space may have a correlating keyword to use.
Beyond building a strong relationship with your users via your social media channels, you should also be running social advertising to expand your reach. Facebook and Instagram ads are relatively affordable and extremely targeted, which makes them extremely valuable.
Just like Google paid ads, these ads can be switched up often, you can test different phrases, imagery, video, and content to discover which direction works best for your brand.
Beyond the actual content, you can go deep into the details to target specific audiences by geographic location, gender, age, and interests. When run and monitored, these ads will show you who of your target audience is engaging with your content and who is not. They provide insights and data that can help you target new users and discover the behaviors of your target audience so you can provide content they care about.