If you lead a marketing team at a winery, you’ve seen this quote from the Silicon Valley Bank 2019 State of the Wine Industry Report:
“The factors leading to the success of wineries over the last 20 years will not enable those wineries to sustain those successes. This means that the winning sales strategies being leveraged today will slowly prove fallible tomorrow.”
To me, this says that people are no longer impressed by the same old stuff, and it’s time to actually think strategically about how to identify, attract, and engage new audiences. Proclaiming “authentic” wines and displaying rustically styled “still life with wine” might attract a newbie’s attention, but what are you doing after you get them in the door? To paraphrase Rob MacMillan, the author of the above quote, it’s not about the first sale, it’s about the second and every subsequent sale that follows. Does your winery have the people who can strategically nurture relationships in today’s digital and social landscape?
Why Work with Us
5 Principles of Our Work
Sometimes things are just bound to pile up. It’s a wine club month, there’s an event at the winery, your best layout designer is doing a dry month, so she’s not at her best … you know, things come up. But we’re here, we understand strategy and pixel pushing and everything in between. Our team has deep experience in everything from content strategy and SEO to directing photoshoots and creating effective ad layouts.
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We're Industry Insiders
Our founder, besides having 20+ years of design, branding, and marketing strategy under his belt, also holds degrees in viticulture, enology, and wine marketing. So, he can drive a tractor, a forklift, AND a landing page strategy. He can pinch a sucker, punch a cap, and crop a bleed. He can … ok, I think that’s enough clever comparisons.
Broad Experience
Our marketing experience includes defining strategy for some of America’s largest brands and also for tiny single-person wineries. Our training has been in traditional design, digital media, and winery marketing. So, while you stick to your passion, making wine, let us get to work on our passion — making you stand out.
Deep Talent
Some of us grew up in traditional media, some in the digital world in the days of Macromedia, and coding javascript rollovers by hand. We’ve created ad campaigns for Facebook, and for your local bank. We live and breathe marketing. We reinvent what’s new every single day.
Iterative Process
We don’t just rush to the computer and settle on the first idea we come up with. We use pencil and paper, we explore, we refine, we test, and we test some more. We are believers in divergent thinking, and an iterative design process to narrow in on the most effective solution.
We can tell a good story
We haven’t forgotten why we got into this business. Sure, sure, html is super fun, but we can still tell you about that wine that changed our lives. None of us got into the wine business just to schlep beverages. This is about what we love — wine has shaped culture and history and nations and romance. Wine goes better with good company, and wine sits there alongside some of the fondest moments of our lives.
We understand how it is to bring in outside marketing and creative folks. It should be a lot easier to find the right people who can ramp up quickly and get the job done without needing direction and hand-holding.
Even with an internal marketing department, wineries often face insurmountable challenges to reaching their audience and keeping them engaged. We can make a difference. Take some time and read how we approach Positioning or Story-Telling and then take a moment to get in touch. We’re very easy to talk to.