Making wine, as you know, is an art and a science. But the hard part (as you’ve learned) is selling it. How much money did you pay for that website of yours? Does anyone visit it? Or perhaps social media is the backbone of your robust marketing strategy. How’s that working? Is it time to get some help?

For a small winery, getting noticed can be difficult. And despite all that passion and the number of harvests you have under your belt, a cool name and a website just doesn’t qualify as a marketing strategy.

The thing is, you’re facing a lot of competition, and most of your customers have trouble telling one wine from another. The number of wineries is increasing every year, while the number of visitors to each tasting room is decreasing. The demographics are changing, with the biggest spenders, baby-boomers, now cutting back on their wine consumption, while their children, millennials, are not convinced that your $45 unknown Pinot is a better spend than two cases of beer.

 

To pull a 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.”

 

How many people visit your website each day? Where do they come from, and how long do they stay? How do you know the answers to these questions? And, how can you use this information to further improve your results?

 

We work with small wineries and winemaker/owners to help them define their category and appeal to their audience. We know how to develop strategy designed for customer engagement specifically with wineries.

Your wine is clone what?!?

Positioning

Effective winery positioning is what makes it possible for a winery to stand out and be remembered compared to all the wineries that keep chirping out the same message as everyone else. If you’re a small winery, or just getting started, now is the time to define the space in which you plan to compete, before you throw money in the wrong direction. Positioning your winery is likely the most important strategic marketing activity you’ll ever engage in, and we’ll guide you through it.
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Winery Web Strategy

What happens when visitors arrive at your website? Do you know how long they stay, or what pages they visit? Are they able to find what they were looking for, thereby giving them a good first impression of your winery? Or do they click away in frustration, already with a bad taste in their mouth? Understanding your visitors’ online behaviors can dramatically improve your site’s performance, help you grow your audience, and — and get this: SELL WINE!

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Virtual Marketing Team

It’s common to see the owners of small wineries trying to do all their own marketing. Some rare individuals are able to pull this off with impressive grace and skill, but when the results are less impressive, DIY marketers are actually driving their audience away. The image of the rustic winemaker becomes less endearing to the person who doesn’t get a response from the winery’s website, or whose attempts to get a sense of the wines is met with photos of the winery’s dog. We help these folks get better results.
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Email Design

Fast Company described design as a “sustainable competitive advantage.” Forbes Magazine wrote “All businesses, no matter what they make or sell, should recognize the power and financial value of good design.” Every time your winery sends out a marketing email, it is an opportunity to increase or damage the value of your brand. Good design makes the difference.
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Content Writing

As a small owner/winemaker, writing fresh content for your website, or consistently coming up with something new to email about can seem, naturally, like a very low priority. But the truth is, these tasks are absolutely crucial for attracting new visitors to your website, maintaining your site’s valuable ranking in search results, and keeping your existing customers engaged and loyal.

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Why Work with Us

5 Principles of Our Work

Hey, guess what? Running a winery profitably is not a slam-dunk. The wine industry is a saturated market, and it’s hard to stand out. We can step in at the drop of a hat and provide you with winery marketing services at whatever level you need, from just a couple of hours one-time, up to a complete overhaul of your entire marketing system.

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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’re here for you. Whether you’re just starting out and needs someone to get you pointed in the right direction so you don’t end up wasting your money, or you’ve been around a while but are not seeing the results you want, we can make a difference. Take some time and read how we approach Positioning or Attracting New Audiences and then take a moment to get in touch. We’re very easy to talk to.