Questions? Answers.

Increasing traffic to your winery’s website is a challenge that almost every winery faces — and understandably so. You’re in a saturated market, and your specialty is not in web strategy. Fortunately for you, very few wineries understand web strategy, presenting you with an opportunity to get a leg up on your competition.

We use an approach based on casting not a wide net, but casting lots and lots of small nets. We identify your audiences, we use what we know about their online behavior, and we reel them in using a blend of content strategy, search strategy, social media and PR.

This is another area that small wineries in particular struggle with. Directing visitors to your website’s homepage and hoping they’ll find their way to your online store and buy a case of wine is like tossing a coin into a wishing well.

It is important to recognize that not all your website’s visitors are the same: some have never heard of you before; some have heard of you but know nothing about your wines; others, perhaps, have heard about your wines but have never tried them; while others have tried your wines before and have come to the website to buy more. If you are treating all these different groups the same way, you’re already closing your door to some of your potential customers. For those who have never tried your wines, what are you doing to help them overcome the risk and buy something they might not like?

There is a lot that can be done to sort out your online visitors and take them to where they want to go, guiding them towards taking some kind of action. For some of your site’s visitors, the biggest action you can hope for is simply getting them to click to a second page on your site, for others, it might be to get them to subscribe tour your newsletter — it’s different for everyone, and we help with that.

The first step in increasing your tasting room’s conversion rate is to identify your tasting room’s goals. What’s most important to you: Signing people up into your wine club, whether they want to or not? Making sure people will make a second purchase from your winery? Or perhaps the goal is to get as many people as possible to leave you a good review?

Understanding your goals is our starting point in working with you to provide formal training to your tasting room staff, helping them become experts in understanding the motivations of their guests according to several demographic and psychographic variants, allowing them to present the story that best resonates with those guests and speaks to what they care about.

You might be one of the lucky ones, but wineries face enormous competition. Your potential customers have several hundred thousand labels to choose from, and they have a difficult time distinguishing one wine from another. What goes into the bottle matters, but that isn’t what sells the wine. Even your distributor is carrying 20,000 labels.

It is natural to view marketing as just one more expense. As a small business owner, you need to be able to build a business case for every expense you incur, justifying the return on investment and deciding whether it pays off. As a winery marketing company we feel heartened by this level of due diligence, as there are just as many SEO companies as there are wine labels, and many of them make promises that are simply not possible to keep.

Winery marketing, if done effectively will cover its own costs many times over, and for years to come. When we first meet with a new winery, we seek to understand how we might help and we only work with wineries for whom we know we can make a difference.

I’m glad you asked! (I didn’t want to seem pushy by bringing it up myself).

Winery Positioning is process of identifying how your winery or wines are unique in a way that your target audience cares about. If done successfully, your positioning puts your winery at the top of a category. For example, you might produce the only low-alcohol sparkling Syrah in California. It’s not enough to say that you’re a small, family-owned winery, because there are thousands of wineries that have already chosen that as their unique positioning.

Your positioning process should give you and every person on your team a complete understanding of who you’re competing with and who your audience is, guiding everything you do, including all your marketing efforts, your blog posts, your email newsletters, your social posts, your events, and the stories your tasting room staff present to their guests. Anything that strays from your positioning damages your uniqueness, your brand, and your desired position as leader of your category.

It’s the name of our founder, Cecil Spinguistic. Just kidding we made it up. It’s a mash-up of Spin and Linguistic, and it represents the meeting point of marketing and story-telling. Besides, “Better Than Cream Cheese” was already taken.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing the structure and content of your website to make it more likely for it to appear on the first page of search results. In the past, SEO relied heavily on keywords, the words that someone would type into a Google search field. To give an example, if a website mentioned the term Cabernet Sauvignon enough times, it would be enough for that site to be displayed in the search results when someone typed Cabernet Sauvignon into Google’s search field. That is no longer how SEO works.

The thing with SEO in the wine industry is that the people responsible for the websites are still only using keywords to try and get their sites to rank, and a quick look at the analytics for that site will show that it is not having any effect. Today, SEO requires a lot more strategy and involves many more channels than simply what’s on the page.

SEO for wineries can seem quite unintuitive, but with a little guidance, wineries can use it very successfully to greatly increase the traffic coming to their website. We can give you the quick 10-minute rundown on what’s involved so you understand what you’re getting yourself into, if you choose to take it on.

Social media strategy is a process of identifying your goals, who your audience is (and where they hang out), what your content will cover, who your competition is, and what mix of paid versus organic you’ll use.

It also involves conducting periodic audits, which is how a marketer would say “check in occasionally to see how you’re doing” which just means taking a look at how many people are connecting with you and considering how much time you’re dedicating to social media.

Another step is to identify potential partners (such as influencers, friends, and even competitors) that might help amplify your message.

No. The thing about social media is that it needs to be authentic, and paying an outsider to manage your social media accounts will only end in tears.

We certainly understand how it is to be a small winery, just starting out. It seems that every time you open your eyes, there’s one more thing you need to spend money on. Winery Positioning is often viewed as one of those things that can wait until you have money in the bank.

But if you’re a small winery, this is perhaps the very best time to examine your winery’s position in the marketplace, before you spend a lot of time and money competing in an arena with too many players. We seek to help you define a category for yourself that puts you in competition with drastically fewer other wineries. Wineries that skip this step often spend much more time and money over the years in wasted marketing efforts, lost sales, and missed opportunities.

Remember, there’s never a cost for just asking us a few questions, and if we feel we won’t be able to provide a tremendous benefit, we’ll tell you up front.

The thing with marketing is, it can feel like you’re doing everything right, covering all the channels, sending compelling messages, but for some reason people still seem to forget to buy your wines. You might tell yourself that it can take some time before your efforts bear fruit.

In marketing, however, we like to quantify everything. How many people visit your website? We can tell you. Are they sticking around? We can look at that too. Are enough people reading your emails? We can measure that. Are you meeting industry standards for people clicking on your links? We can also check that. Are there ways to get more web visitors? Yes! Are there ways to make our content appeal to people better? Yes! Are there ways to make our email subscribers more engaged and “clicky”? Yes! This is exactly the kind of stuff we know about.

We’ve been around since the very beginning of the web, following all the changes in online behavior, keeping up with email marketing, and the evolution of landing pages.

We work to change how people interact with your brand. We can save you a lot of time, and we can help you increase your sales. It won’t cost you anything to just drop us a line, so … drop us a line!

Email design is more about the general look that all of your emails will follow. You could think of it as being like a template or a library of templates that we create for you to just plop in your content and “git er done”. The goal of email design is to create a branded look that is easily recognized by your readers as belonging to your winery. It’s an opportunity to strengthen your brand, reinforce your story, and make your audience feel good about being a part of your winery. Email strategy is about the long-game of keeping your audience engaged and becoming brand ambassadors that continue to tell their friends about you for many years to come.

We start off with a free initial evaluation of your current situation and we learn about your goals, your challenges, your current and past marketing efforts, and your vision. If we feel that we’d be a good match for you, we’ll give you options and recommendations for how to proceed. If you’d like to move ahead, we’ll write up a custom proposal describing every part of our process, deliverables, timing, and cost.

So to get started, just get in touch.