Welcome to the heart of the business of craft distilling— building an effective Marketing Strategy. It’s where the essence of your brand, your flavours and your beautiful spirit meets the practical and core necessities – selling bottles.
This article is a quick tick list of how to get your distillery’s marketing strategy off the ground.
We start by explaining why starting local and leveraging home-ground advantage can be the most potent strategy for a burgeoning brand. From local marketing and distillery tours, we’ll then look at the expansive world of social media, content, spirits awards, masterclasses and tastings. This piece is your guide to creating a holistic plan that resonates with authenticity.
A good marketing strategy is to start local
There’s no point trying to conquer a different part of the country, or even look to export before you’ve got good traction in your back yard!
Home is where the heart is, and if you don’t have the biggest competitive advantage in your own locality – you ought to go back and correct some big mistakes first. The heart of your brand is your operational hub and the distillery itself. Use that as the epicentre and radiate out.
Kickstart your marketing strategy by forming alliances with local businesses and marking your presence at local events. It not only builds a strong local clientele but fosters community relationships that will, in time, build advocacy and new opportunities
Take part in local events
Don’t just show up to a local event because you’re local and it’s on your doorstep. You’ll find that you achieve diminishing results as the months roll on. Rightly so – more and more people will know you and have interacted with you before.
Think about it from their perspective. Why bother going back to a stand when they’ve done it before and they could just go to the distillery down the road?
Embrace the idea that local events tend to be smaller, and tend to be attended by people who also live locally. Use that to your advantage.
Have a dual approach to local events. The first is customer acquisition and projecting brand values (like you would at any other event), but critically, layer in a second strand – local promo.
Use it as a way of talking about cocktail serves that people can get in bars nearby (maybe invite some of the bar team to serve up samples at your stand), or a special offer in a great local shop (bringing us back to forming alliances with local businesses). Use it as a way of booking up distillery tours, not trying to transport the full distillery experience offsite.
Sure, we all want to sell bottles from the stand direct, but taking the mentality of building awareness and sales volume though local initiatives is a much better medium-to-long term gain. It fills a much longer pipeline of potential business and extends the relationship with each person far longer than a single interaction at the stand.
By taking this mindset, local events are an opportunity to make the entire area your stronghold. Or re-enforce that. Local businesses will value your collaborative nature and with increased rate of sale through their tills – that value will extend to your place on the shelf long after the event is over.
Host distillery tours
Distillery tours and tastings ought to be part and parcel of every distillery and an essential cog in your marketing strategy. It builds advocacy, shows transparency and brings in great revenue.
We’ve written at length about it in our Craft Distilling & Tourism, with lots of advice for how to do them well. Suffice it to say here, they need to be a cornerstone of your operation.
If you are a full blooded booze hound, the last thing you want to do is take a photo of your ice cold drink before taking your first sip. Same goes with taking a moment to film the satisfyingly neat nature of a perfectly wrapped pallet headed out to a new customer.
Revel in the moment, yes, but use it to bring people with you on your journey. Life at the distillery, your participation at local events, signature serves in bars and what you are doing collaboratively with other local businesses is easy content to put online.
People love a sneak peek of what goes on behind the curtains. Share exclusive behind-the-scenes content, such as photos, videos, or articles that reveal the inner workings of your distillery and how they have shaped present-day operations.
If you are stuck for ideas, think about it from the perspective of an all-access visitor experience and that on this occasion, your guest was a curious drinks journo that wants to know everything.
The best examples of BTS content are less focussed on how things work and more about what you’ve done with it.
Tips –
- Social Media engagement is what matters most. While having a big presence on social media platforms with huge numbers of followers is great, two-way engagement with your audience is key. Create a space where your audience can interact, ask questions, and stay updated on all things happening with your brand. Think of it less as a megaphone and more of a seminar call with active two way chats going as the presenters talk.
- Tell your brand’s story effectively. Every brand has a story, so make yours memorable. Share your journey, the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Building a connection with your audience that goes beyond just a product involves being real!
A digital hub; Make your website count!
Whatever you chose to do – short social content and informal collabs, or high production value videos and structured partnerships – make your content sweat by ensuring your website is a treasure trove for all of it.
Why spend so much time and budget on content and isolate on it social?
Use great images, stories and more on a blog. It’ll help build your distillery’s SEO, and provide a far better picture of who and what you are as a business than a few static “About Us” pages.
The added benefit of a one stop digital hub is that users don’t have to click away. In the fast-paced digital world, convenience is king. That’s true for shoppers thinking about your product, journalists looking for a story or trade accounts needing further info.
Make virtual tastings an ongoing activation
In a world that is increasingly going digital, offering virtual tastings and distillery tours can be a novel way to engage an audience that is unlikely to come in person due to their distance.
It was a necessity during Covid and many showed how it could be done well. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be a pandemic only offering.
Through live videos or pre-recorded sessions, you can showcase the process around your spirits, tell the story behind each product, and offer tastings where viewers can learn to appreciate the flavours and notes in each spirit.
Why not sell a tasting kits DTC that are linked to a live monthly digital session for example?
Create documentary-style videos
Building on the idea of BTS access, why not produce short documentary-style videos that offer an inside look at your brand’s history, featuring interviews with founders, employees, and industry experts?
It might sound full on to think of making a documentary, namely as Netflix, Amazon and Disney might come to mind.
It’s true, the multinationals all have documentary series – be it Pernod Ricard’s Drink Masters or Diageo’s Spirit which covers some of the events at their of World Class competition. But think why they are all doing it – from Beckham to Wrexam. It’s because they can set a narrative that is then perpetuated. And that principle is true for anyone.
By breaking down your message, your story and your vision into sequential and engaging content, you can frame the narrative around your distillery. It doesn’t have to be 45 minutes and glossy, it can be raw, short snapshots tethered together. It can be intended for social, not Netflix.
Tips-
- If the content can be longer, make sure you can cut up teasers and key moments, so they are easily consumed on social media.
- Make sure you answer questions centred around your brand’s history. You could delve into various aspects such as the origin story, production processes, and memorable anecdotes.
- Make it personal and make sure the aesthetic and tone of voice match who you are currently, not what you were once upon a time. It’s not an advert, it’s a story, so don’t worry too much about pushing product – push the messages that matter and if you’ve done it right, the product takes care of itself. (Look at our article about Brand Values & Ethos for more on this)
Let’s go further afield now, and look at other marketing opportunities that are available to all craft spirits brands.
Host cocktail competitions
Hosting a cocktail competition inviting bartenders to come up with innovative cocktails using your spirits is a tried and tested way to get your brand out there.
The best ones understand that it’s not as easy as just saying there is a competition. It needs to have two-way value.
A good cocktail comp not only provides a platform for bartenders to learn something new, it also furthers their profile and enhances their reputation. Often, there is a monetary value to winning too.
In return, brands get to showcase the versatility of their spirits in cocktail creations. They get bartenders looking at their brand’s USP and wanting to find creative ways to showcase it through drinks. It can help identify trade advocates that you can work with more extensively afterwards too.
Think about how cocktail competition might add value for all involved before going down this path. When ready, be prepared to work hard to make it take off as the multinational brands have really raised the expectation level over the years . It might not be possible to generate the type of media coverage they do, nor afford the type of budget that World Class winners get traveling the globe and being paid high consultancy rates. Know what you are up against, and set realistic expectations.
In-store tastings & masterclasses are part of any holistic marketing strategy
Offering cocktail masterclasses or bespoke tastings for consumers can be a great way to engage guests and work creatively with trade partners.
If direct at the distillery, enthusiasts learn more about your brand, have fun, maybe even create drinks using your products. It can be a great way to foster community and extend engagement.
If in partnership, in-store tastings during shop hours or hosting exclusive masterclasses after hours are easy to organise. Whether it’s just through getting people to taste your spirit or by more structured methods (e.g. making an exclusive tasting, with tickets redeemable against bottle purchase) – active presence in store is a good way to increase rate of sale and support stockists and retailers.
Badge & display your accolades
Spirits competitions and awards for spirit brands.
Awards can divide opinion. There are indeed many, and many are at best a money grab or tokenistic in their nature. That said, at an elite level, they can deliver valuable feedback and a strong result can be harnessed into media coverage and potential new listings.
In that way, participating in competitions not only provides independent quality assessment, but it can also put your brand on the map too.
Some of the established Awards are a key step towards building a reputable brand and are essential to building trust with buyers and potential drinkers. Aim for international awards to test yourself against the best globally. If you don’t register in the medals despite several attempts, you may want to think about what that means, but if you do, you can be sure that your spirit has far reaching appeal.
Don’t just sit on an award if you get it. Gold Medals or ‘Best in Show’ Trophies have real value. Release comms about winning, speak about it on social, and if it’s the top honours at an international competition, maybe even badge it on your bottle as it can help convert on shelf.
Harness Customer Testimonials
Word of mouth is the oldest and arguably the most effective form of marketing. Meanwhile, implementing feedback loops always end up generating more sales in the long run. Encourage your satisfied customers to share their positive experiences where they bought it, forming a web of trust and reliability around your brand.
Not only is this effective marketing, it brings us back full circle and back to mirroring in person activity with digital content. Most of that can be managed at the distillery and implemented daily, long after campaigns, tastings, masterclasses, competitions or displays have faded away.
Over to you! Hopefully these ideas have got you thinking about how you can build out your marketing strategy and inspired you to up your game. Keep it simple by starting with your local area and by finding ways to bring it full circle and close the loop, or shoot for the stars with a global plan and expansive content creation…
Whatever you choose, we hope your marketing strategy allows your brand soar to new heights, one sip at a time.
