Practical tools for winery conversational marketing
Posts tagged as:
All you have to do is Google “Rockaway Cabernet” and “River of Skulls” to find out. Both were recently sampled to wine bloggers.
And if you want the real free run, do the same search over at Able Grape: “Rockaway Cabernet” and “River of Skulls.”
I rest my case. Let me know how I can help you sample your wines to bloggers.
{ 0 comments }
In the future, I think most wineries will not submit their wines to the critics at the Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate and other wine publications. And this will not be due to the chance of getting a bad score but because those scores don’t influence their consumers. Sure, some wine collectors follow scores and make their buying decisions based in part from them but most wine consumers could care less about scores.
In today’s market scores are only important within the trade where distributors use these as sales tools when convincing restaurants and retailers to carry a wine. Since smaller producers don’t receive as much support from distributors these days, they are increasingly turning to consumer direct marketing in their sales efforts. As wineries strive to connect directly with customers online, more will choose to sample wine bloggers.
The latest winery to go down this path is Sonoma’s Rodney Strong Vineyards with a pre-release sampling of their new Rockaway Cabernet to a few wine bloggers, myself included. I think this effort will get some attention in the wine industry not because this is something new — wineries such as Stormhoek and Twisted Oak have been doing this for years — but because they chose to sample bloggers before established wine critics and the wine is an allocated, mailing list only offering.
Sampling programs are effective in gaining awareness of a new brand quickly or exposing an existing brand to new consumers who increasingly are turning to the internet for their information. Google “Rockaway Cabernet 2005” today and you’ll get two full pages of positive reviews from several leading wine bloggers. If they had chosen to sample established wine critics, they would have no coverage in place 2 weeks before the wines’ general release. And because both Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate are behind subscription logins, search engines will not pickup their reviews when posted weeks or months later.
Not only does Rodney Strong get immediate coverage before the release of this $75 wine, they also are inviting a discussion about the wine directly with their perspective customers. I think this is a trend we’ll see other well known and boutique producers follow once they see the results here.
More information about Rockaway can be found here and my review, with links to the other bloggers involved, here.
Photo by Joe Roberts, the 1 Wine Dude
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=d2632753-db08-4ffb-8442-30b136fed716)
{ 9 comments }
Image via WikipediaOnce you get started blogging and establish an editorial calendar one of the next things you’ll want to tackle is how to optimize your posts for search engines. While there are a lot of theories about this, I found the advice from this post to be the most useful.
In a nutshell, write descriptive headlines, summarize the post in the lead and don’t split your post into pieces.
Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow explains these techniques in this video with journalist/blogger Thomas Crampton. His first point is to write your headlines like a wire service editor being as descriptive as possible so readers know what they will get when they click on the link. The likely result will be more new readers discovering your blog on search engines and the opportunity to build good will with readers.
Doctorow continues that the lead should include a summary of your post which will allow the reader to choose if this post is worth reading or skipping. If you look at the lead of this post you’ll see this in action and you’ve come this far into the post for the details. Lifehacker has some similar thoughts on this subject here which reminds me to mention that relevant external links are also good ways to support your main points.
Finally, make it as simple as possible for the reader to consume your content without clicking for more information. While shortening what is displayed with a more tag might be advised for very long posts, don’t use it on something shorter just to get another page view for ads you might have on your blog. You should also publish full text in your RSS feed and not force readers to visit your blog to read the rest of the post. These things tend to annoy readers and does not build the trust required for readers to subscribe to your blog.
For more information, check out the post here which includes the YouTube video.
{ 0 comments }
The first-ever North American Wine Bloggers Conference will take place October 24-26, 2008 in Sonoma County, California. The goal of the conference is to gather wine bloggers from throughout North America and beyond to meet, learn, and share.
{ 0 comments }
