As Byrd Vineyard launched their first e-commerce website to enable direct-to-consumer sales, our team at Dia Creative was ecstatic to come on board. Partnering with a brand that has an incredible award winning product with a nice variety of possible customers (who doesn’t love wine?) and these gorgeous picturesque vineyards was a project that we were instantly energized to take on.
With the goals of increasing their digital presence to generate sales, building brand awareness, and solidifying repeat customers we set to work. By increasing post frequency, engagement, profile clicks, and website visits, we saw some incredible results. We increased their Pinterest audience 318% and their instagram followers by 9,451%, and our Black Friday/Cyber Monday ads resulted in 637 clicks with a $0.36 cost-per-click.
However, despite the incredible growth of their online presence, the sales of wine were not reflecting that growth, and this drove home an important lesson. Since Byrd has no tasting room nor do they allow visitors to the vineyard for tours, none of these people had any idea what this wine tasted like. And unlike clothing or other online sales, where people are willing to buy based on testimonials, a high end wine is something people need to taste firsthand before they’ll put their money down.
So… How do you build a following for a brand of high end wines when people can’t easily taste it?
This is where the flexible part of our “Fractional, Flexible, and Transparent” marketing strategy came into play. Seeing the need to get this wine out into the market, we switched from using entirely digital methods and went to work to create popup tasting events.
By partnering with local restaurants, we were able to quickly produce two events that not only significantly added to our email subscribers, but included onsite sales for a net value of $1,187. Having these face to face interactions not only allowed us to give potential customers the ability to taste the wine, but also hear a little more about the story behind these high-quality, award-winning, estate-grown wines. We were able to document photos and other assets during the event to further support our social media presence.
In summary, when working with Byrd Vineyard we…
- Clearly defined their brand identity and story
- Engaged users on the channels that fit their key clientele (Instagram and Pinterest)
- Used consistent and engaging content posting on these channels to expand reach and maximize sales
- Recognized the need for in person engagement and tastings, then responded quickly to adapt our approach
- Utilized in person events to expose customers to the brand and boost sales, maximizing the ROI by then utilizing content from that event for future social campaigns
The shift to in-person tasting events had a direct impact on improving online sales which ultimately led to increased customer return rate, stronger brand loyalty and awareness and most importantly, raising overall profit. So even though it wasn’t the way we initially envisioned we’d do it, we were able to hit the target goals we had set with this client by really monitoring what was working, what wasn’t, and being open to try new ways of engaging their base.
