Archive for Tasting Room
Tasting Room Merchandise – Building Your Brand and Boosting Profits.
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Kool Vino Bag
These days, companies that are marketing to a younger crowd often employ something called “street teams.” These teams are made up of groups of young people in the company’s target demographic that are paid to take a product out on the streets or any place where their customers are, and show it, use it, and talk about it to others in an attempt to stir up interest and sales.
Wineries can take advantage of this same tactic to help promote their brands to potential new customers. It’s as simple as effectively offering branded merchandise to visitors in tasting rooms.
“Once the wine is drunk and the bottle recycled, your customers could easily forget you,” said Vanessa Topper of TopNest Designs in Northern California. “If they take home a decanter or corkscrew with your winery’s name on it, chances are they’ll remember you.”
Most tasting rooms today sell merchandise along with Read More→
7 Ways to Grow your Facebook Fans
Posted by: | CommentsGuest Blogger: Winery Advisor
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More Fans – More Interactions – More Sales
Why do we want more fans?
Every time a fan comments, “likes” or interacts with your fan page there is a good chance it will be broadcasted to the News Feed of all of their Facebook Friends. Lots of interactions will signal to Facebook that this is important information and it will be included on a fan’s News Feed. Each fan can have hundreds or even thousands of Friends. If only 10 of your fans interact with an event notice, photo, video or simple text type message, that information can show up on thousands of peoples Facebook News Feeds — and can be furthered shared with multiple levels of additional friends. This is how your information, special offer or call to action, can go “viral” spreading quickly to many people.
Seven Ways to Grow Your Facebook Fans
- Have multiple influential users invite all of their friends to become fans of the page. If you can get 20 people each to invite 100 users, and encourage these users to invite their own friends, your fans will quickly grow. Use incentives if necessary – contests, rewards for joining, etc.
- Leverage your other online resources including email lists, websites, blogs and any other place you have a digital presence. Start to call them to action to join your fan page. Add Facebook links to the homepage of your websites, add a link in employee emails, place links in your email and newsletter marketing. The key is to funnel enough subscribers to the page where a natural cycle of growth begins by virtue of more people becoming fans.
- Leverage your “offline” media. Include promotions and Read More→
Winery Construction and Expansion – Success depends on good planning.
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LaBelle Winery in New Hampshire - www.labellewinerynh.com
If you have been thinking about building a new winery or expanding your existing one, there is a lot to consider before starting. It entails more than simply finding available space and putting up a building. In the world of winery construction the difference between a happy, successful conclusion to a construction project and one that turns into a money pit nightmare is pre-planning.
“Before you do anything, find your use permit either in your files or at the county records department,” said Demerus Lescure, vice president at Lescure Engineers, Inc., a civil engineering firm in Santa Rosa, California. “With an existing winery there is a description of what the county will let you do in terms of how many cases of wine you can produce, or whether or not you can have winery events. You may need to apply for a modification if your existing permit doesn’t match up with your new plans and sometimes, previous restrictions have gone away.”
It’s common, especially for rural wineries that don’t have as much public interaction, to run into trouble with use permits. As Lescure has observed, these winery owners often think nobody’s watching, so they just go ahead and add a new out building, or a new fermentation facility to enlarge their capacity. It’s all good until the neighbors start noticing more truck traffic and turn them in. It happens.
“It’s easy to say let’s add a room, or more barrels, or a new crush pad,” said Lescure. “But pretty soon the neighbors are Read More→
Advisor: Why Using a Recruiter Makes Sense
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Why Using a Recruiter Makes Sense
Your top financial officer just quit and left you with a gaping hole in the management team. Your winemaker just told you she’s moving to New Zealand at the end of the month. You had to let your sales manager go because he can’t get along with the rest of the staff.
What do you do now?
In the past, many winery owners just sat down, wrote up a want ad and put it in the newspaper or on Craig’s List hoping the right person would see it and respond. This typically resulted in dozens of phone calls getting in the way of normal business, and dozens of resumes flooding the fax machine. Somebody then had to stop whatever it is they normally do in order to sort through all the applicants and try to choose which ones to call back for an interview. Then somebody had to schedule and conduct the interviews, a process that could take weeks.
In the meantime, all the work that would normally be getting done is piling up because of the distractions of the hiring process, including the work of the unfilled position.
Today, instead of do-it-yourself hiring, many savvy winery owners are utilizing the expertise of Read More→
Direct-to-Consumer Sales
Posted by: | CommentsWriter Jim Brumm
Are you getting all you can from your tasting room?
The most profitable way to sell wine has always been to sell it directly to the consumer. When you add middlemen such as distributors and retailers, the margins shrink as each takes their share of the profit off the top. For most wineries, especially smaller ones, this means that their primary hub of profitability is the tasting room.
For visitors wandering through wine country, whether in California, Virginia, Oregon of some of the other emerging wine regions across the country, the tasting room is often their first exposure to your winery. They come in because Read More→
Wine Industry Associations…Helping Members Thrive in Today’s Economy
Posted by: | Commentsby Jim Brumm
Making great wine is hard enough, but layer on the marketing, compliance, employees, taxes, permits, distribution, vendors, receivables, etc…it’s easy to see how overwhelming it can get. There is much to take care of and often not enough time to learn what you need to know before you have to make a decision. Sometimes a little help is called for.
For many grape growers and winery owners, joining an association is the answer. In California alone there are nearly 60 winery and grape grower associations, each helping its members support and promote their region with pooled marketing efforts, training, continuing education, industry updates, and government lobbying.
Tapping the power of the collective, winery and grower associations coast to coast are proving the old adage that there is Read More→
And The Winner Is…
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It’s interesting these days to look at the results of wine competitions around the country that are open for entry to national and, in some cases, international wines. These days we are seeing a much larger number of winners from states that are not traditionally thought of winegrowing and winemaking states.
For example in the 2011 San Francisco Chronicle wine competition, which had 5,050 wine entries from 23 states, two sweepstakes winners came from wineries that are outside California, one from Washington and one from New Mexico. Out of the six sweepstakes wines selected only one wine was from Sonoma County and none were from the Napa Valley.
This is getting to be more and more common as wineries from all over the country regularly enter and receive medals for their wines. Of course we are used to seeing wines from California, Washington, Oregon, New York’s Finger Lakes and Virginia on the winners lists, but until recently we have not been quite as accustomed to seeing wines from Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Georgia. Missouri, Michigan and South Dakota to name some of the states that entered wines and won medals. And the medals awards to wineries in these states are primarily for vinifera wines, although some are for grapes not grown on the West Coast and some are for fruit wines.
As I travel so much to wine regions around the United States and Canada it comes as no surprise to me that wines from so many different parts of the US are doing so well. I taste the wines and they are delicious.
Congratulations to all the medal winners from around the country and good luck to the wineries that, though they may not have won a medal this time, might the next.
Keep up the good work!
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New Year, New Start…I Assume
Posted by: | CommentsSo how are the new year’s resolutions going? I have already discarded a couple of mine but have high hopes for some of the others. In addition to making (and subsequently breaking) my resolutions for 2011, I have decided that one resolution that I am very much planning on sticking with is one that encourages me to challenge my assumptions.
We assume so much and create so many phantom rules by which we live, that we end up with a brain full of “facts” that actually are dubious opinions with no real evidence that they are indeed… facts. Turning opinions or assumptions into facts can be prevalent when you retail staff makes assumptions as to whether visitors to the tasting room are, or are not, going to purchase wine or join the wine club.
Many times visitors walk into a tasting room and the staff sizes them up, deciding that these particular visitors aren’t going to buy anything. Based on these assumptions they don’t talk to visitors in terms that will trigger a buying response or present them with reasons that will make these visitors want to join the wine club.
Create a different outcome when you’re selling wine or wine club memberships. Do it by simply changing your attitude or assumptions. Instead of assuming that your visitors are not going to join the wine club because they probably already belong to too many clubs already, imagine that the visitors to your tasting room that day are planning to join eight different wine clubs and so far they have only joined two.
Elizabeth Slater- Founder & Vice President of WIN
Our assumptions can just as easily be positive as negative. We really can make it happen. It’s not too late to add one more resolution, especially if you have already broken one, there should be plenty of room.
For a copy of my one-page handout: Challenge Your Assumptions email contact@wineindustrynetwork.com
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It’s Almost Trade Show Season
Posted by: | CommentsElizabeth Slater- Founder & Vice President of WIN
It’s almost trade show season. I say almost because even though it is only November and the first trade show doesn’t happen until January of next year, we all know how time flies… and no time flies faster than between now and the holidays! In addition to the large regional shows: Unified, the Midwest Wine & Grape Conference, and Wineries Unlimited, there are also many conferences happening in individual states.
As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind”… clever fellow was Louis. It’s not too early to start preparing for the upcoming conference/trade shows. Trust me, there is plenty of prep work to do no matter which side of the booth you’re on.
For wineries, take a look at the conference schedule and pick out the sessions that will give you the information you need the most. After you have honed in on the sessions, take a look at the exhibitor list and prioritize the “have to visit” booths and the “want to visit” booths. Plan enough time to walk the whole show. You never know what’s out there that will make your job easier or your business more successful. And of course, be sure and stop by the WIN booth to visit our team, we will be at all three shows.
If you’re going to be at the Midwest Conference or Wineries Unlimited, definitely don’t miss the full day Tasting Room Profitability/Wine Club Summit and kick your direct-to-consumer sales and service into high gear. Admittedly I am biased about these sessions as I am going to be participating, but I am confident that they are going to be great!
Finally, don’t forget to save some time for networking. Not only is it beneficial, it’s lots of fun too! Talk to people from different countries and from different parts of the county. A new perspective might trigger a new idea for your business.
The best thing about the conferences and trade shows…there is always something to learn and sometimes it’s in the place you least expect it. See you there!
Does Social Networking Sell Wine? Yes!
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It seems that the question most asked these days about social networking is whether or not wineries are actually getting visitors into their tasting rooms or into restaurants and retail stores to buy wine that they have learned about through Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare among others.
It seems that wine consumers are visiting wineries they may not have heard of because of the wineries’ presence in social networking forums. One example we have is from Michel Schlumberger, a winery in Healdsburg, CA, who found this blog from a consumer visiting Healdsburg:
“I checked in on Foursquare that I was in Healdsburg. Foursquare also automatically updated my Twitter account. A couple hours later I get a Twitter reply from the Michel-Schlumberger winery inviting me to come visit; that they are only 8 minutes away. We already had a list of wineries we wanted to visit and they were not on the list. But….Because of the invite I went to their website. We were both impressed with the winery and decided to add them to the list of visits on Saturday. WIN!
Fast- forward to Saturday. We arrive at the winery and I again check in on Foursquare. I am immediately given a coupon for one free tasting because of the check-in. WIN! We sit down for our tasting and immediately fall in love with their wines. So much that we decided to have a picnic lunch on their grounds and buy a bottle of wine right then to have with lunch and another bottle to take with us. WIN! Now guess what. They have two new customers. How much did they have to spend to acquire us? Some time on Twitter and Foursquare and one free tasting.”
The erstwhile visitor – now a connected customer added a great review of the winery to Foursquare and told some relatives who often come up to the area about Michel-Schlumberger.
Michel-Schlumberger uses Foursquare and other social media channels to invite people who may or may not know about their winery to visit and once there gives them reasons to become connected with the winery. For the cost of one free tasting, they began a relationship that they can build on for years to come.
Quite impressive.
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