Sell Wine or Bust: Social Media Is A Winery’s Secret Weapon to Survival

Computer Shopper published this deansguide article 9-11-09

Is there empirical proof that social media sells wine? If you take my experience, as an example, it does sell wine. If you are a Chief Marketing Officer, Wine Tasting Room manager, or anyone tasked with selling wine you may say no to social media. You may have created a Facebook page. You may have registered on Twitter. You may have even established a blog. Yet all of your efforts have fallen flat with a resounding thud! No uptick in sales, no mad rush to the tasting room, no phone lines burning off the hook. What happened? You forgot to do a lot of something-here are 6 reasons nothing has happened yet:

1. Participation: you set up your Twitter, Facebook, blog, and LinkedIn presences thinking they would run themselves with minimal participation- wrong
2. Plan: you showed up on each network without a plan to engage, a strategy, or a purpose
3. Call to Action: you don’t ask your audience to do anything; your messages simply make statements without a compelling reason for audience participation with you
4. Targeting: you utilize the “more the merrier” approach where you will shotgun your messages without targeting the audience that is most interested in your products and services
5. Twitter: you are not utlizing Twitter as a source of sales leads and list building with consumers as well as businesses
6. Facebook: you are not utilizing Facebook as your customer relationship management tool to build and maintain customer loyalty
7. Measurement: you are not developing a system to track and analyze which messages are working to engage with customers, which messages are eliciting a call to action. Without this information, you can NOT continually tweak your strategy and messages to improve results