With the number of wineries in United States, differentiating yourself from the competition can be a difficult task. However, by taking an innovative approach to marketing, you can generate buzz, get important links, exposure and introduce your brand to new audiences, and differentiate yourself form the competition.

Thinking of innovative concepts in wine industry can be a difficult task. But there are basic steps that can get you thinking in the right direction:

1. How can you get your customer base involved with your wine or winemaking process?
2. What components of wine can be changed, ie: wine bottles, labels, corks, wine glasses, bottle openers, decanters, etc.?
3. What avenues do your customers go through to buy your wine?
4. How can you make your wine fun to drink and interact with?
5. How does your customer base find your wine online, and can they interact with the wine, your winery and each other?
6. Are there foods that your wine pairs well with, if so, can you write fun recipes that your customers can follow?

The key is finding an angle that will catch the interest of your customer base. Once you have brainstormed a few ideas, begin thinking about how you are going to spread the word about your new, interesting idea.

A great place to start is the wine blogosphere. Wine bloggers are continuously looking for new, interesting ideas coming out of wineries to write about. If your idea is good, contact as many wine bloggers as you can asking them to write about it (wine bribes work amazing well).

This has many benefits beyond the exposure and traffic to your site. Wine blogger links are considered very important in the search engines, and will help increase the page rank of your site. Search Engine algorithms are quite complicated, but the more links that are pointing towards your site, the more traffic you will receive from the search engines.

An excellent, well executed example of creating an innovative marketing campaign is Fantesca Winery.

Spring Mountain’s Fantesca Winery developed an interesting campaign allowing their customers to submit quotes that could end up on the corks of their wine. Dubbed “Fortune Corkies,” Fantesca promised to reward the wining quotes with a 1.5L magnum of the Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, with your “Fortune Corkie” as the cork. This created a way for their customers to interact with their product.

Duane Hoff, proprietor of Fantesca then contacted several wine bloggers in an attempt to spread the word. This campaign resulted in stories from Calwineries, Winehiker Witiculture, Wine Outlook, WineCast and Good Wines Under $20, there may have been more, but this are the ones I know about.

As a whole, this marketing campaign was very successful. It created buzz around their winery, got their customers involved, drove traffic to their site, exposed their brand to new people, got inbound links to their website, and created customer loyalty through personal investment. Developing innovative marketing campaigns can have many benefits, and it is a great way to differentiate you winery from the competition.

This entry was posted by Ryan Fujiu on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Blog, Link Baiting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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