The beginning of the New Year is often times a place for new personal goals, but what are your wine business goals? This year I encourage you to also pick 1-3 wine marketing resolutions for your winery.

We are all creatures of habit and while we may want to make big changes in our lives, the truth is we often quickly give up on our resolutions. If you want to make real changes, you have to change your habits or hire outside help.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, talks about the “The Two-Minute Rule” which states “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

Nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute action:

  • “Grow social posts” becomes “Take one photo a day for social”
  • “Learn Facebook ads” becomes “Watch a two minute FB ad training video”
  • “Send more emails” becomes “Spend two minutes a day in Mailchimp”
  • “Write more blog posts” becomes “Spend two minutes a day writing”

Here are our top tips for your winery:

Define your goals

Winery owners and marketing directors are busy. They are often are not just sitting at a computer and scheduling social media posts and email marketing. Instead they are pulled in multiple directions in the tasting room, helping at events, wine club management, eCommerce, and more!

This often means they are so busy running day to day, they don’t have time to create goals. Without a goal, you will find yourself running faster and faster each day but making no true progress. Goals give us directional clarity and a priority of what to focus on each day.

Since we work so closely with wineries, we often notice trends and patterns. We have heard from our clients tasting room traffic declined in the later part of the year of 2022. Wine Pulse also reported that “Q1 was extremely strong for wineries with reopening from 2021 – in fact, number of tasters were up by 64.30% in Q1 2022. However, year-over-year there was a serious decline in traffic with the number of tasters going down as the year was progressing.”

If your winery faced decreased tasting room traffic, how are you approaching 2023? What changes can you make?

What are other common goals we see with wineries? They can be overarching like increasing sales or more specific like converting tasting room visitors to wine club members, increasing tasting room traffic, or increasing eCommerce sales with marketing automation. Not sure? We can help! We provide one-on-one meeting packages to figure this out.

Create a marketing plan and budget for 2023

Now that you have your goal, it’s time to create a plan and budget. We help wineries break down their goals into yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily action plans to hit their goal.

Not having a clear marketing plan set can lead to feelings of overwhelm. Where to start? There is so much to become an expert on when it comes to wine marketing. Online ad rules are always changing, as are advice on where to spend your time: social media posts, stories or reels?

Having a plan with a clear overall goal simplifies marketing. They give purpose, vision, and measurable goals. It can help determine which type of marketing leads to the goal and which has the best ROI. Plus, it feels so good at the end of a year to say we reached our goal by this % and found out these tools and tactics work the best for our winery.

Get serious about your email marketing

While email marketing can seem super easy to do (who can’t send an email!?!), email marketing has evolved. Now you can create email automations based on your customers action and preferences. Email marketing has the top ROI of any type of digital marketing. It beats social and ads. If you aren’t doing consistent emails, commit to a monthly newsletter. If you are, consider advanced email strategies like drip automation emails, abandoned cart emails, and personalized email journeys.

Hire a marketing and branding strategy advisor

Not sure what your goals are, how to create a marketing plan, or how to do email automation? Are you overwhelmed and don’t know where to start? At Bauerhaus we work with wineries of all sizes on monthly retainers. First step? Set up a free discovery call. Next step, go through our signature process, the Bauerhaus Brand Map, to make sure the foundation we’re building upon is solid. No matter the scope of your retainer, we must begin by understanding how and why your brand is different.

The Bauerhaus Brand Map is divided into sections: Define your customer, define your competitors, define your brand, and walk step-by-step through a customer journey that covers how someone goes through: awareness, consideration, decision, and loyalty. This covers digital touchpoints and in in-person. We go through this process over a series of weekly Zoom calls and end up with a Marketing roadmap of suggestions.

Are you ready to start 2023 with a bang?

We can help! Set up a free discovery call to find out if we are a good fit. Our clients tell us that one of their favorite parts of working with us is a weekly or monthly meeting to ask all their questions. Bauerhaus Design offers various support packages tailored to your unique needs, covering the Bauerhaus Brand Map, marketing, design, and more. Book your free call today!