Are QR Codes the Ultimate Growth Hack for Beverage?

If you’re like many craft beverage producers, you and your team may have found yourselves looking for new revenue sources over the past 3-5 years due to:

Changing buyer/drinker behavior
Increased competition
Shifting market conditions
Impact of COVID-19
Non-traditional category growth

It’s difficult as a business owner or manager to stare into the face of these challenges and confidently double-down on marketing efforts to promote their way through it. Quite frankly it’s easier to retreat into what they know best: making a great-quality liquid. This is a defensive position that we know helps keep the lights on in the short term. But the further removed a producer gets from consistently marketing their craft beverage, the more difficult it is to regain the attention and engagement of their drinkers. And the slide towards irrelevance accelerates.

We want to see your QR Code usage! Send a photo of your packaging with the QR Code clearly visible (and readable) and we’ll send you a code good for one downloadable Guide from marketyourcraft.com.

In the financial world, making consistent, equal payments into a mutual fund, trading account or retirement plan over time has a net-positive return, despite highs and lows of the market. Advisors call this systematic investing, and it’s a more predictable way to accumulate wealth. The same can be said for craft beverage: a Marketing Plan consistently executed over time generally has a net-positive return across brand awareness, engagement and sales measures.

Why then do so many tasting rooms close, consolidate or otherwise struggle? It’s easy to point the finger at marketing when the truth is it could be any number of operational, management, production or market factors. Expanding too quickly to multiple locations for example. Failing to build the proper sales organization to help scale the business. Not taking drinker preferences into consideration when introducing new craft beverage innovations. You get it. However, if all other cylinders are firing and marketing IS to blame, it usually comes down to this:

Your tasting room isn’t relevant to drinkers.

May sound harsh, but if you’re not differentiated from your competitors, you’ll start to lose existing customers and fail to attract new ones. Last month we walked through the building blocks of a solid Marketing Plan, including identifying the “Why” behind your brand; defining the customer and competitor; brand positioning; and brand story. With this in mind, you and your team can talk strategies and tactics to engage new audiences in relevant ways.

Let’s look at relevance another way: as the intersection of new drinkers, ways to engage, new tactics and ways to personalize. The Venn Diagram of those relationships would look something like this:

We believe printing QR Codes on your packaging may be the ultimate growth marketing hack that delivers on all four requirements.

Yet very few craft beverage brands have yet to experiment with this what-was-old-is-new-again tactic. And fewer still use it to drive traffic to a landing page that helps bring the can or bottle to life. To review, QR Codes as we know them have been around since the mid-90’s; gained popularity in marketing in with mid-00’s; and reached critical mass during COVID-19 as the world tried to function without physical contact. Craft beverage producers have for decades used alpha-numeric, bar code and even QR codes for traceability purposes. But not until the mid-10’s did brand marketers look for innovative ways to help their products stand out at shelf (beyond label and naming creativity of course). The wines of 19 Crimes are cited by many to be the first commercial use of augmented reality (AR) in 2017, winning awards for telling each wine label’s story in an engaging way. Since then vendors such as Living Labels/Tactic Studios and Swigr and global brands like Jim Beam have partnered to bring similar storytelling tactics to market.

What has happened to all the AR excitement? Brands cite development costs, finding appropriate use cases, maintaining the technology and limited user adoption as just a few of the deterrents to getting started. Plus, at present there’s no single standard for AR development, so brand-specific mobile apps are often needed, further complicating the user experience. At the same time beverage marketers were trying to understand AR as a platform, they likely saw QR Codes as a less-engaging, second-class tactic. So, it has yet to have the critical mass of interest or use in this space.

We’re hoping to change that.

If you have the flexibility, opportunity and means to conduct a test run of packaging QR Codes in the next 3-6 months for your craft beverage business, we encourage you to do so. And we’re going to lay out the basics of what’s needed in order to pull it off. Let’s get started.

Create a landing page: many of our client question why the content on their websites doesn’t get more traffic. Browse the Google Analytics for your own site and see if 80% or more of the traffic volume is to the homepage. Visitors just aren’t going any deeper! As much time and effort as we spend building out beautiful About Us pages, Food and Drink Menus and Event Calendars, most visitors expect a majority of the BRAND CONTENT to live on the home screen. And you certainly can link packaging QR Codes to your homepage…but you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to personalize the PRODUCT CONTENT experience. Consider the following options for a truly-engaging product landing page for your craft beverage business:
1. Welcome the visitor with a product-specific greeting, using tone and personality.
2. Display a prominent product image. This should at least correspond with the single-unit packaging that features the QR Code, if not the multi-unit pack and potentially the liquid presented beautifully in-glass.
3. Provide a brief description of the product (1-2 sentences max). Think of these as tasting notes.
4. List stats/specifications for the product, including style, package size, production team inspiration, volume produced (if available), packaging date and any other relevant detail.
5. List ingredients and fermentation information where applicable. Some brands will use this real estate to share nutritional labels.
6. Use a product locator to map nearby locations for product [retail] availability.
7. Share a social media feed specific to that product (versus broader brand). This helps drinkers see themselves enjoying the brand (at home, in your tasting room, at a restaurant, etc.).
8. Use a contact form or instant messenger chat feature to enable two-way dialogue with the brand. During regular business hours, this is a great customer service channel that could make or break the sale!
9. End with a brief boilerplate description of the brand, with relevant links to continue their experience elsewhere on the site.
Generate a QR Code: we like bit.ly or bitly.com. Open a free account if you don’t already have one. Create a shortened bit.ly link to your landing page above. Use the QR Code Generator to format a high-res QR Code linking to your new bit.ly link. This allows you to redirect your QR Code to another page in the future without costly changes to packaging.
Incorporate into your packaging: work with your graphics team or outside agency to concept a label that presents the QR Code at a large enough resolution to be easily-readable by a QR Code reader (most iOS and Android devices now have QR Code readers built into the camera). Test, test and test some more! And make sure you’re involving your legal counsel throughout the process – you don’t want to undo any of the packaging approval work done to-date.
Write a press release: often underutilized, send your local and regional industry-friendly journalists a press release announcing your new packaging innovation.
Talk about it on the socials: there is a subtle way to tease interest in the packaging without giving too much of the experience away. Lean into drinker testimonials whenever possible.
Include in your marketing materials: once you’ve built some momentum with QR Code use and corresponding traffic to your landing page, you can feel confident the links and the tech are both working. You may choose to extend QR Code use to product-specific marketing materials such as sell sheets, presentations, merchandise, t-shirts, sampling activations and more.

QR Code on wine bottle for QR Codes post

Need support to get started? Market Your Craft can help.
We’re offering to cover the first four (4) hours of any approved project estimate to help set up QR Codes and corresponding website landing pages for your craft beverage business. If together we agree the project is not a fit, Market Your Craft will share a code good for one (1) free download of any Guide (up to a USD$99 value) as well as make connections to other solution providers who may provide value. Offer subject to change. Valid for new business inquiries between 2/19/24 and 3/31/24.

START USING QR CODES

MailChimp archive:
https://mailchi.mp/8a7a471e4e64/240219_qrcodes?e=bd76eedb35
Download:
https://app.box.com/s/zrnwfbnjzkc4gwy68zkuvyql61bjf2sy