Knowing most of the country is experiencing extreme heat and wildfires have ravaged over 4.2M acres already, we hope you and your team are safe and the summer selling season is going well. The hot weather certainly creates a slew of new drinking occasions for craft beverage and others.

We wanted to share a conversation we had recently around a website refresh for the summer. For context, Market Your Craft has partnered with this longtime client on two website redesigns; establishing a social media strategy and content calendar; brand repositioning; and various promotional tactics. Objectively, the team delivered quality digital work, but may have fallen short of the overall goal of driving traffic to their tasting room. So, there’s been less interest in maintaining the digital properties over time, prompting the question:

Do drinkers even use websites anymore?

It’s a question we didn’t see coming! More pressing than the potential loss of a project or client was the idea that the value we’ve placed internally on websites as a vital part of the marketing mix was being challenged. Never one to back down from a good debate, we listened to what the client had to say about the engagement they’re seeing on social channels and the need to appeal to a younger LDA+ audience. We ping-ponged back and forth for a bit on topics like brand personality, ecommerce, event calendars, product locators, and others. We landed in a good spot, deciding to focus on those areas of a website that complement social media channels in a type of hybrid promotional model that strengthens the connection between the two.

Believing this was a much bigger question on the minds of many more craft beverage producers, we decided to go down the rabbit hole to see if there was some prevailing attitude in the digital debate between website and social media investment. To start, we must acknowledge that the need for and prioritization of marketing websites has changed dramatically since the early days of the internet. Sounds old, doesn’t it? For those brands who were early adopters in the 1990’s, having a website was the sign of an established business – a serious player in the craft beverage world, looking to build brand awareness at scale. The early 2000’s saw companies expanding their retail operations online with some variety of an ecommerce storefront and fulfillment, first for merchandise and then in support of direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales channels. Instagram emerged on the scene in 2010, ushering in the next wave of social engagement with brands and user-generated content. The 20’s find social media influencers rising in popularity, with brands shelling out an estimated $10B annually to connect with their audiences. So yes, things have changed in the past 30 years…

How do craft beverage businesses today value their brand websites against social media efforts? The answer is extremely subjective. But what ISN’T subjective is the disproportionate amount of money and time/human resources being spent in favor of social media. Anecdotally we understand beverage brands will spend upwards of 10-15 hours/week maintaining an engaging social media presence versus < 1 hour on their website (typically updating events if anything). So, by default your social media channels will always be a more up-to-date window into your beverage business, quickly outdating your website.

There must be SOME value in keeping an up-to-date website, right? Moreso than just an updated social feed and product list? Below we’ve listed reasons for sharing your story online (as opposed to using offline media, events, and other marketing channels) and which platform offers an advantage:

SOCIAL MEDIA VS. WEBSITE

A comparison of each platform’s ability to deliver a marketing goal.
 

You may have a different set of goals for your digital efforts. Or perhaps you assign more value to one area than we did. That’s all in-bounds for this exercise. However you look at it, there is still an argument to be made for having a website for your craft beverage business. Which begs the question:

Are your website and social media efforts stronger together than apart?

Having accounts on popular social media platforms and posting on a regular schedule is a good strategy. Having a website that makes you easily discoverable in search is also a good strategy. But have you sat down with your team to discuss how the two should work together? If you have, you’re much more organized than most 😉 More likely the team has a broad strokes idea of what success looks like in terms of social posting frequency and content calendar separate from website update and promotion. In any case, now is the perfect time to take a critical look at social and digital activity as a part of your broader marketing plan, leveraging synergies between the two and celebrating the differences. Here are some recommendations for your brand:

1. Start with a concise brand story: to stand out in a crowded industry like craft beverage, your goal should be to connect with drinkers emotionally. New customers will use the brand story to quickly decide whether to pursue further. The brand story also reinforces the promise your business has made to existing customers. We like to walk clients through an exercise to help articulate the single sentence that captures the facts and feelings created by your craft beverage business. It’s designed with sacred stories, give-a-damns, customer and competitive insights, and niche marketing opportunities in mind. This one-liner is the foundation of your marketing blueprint as well as the filter for all tactical executions (like social media posts and website updates).
2. Audit your current digital efforts: time to take an objective look at what you’re doing online, using tools like Sprout Social to benchmark social activity and Google Analytics to track website use. You’re looking for opportunities and threats: for example, another craft beverage producer is generating more conversation around their tasting room experience. Or most visitors are entering and exiting your website via the events calendar page. Knowing what is and isn’t working will help focus your team’s efforts in areas like content development and website usability.
3. Develop a content strategy: content is how your unique story is presented to the world, inviting customers to make the decision on whether or not to enter the story for themselves. Your content should help set the expectation of new customers BEFORE they do business with you! Help them see themselves enjoying a drink at the bar, laughing with friends or enjoying live music. Be deliberate about the photos and videos you post; what you share about product, process, and facility; where you promote events; and how you discuss team and community. And the goal is not to post everything, everywhere – use the chart above to maximize the impact of your content by playing to a platform’s strong suit. For example, consider establishing or strengthening your brand personality on social and exploring beverage offerings, pairings, recipes, and availability on the website.
4. Agree on the metrics: one of the greatest advantages to using social and digital media is the abundance of performance tracking and reporting available. So, use this opportunity to rethink or confirm what constitutes success in each platform and what metrics help tell that story. For social media, consider tracking engagement rate, reach, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, follower growth, social share of voice (SSoV), customer sentiment, and referral traffic to your website. For your website, look at traffic, bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session, conversion rate, load time, exit rate, new versus returning visitors, and referral traffic from search engines and third-party links. Then track performance at least monthly to gauge the effectiveness of each platform and adjust your strategy accordingly.
5. Explore e-commerce: generally speaking, craft beverage businesses are using online stores for merchandise and ticket sales only, if at all, because it’s more involved to sell and ship product. Some brands enabled online selling for curbside pickup or local delivery at the height of COVID-19 and have kept that option available since. More aggressive producers are taking the time to understand state-to-state shipping rules, establishing a compliant system internally or partnering with a third-party service like Uber Eats, ReserveBar, GoPuff, Minibar, and Instacart. The e-commerce functionality native to each of the social media platforms is at this point less developed, so look for ways to extend your store’s accessibility by making your social accounts and posts shoppable with plugins. More on TikTok stores, WooCommerce plugins, and Shopify apps; Facebook and Instagram shops, WooCommerce plugins, and Shopify apps; and a little on X shopping features.
6. Enable discoverability: social media is a great way to introduce your brand to new drinkers while they’re inside the platform. Especially if you’re spending a little against targeted advertising, boosting posts, or other promotions. But outside the TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, or X environments your brand needs to be easily discovered, and webpages are still more predictably indexed than social content. The most cost-effective way to ensure you show up in a “tasting room near me” search is to have a website that’s optimized for search, meaning the pages are designed in such a way to make it easy for Google and Bing to find and index your content. There’s a science to this, striking the right balance between text, imagery, internal and offsite links, keywords, cornerstone content, etc. Website plugins like Yoast makes it easier for marketers to help improve their brand’s search engine rankings with tips and best practices for content creation and search engine submission. Don’t forget to take ownership of and update your Google Business Profile and Bing Places for Business listing.

The team at Market Your Craft still believes a brand website is necessary, if for only longer-form content, product information, and e-commerce. Let’s call this Brand Authority. We also recognize the need for a strong, deliberate social media presence to build brand awareness, foster engagement, and encourage user-generated content. Let’s call this Brand Personality. Once we’ve taken a more objective look at all our digital media through the lens of a thoughtful brand story and content strategy, it’s easier to align Brand Authority and Brand Personality activity for greater marketing impact. So, what did we end up recommending to our client? A radically simplified website with 90% of the value frontloaded on the homepage, including a promotional messaging carousel at the top; brand story hero panel; social media feed and events calendar; real-time list of available products; shoppable products; and contact form. All while eliminating unnecessary plugin subscriptions and reducing the overall footprint of the site for a better user experience. This allows the client’s social channels and packed event schedule to take center stage, helping communicate the fun of the brand.

Ready to take a more objective look at how your social and web channels align with your overall marketing strategy? Let’s grab a [virtual] drink to discuss!

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