The Winery Web Site Report

From Tasting Room to Web Site

Do you have a tasting room or other retail presence?  These BoasterPosters feature your Web site in a nicely framed format, are not terribly expensive ($160), and subtly remind visitors that you have a Web site where they can continue to be part of the community of people who drink and enjoy your wines.

Visitor Effectiveness at Retail

This blog focuses on the "visitor effectiveness" of winery Web sites (i.e. making it easy for visitors to achieve their goal).  Take the idea of "visitor effectiveness" to retail stores aimed at demystifying wine, and you get Vino 100, a chain of wine stores that carry only 100 different wines, each under $25.

Vino 100's focus is on user-friendliness making sure that the store is easy to shop and information is easy to access.

Visitors to a retail store, of course, are very much like the segment of visitors to your Web site that we describe as buyers: people who want to make an immediate purchase.  Give them clear choices and get out of their way.

It sounds like the designers of Vino 100 are "thinking like visitors."  Of course, they need to add a Vinotek automated wine tasting machine to each store, allowing people to sample wines for themselves.

(via TP Wire Service)

Wine Business Daily News

If you are interested in the wine business, you may find this worthwhile: Wine Business Daily News, from Wine Busines Monthly.  It delivers the top wine stories to you via e-mail every business day.  And it's free.  Since WBM doesn't have an RSS feed that I can find, it's a good way to see the top stories (although WBM provides many more stories each day on their Wine Business Daily News Page).

What Are You Reading?

Here's another question-and-a-half for my readers who run wineries (large or small):  What do you read online?  If you're reading this Web log, what other blogs do you read?  Feel free to post a comment or drop me an email (mike@winerywebsitereport.com).  Thanks!

Advertise on Wine Blogs?

On the off chance you're not aware of it, there are lots of wine drinkers blogging about wine (see Wine Blog Watch or the right column at Fermentations).  Some wine bloggers place  "Ads by Google" on their pages to help defray costs (see the bottom of Dr. Vino or the right column of Ultimate California Wine Blog for examples of "Ads by Google" on web logs). These advertisements are part of the delivery end of Google's AdWords program.

When you search on Google, targeted ads appear to the right of your search results, based on your search words.  Google offers this same feature to Web site owners though their AdSense program.  Based on the content of a Web page, Google decides what ads are relevant and displays those "Ads by Google" alongside the site owner's content.  In the case of the examples above, "wine" is a frequently-occurring word on these blog pages, so Google chooses wine-related advertisements to display.  Web site owners displaying these ads get part of what Google is paid by the advertiser.

Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad (hence the name, pay-per-click advertising).  Since there are generally several advertisers bidding on the same key word, position and frequency of the ad is determined (in part) by what the advertiser is willing to pay for a click.

The problem with Google AdWords (from the perspective of a winery) is that a phrase like pinot noir is going to be relatively expensive to use (Google estimates this phrase would be clicked on 60 times a day at $0.75 a click, meaning you could spend up to $45 a day).  The phrase Russian River pinot noir would only be clicked on once every two days, and it would probably cost you $1.12 for that one click.  It's more expensive on a per-click basis, but it's also more targeted, so your overall cost is lower.  (I'm glossing over some details - for instance, you can set a daily budget - but the basic idea is that advertisers bid for ad placement).

But there may be an even smarter, more effective approach.

Someone who blogs about wine might be interested in your sponsorship or advertising.  It can be as simple as a text link or box that a blogger places in their sidebar, and offers highly-targeted access to potential customers.  How much does it cost?  On a non-wine site, I have an advertiser paying $100 every three months to place a Google-style text advertisement on a single, relevant-to-his-potential-customers page, which is much better than what Google would pay for the same space (and better for the advertiser, relative to what he might pay for a strong keyword through AdWords).  It's not clear if that $100 is a bargain or a rip-off, but both sides seem to be happy with it.  In other words, pricing is pretty negotiable.

So:  consider a low-cost experiment in advertising on a wine blog.  You might even ask your (best) customers where they go online with regard to wine research, and advertise there.  For example, if I were a New York winery, I'd be asking Lenn if he'd be interested in my ads.

By the way, you shouldn't even think about paying to drive traffic to your Web site until you are sure that you are able to convert that traffic into desired actions.  How can you be sure?  Make sure that the "visitor effectiveness" of your Web site is above average (so you don't pay for visitors who get frustrated and immediately hit the Back button), and understand how to analyze the actions of Web traffic you're already getting.

(PS - This post is not a solicitation for ads for *this* blog.  Wrong audience)

Another Winery Blog: Dover Canyon Winery

Mary Baker of Dover Canyon Winery down in Paso Robles, CA wrote in to let me know about their new Dover Canyon Winery blog (hosted on TypePad).

You should also take a look at her thoughtful comment on my post, Three Questions for Winery Owners/Managers.  It's an interesting look behind the scenes at one artisanal producer who seems to be doing well.  Thank you, Mary, for taking the time to write back.

Dover Canyon joins eight other wineries on our list of winery Web logs.

A New-Old Winery Blog

The Preston of Dry Creek Web site used to have a placeholder for a web log.

Now they've added a link to Lou's Musings - the unofficial mouth organ of the Dry Creek Prestons which, like this blog, is hosted at TypePad.  Unlike this blog, it's written by Lou Preston.

Here's our listof all the winery web logs we know about, of which all but one have RSS feeds (meaning you can track updates using an RSS reader like Bloglines or NewsGator).  Please let us know of any other winery web logs you encounter.

What Customers Really Want

Here's a excellent article at StartupNation.com (oriented at retail stores, not Web sites) on What Customers Really Want.  This comment, on Convenience, caught my eye:

Convenience. The service rule here is simple: make it easy! Says Gross, “Customers want merchandise that is well organized, attractively displayed and easy to find. That’s how today’s customers define convenience, and the easier you can make the shopping, the more money you will be lugging to the bank.”

In this regard, your Web site is no different from a retail store: making things easy to find for your visitors, whether they are buyers, browsers, members of the trade, or the media, is the secret to a Web site that gets used (and consquently generates actions that benefit your winery:  on- and off-line purchases, word of mouth, customer satisfaction, increased sales, new outlets for your wine, press coverage, world peace, etc...).

Take a look at the whole article.

Three Questions for Winery Owners/Managers

I'm hoping that there are some winery owners or managers in my audience (and if any of the rest you know some, I'd really appreciate you passing along a link to this post), because I'd love to hear your answers to the following three questions:

• First of all, a very basic question:  what is your long-term goal for your winery?  I would assume that you want to sell all the wine you presently make, but if you achieve that, will you seek to increase your production?  Stay small and increase prices?  Try to get 4,000 people on the waiting list for your mailing list?

• Second, what are the 3 main obstacles to achieving your goal?  They don't need to be technology issues - I'm just trying to get a candid picture of where you see the most problem-solving leverage for your efforts.

• Last, do you worry much about "competition"?  To the extent competitive information might be useful in your sales and marketing efforts, what would it be?

Please free to respond to these questions in the comment section, via trackback from your own blog, or privately by e-mail (mike@WineryWebSiteReport.com).  And thanks in advance for your insights!

(Bonus question: what's your biggest daily/recurring headache?)

Wine Industry Information

Sonoma State University offers this research guide to the wine industry, which seems pretty comprehensive.

Wine Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead

Hugh McLeod is a marketing/advertising guy living in Britain.  He's moderately famous in the online world for his back-of-a-business-card cartoons, as well as an essay entitled How to be Creative.

Now McLeod is experimenting with the use of blogs to market wine (specifically, to get some buzz going around the UK release of Stormhoek wines from South Africa).  His post talks about how wine marketing might take a lesson from The Grateful Dead, who built a community around their "product".

You really want the people who love your wine to talk it up.  Web logs give each of your fans a much greater reach than ever before.  McLeod also made this important connection:  wine reviewing, professional or amateur, is simply a surrogate for being able to actually taste a wine.  He sent samples of Stormhoek to bloggers, so that they could taste it and write about it (if they chose to).

McLeod simply made it possible for bloggers in the UK to speak from experience.  Certainly, he will get some play simply because he sent out samples.  But ultimately, the wine will have to stand on its own merit (with "ordinary" folk).

By the way, he's also looking at doing a similar experiment when Stormhoek comes to the US (see his comment on this post- third one down).

Any bloggers among your fans?

Enologix in the NY Times Magazine

The New York Times Magazine profiles Enologix (free subscription required), the company that analyzes wines-in-process to help winemakers deliver a wine that scores 100 points on the Wine Spectator or Wine Advocate rating scale.

Living in Sonoma County (and enjoying our locally-grown wines), it was hard to read this quote from Enologix founder, Leo McCloskey:

If you're in Sonoma, you have to rearrange Mother Nature to match the beauty of Napa and Bordeaux,'' he said. ''Napa cabernet is the only New World wine ruler that's being used internationally. Sonoma is an also-ran.

It's a little ironic, since Enologix is based in Sonoma (city and county).  Also interesting are the names of some clients: Beaulieu, Benziger, Diamond Creek, Merry Edwards, Niebaum-Coppola, Ridge, St. Francis and Sebastiani.

But given that distributors, retailers, and consumers rely heavily on ratings, a 90+ score makes a real difference to a winery's bottom line.  It's wine-as-art vs. wine-as-business.

(Update - upon reading the quote a little more carefully, I can see that McCloskey appears to be saying "Sonoma Cabernet is an also-ran.  That may or may not be true, and I know that I'm not expert enough to comment on it.  Still, whatever happened to just taking pleasure in what a wine has to offer?)

When A Winery Shouldn't Blog...

One of the minor "visitor effectiveness" elements rated in The Winery Web Site Report (1 point out of 100)  is whether a winery offers an RSS feed and/or a Web log (blog) on their Web site.  As I've noted earlier, there just aren't very many wineries that blog.  Nevertheless, we still think that a well-written blog with weekly updates can be a powerful way of connecting with the visitors to your Web site.

Still, we acknowledge that there are wineries which simply should NOT blog, and Dave Taylor explains it well in his post on When A Business Should NOT Blog.  Although his  example focuses on professionals (opticians!) selling their expertise, it could just as well be a winery selling the experience of their wines.