The Winery Web Site Report

Wine Bloggers or Wine Evangelists?

This post (about Pepsi reaching out to marketing bloggers) raises a good question about wineries reaching out to wine bloggers:

If you're a company watching all this unfold or looking back at similar campaigns from companies like Nikon and Stormhoek, keep in mind...you'll probably get more bang for your buck (and have an easier time getting coverage) if you focus on reaching out to the people who either already love your brand or who are representative of your target audience.

Certainly wine bloggers can make people aware of your wine, but you also need to target "wine evangelists": people who love your wine and want everyone to know about it.

How do you create/identify your wine evangelists?   More about that next week...

Good Reads

For your consideration, a nice post from Ben Chinn at Inertia Beverages, Building a Better Virtual Tasting Room, including a link to a great interview with some experts on maximizing tasting room effectiveness.

Next time you're thinking about the content of your web site, or if you're building a new one, a lot of what you already know about your tasting room will help you with your online presence.

Ben's point is that your Web site is your virtual tasting room.

His post echoes my recent statement that visiting your winery's Web site should feel like visiting your winery. But, please, don't take that too literally.  What I mean is that,  in both cases, a visitor should feel like they got what they came for (and then some). 

Writing For Your Winery Web Site: Two Tips

For those of you who want the CliffsNotes^™ version, here are the two tips:

1. Write as though you were speaking face-to-face
2. Provide substance 

The longer, worth-your-time-to-read-it version is here: Two Tips for Website Writing

 

Think about how you interact with real-life visitors to your winery.  You probably ask them why they came, and attempt to satisfy them.  If they seem confused or unsure, you may try to guide them to a tasting or a tour or something else.  If they've visited before, or purchased your wines, you'll treat them differently than someone who is a first-time visitor.

To a visitor, your winery Web site should feel like that experience ("I had a great time visiting!")

Marketing Thought For The Day

From the [non]billable hour:

The single best marketing strategy in the world is to find your best clients and ask them, "How do I get more clients like you?"

Involve your best customers in helping you find new customers ("We'll send a free bottle of our wine to someone you recommend").  Let your best customers know that you know who they are, and are glad to have them, and respect their opinions.

I'll never forget the free coffee mug that Amazon sent me one year (back when they were young and struggling), just because I ordered a lot of books that year.

Two Questions To Improve Your Winery Web Site

Here are two questions to improve your winery Web site:

1. What action do you most want your visitors to take?
2. Are you making that action as effortless as possible?

Assuming a major goal of smaller wineries is to sell more wine direct to consumers, it amazes me that their Web sites don't make this easier.  It's not just the checkout process, it's the whole idea of orienting your site to sell wine.

And there's even nuance to that.  If you'd like people to buy cases of wine (instead of just bottles), what incentives do you provide to make it worth someone's while?  Free shipping?  A simple discount?  Schwag? That's part of making the action effortless as well.

In designing the original Winery Web Site Report evaluation, I started with the 4 types of visitors to your winery Web site:

1. People who want to buy your wines right now (buyers)
2. People who want to resell your wine (distributors, wholesalers, restaurants)
3. People who who want to tell others about your wine (the media)
4. People who want to find other information about your winery and wines (browsers)

and discussed the need to make it easy for each type to reach their goal successfully and with a minimum of fuss.

As part of making it easy for buyers to reach their goals, I strongly encourage wineries to use the phrase "Buy Now" as part of their main navigation, as opposed to "Wines" or "Online Store" (or worse, something more cutesy and less obvious).  You might want to keep "Wines" as a navigation item for those seeking information, but it's not a call to action for people who arrived with the goal of buying your wines.  "Online Store" identifies a location where your wines can be bought, but again, it's not as clear a call to action.

Here are some other questions related to how effortless you make it for visitors to buy your wine:

• How many clicks does it take to buy a bottle of wine on your site?  What can you do to reduce that number?  
•  How many clicks to buy your most popular wine?  
•  Do people have to sign up before they can add something to their cart? 
• Do you offer a buying suggestion on every page of your site?   
• Do you offer one-click ordering for previous customers?   
• Do you tell them about restaurants and retailers where they can buy your wine offline? 

Yes, effortless e-commerce is hard to do well.  It's one reasons that people choose ready-made solutions from Inertia Beverages, eWinery Solutions, Cultivate, and Nexternal (although I've seen a lot of bad uses of Nexternal, Orin Swift Cellars has one of the most seamless Nexternal shops I've seen,).

How well have you answered the two questions for your site visitors?

(Here's the original post from ProBlogger which posed these two questions in slightly different form.)

 

Your Winery Tribe

Seth Godin has a new { marketing, leadership } book out: Tribes (which some think may be his best book yet, and that's saying somethin').

A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

The key for wineries is that your 1,000 True Fans (and even those who aren't True Fans but still like your wines) can be a tribe.  The shared interest is already present: your wines.  You should be thinking about how to help your tribe to communicate.

Best of all for busy winery owners, it's a short book (and you can get the audio book on iTunes for 99 cents, or for free if you register for Audible.com).

The Best Winery Blog?

An Exemplary Wine Blog singles out Jason Haas's Tablas Creek Winery blog, along with blogs from August Briggs, The Hess Collection, Iron Horse, and Donum Estates (all of which can be found in The List, our comprehensive list of winery blogs).

Congratulations to Jason on this well-deserved recognition.

Starting A Winery Web Site: My Recommendations

The story so far:  an existing winery (without any Web presence) is  launching a new varietal (which won't be in production until 2010) -- you can read the details in my original post Starting A Winery Web Site: What Would You Do? along with several excellent reader suggestions.

I assume an existing winery already has a logo to go along with its name, but establishing your visual identity is important.

The next important thing is to obtain your winery's matching domain name, e.g. Acme Winery should try hard to own the domain AcmeWinery.com, as well as similar domains which people are likely to search (e.g. AcmeWine.com, AcmeWines.com).  In countries, where .com is not the predominant top-level domain, readers should make the appropriate adjustment.

As Paul Mabray pointed out in a comment on the original post, the poster child for wineries without Web sites is Josh Hermsmeyer's pinotblogger.com (which is now the home for his nascent Capozzi Winery).  Josh also owns CapozziWine.com and CapozziWines.com (although it appears that someone else controls CapozziWinery.com).

 If you were to follow Josh's example, you would set up a blog at www.AcmeWinery.com and start blogging.  For a startup winery, your winery Web site is your winery blog.  The advantage of using blogging software like Wordpress or TypePad is that many of the headaches involving the mechanics of a Web site are eliminated.

I also recommend using a hosted service (e.g. WordPress.com or TypePad.com or Blogger.com), where someone else sets up and maintains the blogging software for you.  You lose some flexibility, but when you are starting out that flexibility is just one more thing to contend with.  Note that with any of these three, you will have to do a little extra work (called "domain mapping") so that www.AcmeWinery.com points to your hosted blog.

Your site doesn't need to be fancy, but it must show the following things in the header (which appears on every page):  your logo, the name of your winery, and your contact information (perhaps just a phone or e-mail if you don't have a physical location yet).  Remember, your logo will be the way most people remember your winery, so make a point of showing it.

Before ever making your first post, you must sign up for Google Analytics and install the simple tracking code into the template for your blog, so that right from the start you have quantitative information about how people use your winery Web site.

You'll also need some static "Pages" which explain what's going on (TypePad and Wordpress make this easy).  Visitors to a blog are coming in to the middle of a story in progress, where newer posts replace older ones.  You need a page that explains the story so far.  Again, pinotblogger is a great model.  I don't think Josh will mind if you copy his ideas.

Plan to create 5 - 10 initial posts before telling anyone about your blog.  Take pictures and write stories about them.  Introduce the cast of characters (again, with pictures).  In the case of this particular winery, which has an existing product, do some posting about that wine (and let people know if/how they can obtain some of that wine locally).  If this step seems hard, maybe you should re-consider blogging (see my recommendation at the end).

Once you announce your web site (you can use a free press release service, but also send a personal note to local business editors), plan to post once a week.  Have a list of ideas which you can draw on for those weeks when nothing is happening at the winery itself.  Consistency is important in building up a following for your blog.  Again, for ideas start with the oldest post on pinotblogger, and read forward.

In addition, you must create an environment where people want to stay in touch with you.  Notice that one prominent feature on every page of Josh's blog is an invitation to join the Capozzi mailing list, which offers several benefits:

• you will receive notice of the inaugural vintage, whenever it happens
• you will have first priority in allocation of the inaugural vintage 
• you are a Pinot Pioneer, giving you access to 
  • discounts 
  • library wines 
  • Pinot Points (redeemable for cool stuff)
• you receive invitation to winery events and other special happenings

These are all incentives for someone to give you their contact information so you can continue to interact with them.  Since the winery in question has a "captive market" for its existing production, it's extra-important to get these folks on their mailing list (it doesn't sound to me as if they are).

You should give your mailing list customers the option of receiving your blog updates via e-mail (ideally, they know how to subscribe via RSS, but I suspect allowing them to opt-in to e-mail copies of posts is easier for most people).  FeedBlitz is the service I offer my readers to receive blog posts via e-mail, since it integrates nicely with TypePad.

You may also want to create a standalone "Visit Us" page if you are in a position to receive visitors.  People who are interested in visiting a startup winery are potential "true fans" that you want to cultivate.  Even if you can't invite people to the winery, you may want to create some (quarterly) events where you can meet people who have been nice enough to join your list before there's any wine to buy.

One thing that I would recommend for this particular winery is to think about emulating the "wine futures" program of David Coffaro Estate Winery as they plan for their inaugural vintage.  David's approach strikes me as a pretty sharp one, as long as you are clear about its limitations.

To summarize, when starting a winery Web site, you need:

• A logo (this is the visual identity you are establishing)
• A domain name that closely matches the name of your winery 
• Hosted blogging software with "page" capability  (TypePad or Wordpress)
• A blog header with your name, logo, and contact information. 
• Google Analytics installed
• A page which tells the story that people are joining
• Five to ten inital blog posts.  No one likes an empty blog.
• A commitment to post on a regular, weekly basis. 
• A way to capture visitor contact information (and incentives for people to provide it) 
• To make people aware of your winery Web site by adding its URL to your e-mail signature, letterhead, business cards, printed materials, and any other information you send out into the world.
• To let me know about it! 

The bottom line is you want people to be interested enough that they will give you contact information (even just an e-mail).  The way to do that is to tell an interesting story about your winery, and the best way to tell stories on the Web is with a blog.  Then take good care of the people who are interested in your story.

The downside:  if you aren't writing interesting stuff, your efforts will be largely wasted.  In that case, a single static page with your logo, winery name, contact information, and the basic story (one or two paragraphs at most) will serve you as well.  Don't forget to let people join your mailing list (although I doubt you'll get many sign-ups without other promotion).

What did I forget?  Add a comment!

AmericanWinery.com

Although it's not a winery, AmericanWinery.com does have an interesting blog (I subscribe to its RSS feed, and find it worthwhile to follow).

Here's an informative article from the NY Times with the backstory on AmericanWinery.com.  Basically, their idea is to create a community and sell wines to it, which differs a bit from the more traditional retail approach taken by both Wine.com and Amazon.com.

New Winery Blogs for September, 2008

The following winery blogs were added to The List during August:

1. Adirondack Winery

2. Bastianich Wines

3. Casa De Las Vides

4. Grace Hill Winery

5. Tertulia Cellars 

Our comprehensive list of winery blogs now totals 119 active and inactive blogs. 

Lazy Sunday: Please Register To Vote

Want to know if you're already registered to vote?  Visit VoteForChange.com while drinking your Sunday morning coffee (it took me about 2 minutes to verify that I'm registered to vote in California).

Regardless of your political persuasion, don't fail to exercise your right to vote.

If you're not already registered to vote, please watch the following video:

If you want to skip the 5-minute video, just go to http:/maps.google.com/vote/ to get voter information specific to where you live.

In California, if you're not already registered to vote, you must do so by Monday, October 20.

(I'd love to see wineries supporting voter registration -- if you're doing something special at your winery to help get out the vote, please leave a comment!)

Housekeeping: Comment Feeds Now Available

In response to a request from Canadian reader Andrew Kamphuis, you can now subscribe to comments on this blog.  Typepad offers an RSS-feed-for-comments as a feature, but it must be enabled.  On an individual post page, you will now see

In other words, you can subscribe to what others have to say about what I write. :)

I hope you'll take advantage of this change to follow posts which interest you and especially on posts where you have added a comment.

Telemarketing for Wineries

Go read Telemarketing to your customers can pay off big  at Brian Asmus's Small Winery Marketing blog.

And even if you don't plan to telemarket to your list, consider this excellent piece of advice:

Make specific offers during these calls that are unique for their price or product offering and do it in ways that make it easy for the customer to say yes.

This applies to more broadly than just calls.  Successful direct marketing is based on the idea of an irresistible offer.

Starting A Winery Web Site: What Would You Do?

Here's an e-mail I received today (edited slightly):

I've just read your newsletter from March 2006 and it's made me slam on the brakes on my plan to start a Web site for my project! I was ready to go down route #2 and hire a graphic designer, but now I'm not so sure.
 
Here's my situation:
 
For the last 5 years we've been managing a small vineyard and producing around 200 - 300 cases of wine. In all this time we've had no need for a Web site because we are fortunate in having a sort-of-captive market and all our production is sold almost automatically. ... Now this is fine, and we don't want/need to change the way that works.
 
The thing is that, as of this year, we have taken on another larger vineyard, about 2500 cases, which we obviously can't sell exclusively to this small market. Our idea is to market/sell further afield ... This new vineyard was abandoned by the previous owner and hasn't been pruned for 2 years (and the leaves and shoots have been eaten by animals!), so we don't think there will any grape production in 2009. So, for the first year (at least) we will be working exclusively to recover the vineyard and there will be no wine production.
 
Could you make any suggestions as to what sort of Web site I should have?

I wont have a product to sell until 2010, so I don't need online sales yet.  I was thinking of doing a "sponsor-a-vine" scheme  to generate interest, build up a mailing list, and have a bit of income.  Also, a sort of "vineyard diary" feature, and, of course, all the brochure-type material. 

I must say also that I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed by the complexity of all the issues involved in Web site design! I just don't know where to start.

Before I offer my suggestions, what would you tell this reader based on your winery Web site experience?

Number One on Google: What's Really Important

There's a lot of talk about being #1 on Google.  It's important, because most searchers home in on the first site in a list of search results, and very few searchers go beyond the first page of results.

The problem is this: you can be #1 on Google for a search phrase that no one uses.  That's useless (which is why you should be skeptical of people offering to "make you #1 on Google").

You should be #1 on Google for the name of your winery (and the commonly used alternatives).  For example, if your winery is named Acme Winery, you should aim to be #1 for Acme wines as well as Acme Winery.

Of course, that only covers people who are searching for your winery by name, which is just a fraction of the searches that could be leading people to your winery.  You also want to be highly ranked for the searches that potential customers are making (more about this soon).

Incidentally, you should type the name of your winery into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  It will show you the various ways in which people search for your winery, and which are the most frequently used.