Beer marketing is a funny animal. We’re still in a boom time for craft breweries, so in many ways it’s not that difficult to sell beer. Set up a brewery, start to advertise, and the people will come. If you make even halfway decent beer, they’ll come back again.

But the M & A announcements — like Sapporo’s recent purchase of Anchor — remind us that early, or even sustained success does not necessarily guarantee the resiliency of your brand.

You need to keep improving, keep doing a little better every day.

To keep improving in your digital marketing strategies (i.e., any online marketing you do), you need some time, energy, maybe a little money, and, significantly, a plan. Fortunately for you, I have a simple plan that will serve as the backbone of your digital marketing efforts.

This plan lays out, in order, the steps you should take to systematically establish your brewery’s online authority. Each step builds on the last and helps you grow in a way that makes sense for a brewery in contrast with an online business.

1. Website

Let’s start with the obvious: you need a website to be your digital home base. Even a single page with your name, address, and a way to contact you is better than nothing.

And it has to come before the social media accounts because when people look for you online they will begin by searching for your brewery name and looking for your homepage.

It’s worth getting professional photos and perhaps even professional design for your site if you’re not great at it yourself.

Then make sure you keep it up to date and accurate. That doesn’t necessarily mean listing the taps every week, though it’s not hard to do that in your news/blog feed, but it does mean posting information about special events or where people can find your beer.

2. Social Media

Again, another obvious one. I advise adding this immediately after the website because it is the easiest way to reach the most people for just the cost of your time.

The best use of social media is to snap a picture or video of something happening in the brewery or tap room and posting it with a quick caption. Images get big attention and engagement, and while a carefully composed shot will certainly look professional, people value authenticity and intimacy, too. They won’t flinch if the lighting is a little off or the sound isn’t perfect as long as they’re seeing something interesting.

Most of your social media posts will probably be general, “here we are,” “top of mind” sorts of posts, but don’t forget to occasionally drop in a call to action. For instance, come Thursday or Friday you could schedule a couple posts telling people to come out to the tap room over the weekend.

Try to mix up these calls to action a bit. Don’t just copy and paste the previous week’s! Find something legitimately new or interesting going on that week and promote it.

3. E-mail Sign-Up Form

This is the one e-mail piece most breweries get right. It’s only the tip of the e-mail marketing iceberg, but we know icebergs are there by their tips, so it’s still important.

Keep your form simple, but don’t be afraid to ask for a little extra info, like “Where did you first try our beer: the tap room or in a bottle?” You can also ask for this information later, and it will help you understand your audience better.

It’s also good to tell people what the newsletter is about and how often they should expect to receive it.

One last tip: Make your form easy to find! Some fans may assume there’s a sign-up and hunt for it, but you don’t want to put anyone in that position. There should be a form on your home page, if not on every page, as well as a sensible menu option.

4. E-mail Newsletter

Hopefully you see the logic of collecting e-mail addresses before you try to send an e-mail newsletter. For most breweries, a monthly newsletter is adequate. You can send an e-mail blast or two in between newsletters if there are special events that merit it.

Weekly is great if you are telling lots of stories and unrolling new beers more than once a month.

The main thing is to pick a schedule and stick to it. Send on the first Thursday of the month, say, and make sure you send something on every first Thursday.

Look at the calendar about 6-8 months out and identify holidays or birthdays or other events that you may want to mention in your newsletter. Make a list of topics or categories you can write about. These may change, but you’ll want to plan so you don’t find yourself late on a Wednesday night scrambling to assemble the newsletter.

It also doesn’t hurt to name the newsletter something, if it’s not too cute or silly.

5. E-mail Welcome Series

Now we’re getting into the interesting stuff when it comes to e-mail. The welcome series is a sequence of e-mails that begin sending automatically after someone subscribes to your newsletter. You can set up automation in most e-mail marketing providers, though it may take some tooling around to figure them out.

Actually, you should at least have a welcome e-mail for all new subscribers as soon as you create your sign-up form. The first welcome e-mail says, minimally, “Thanks for subscribing! We value you as a customer, and we’ll shoot you our newsletter the first Thursday of every month.” Maybe you include a little something about your brewery while you’re at it.

A more sophisticated welcome series will run upwards of 10 or 12 e-mails, sent between one day and one week apart, that draws your new subscriber into the fold, shares stories and insider information that makes them one of the tribe.

6. E-mail Lead Magnet

Whenever you hear a marketer say “lead magnet” just think incentive. In this case, it’s an incentive for someone to give you their e-mail address.

When you’re a young brewery, you probably won’t need to convince people to sign up: they’ll be excited to have a new brewery in town and they’ll be eager to support you.

When you’ve been around a while, it’s harder to get someone excited to be on another mailing list, so you offer them a little something.

It could be a coupon, or digital wallpaper with your logo, or maybe you can promise some kind of exceptional, secretive content in your first welcome series e-mail.

7. Social Ads

I list these late in your strategy because they cost money and they require a little more time and energy to plan, implement, and assess.

They will also be of more value later, when the folks who are likely to see you in their neighborhood are already signed up and you’re looking to get those people who will first find you on the store shelves.

Generally, you’ll use these to advertise special events you’re putting on or participating in, so they also presume you are able to put on special events.

8. Blog

This may strike you as late in the list, but I have my reasons.

First, you’ll probably use your blog to post news and events from an early stage of your brewery, which is fine. But it won’t be entirely neglected.

Second, posting regular social media and newsletter content is often work enough, especially if you’re on the kind of team where everyone helps package the beer or run the tap room once in a while. A blog, just like a newsletter, needs to be consistent, and usually people expect more frequent content than a newsletter. So, get into a good rhythm with the other things before you worry about the blog.

You can make your blog about anything you want. It could be a place to tell stories about happenings around the brewery, a place to let other voices on your team share their perspectives, or even a soap box for you to comment upon beer news.

Make sure your team is on board before you start asking them to provide content — or hire a ghostblogger to interview them and create copy in their voices.

 

Image via Jeff Sheldon/Unsplash