Every brewery owner and brewmaster has to ask himself/herself how their brewery is going to sell more beer at some point in their brewing journey. More importantly perhaps, they must determine what makes a beer sell better than it currently is and versus the many other brand possibilities to consumers. I think many brewers first start with product quality, which is definitely the first step. The product has to be damn good to keep a person from buying more and telling their friends. So, I would argue that many craft brewers out there have a damn good product, especially when compared to the big houses and imports.
The product isn’t the problem, it is the next step in the evolution of a growing business where many breweries fall short, and that is marketing to consumers and selling to influential retail accounts. I sometimes wonder how many resources, like a percentage, that a brewery spends on the science of the product vs. on marketing and selling. I have a feeling that it is more on the product end, which is fine if the goal of the brewery is to have a simple lifestyle business in their local community. But, what about those aspiring breweries who want to be the next Brooklyn or the next Boulevard.
When I grew up in Oklahoma, I knew about Boulevard, everyone did, but I only knew about Boulevard wheat. I would consider myself an average college beer drinker growing up and I had no idea what the Boulevard Stout was and really had no intention of learning. I knew the Boulevard wheat though, and so did my friends, we bought it as a luxury item showing we knew good beer to average college ladies. Thinking back, Boulevard broke through the tipping point, they somehow reached the “average” beer consumer instead of just the beer drinking elite.
Marketing to the beer drinking elite is fine, BUT, if you want to break out and build an impressive brewing machine like Boulevard, you have to ask yourself how do I reach the average beer consumer and convince them that at least one of my brands is the cool brand for them. I don’t know the definitive answer to that question, it would be in many parts, but I have a hunch that it has something to do with the next part of the equation, selling into specific retail accounts that are “cool” and well traveled by the average beer person and not just the beer drinking elite.
Do you know of such a retail location? How would you get your beer in there? BreweryFans.com plans to help influence that part of the equation, time to add a new variable to the equation which will help tip the outcome in your favor, time to sell with BreweryFans.com.
If you are a new brewery or a brewery who is thinking about getting into the social media game, it may seem daunting to decide where to begin and how to evolve your social media campaigns. I think everyone in the craft beer industry understands the power of the social media to attract new customers, connect with loyal fans, and ultimately drive your fans to purchase more of your beer. The question I hear a lot though is: where should I spend my time and how can I measure the return on my investment. So, in this blog post, I am going to give you my recommendation on where to start with social media and how best to evolve your social media channels as you grow your brewery business.
First and foremost you want to go where the greatest amount of fans/consumers are that requires the least amount of effort on your end. When a brewery is starting out, I feel social media attention should be given about 1/3 of a marketing person’s time and the other 2/3 should be spent on cultivating local relationships to drive local connections to your social media channels so you can build stronger ties and track your local marketing effectiveness. So, where should you begin:
Facebook fan pages. Every brewery should start with a Facebook fan page. There are over 350 million Facebook users and more importantly, over 50% of those 350 million users log in once a day! That is amazing. You can view more Facebook statistics here – http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics – Now, with Facebook you have three options. To build out a Facebook profile, a group page, or a fan page. For a brewery, you need to build out a fan page. A fan page lets you post your logo, your website, information about tours and your brews, photos of your events, beers, and staff, and you can then message all fans who join your facebook fan page with an email message at anytime. The main reason for having a Facebook fan page is because there are 350 million people on Facebook who might be searching for your brewery’s name and when you update your fan page status it then appears on your fan’s Facebook front page when they log in every day. To see a good example of this, check out SweetWater’s fan page with 13,000 fans – http://www.facebook.com/pages/BreweryFanscom/61281692273#/pages/SweetWat. It takes about 2 hours to set up a fan page initially, but it only takes 15 or 20 minutes per day, less sometimes, to update your fan page status and add new photos, which provides new content for your fans to check out. This is why I say Facebook fan pages are the first and most important thing a brewery can do to enter into social media. Now, just to put a note on this, BreweryFans.com is very different than Facebook fan pages, we both have fan pages where fans can join, but BreweryFans.com allows a brewery to showcase their beers, we bring in content from other websites such as YouTube, and you can send messages to specific fan segments, such as just fans in a particular state or just females, and Facebook only allows you to send a blanket message to all fans at once, which can be considered spam if abused. So, definitely get into the Facebook fan page craze, you can link your fan page with your BreweryFans.com page and promote both of them when building local relationships and loyal customers. You can say “Make sure you become a fan of ours on BreweryFans.com/your_brewery_name and we are on Facebook too!
Twitter. Everyone knows and has heard of Twitter and tweeting and that it is an amazing phenomenon. Simply explained, Twitter is a micro blogging service allowing anyone on Twitter to get notifications when you create a new post, which has to be less than 140 characters long. You can link to your website and follow others on Twitter that are in your target market. It only takes a few minutes to set up an account for your brewery on Twitter. It is a simple URL like www.twitter.com/your_brewery_name so you might as well grab that online real estate, which the search engines love to see. Then, you can start adding a few posts, which we recommend should be something interesting about your brewery and not something like “eating a turkey sandwich” but instead could be “grabbing a new batch of hops that just arrived from England.” Make sure your Twitter posts are about beer, the brewing process, interesting things in your staff’s lives, new events, seasonals, etc. The real power of Twitter is when you follow others. So, lets say you are in Denver Colorado, you could create a Twitter account and then follow the local radio station hosts, the local news anchors, other bars and restaurants in the area, local celebrities, etc. I would say about 50% of the time, when you follow someone, they check out your website and then follow you back. So now you have created a tie to them. Eventually others will find you and follow you and you are notified each time this happens. You can even make your Twitter status updates the same as your Facebook fan page status updates, they are exactly the same concept.
That’s it. I know this may be controversial, but in the beginning, I am a big advocate of not overdoing your social media efforts and instead focusing on Facebook fan pages, Twitter, and of course your BreweryFans.com fan page. There are millions of people on these networks and they are very easy to use and get started with today. You should promote these channels on your website, on your door when people walk in for a tour, at your brewpub tables, and on any marketing materials that you send out.
Lastly, I wanted to talk about a new service that you should consider to make it easy to post your updates to your Facebook fan page and Twitter at the same time. It is called Post.ly – check it out here – http://post.ly/why – It basically allows you to update your status and it sends this status to both your fan page and your Twitter account. It also works if you have a blog or other social media channels. This will save you time and energy and let you see other popular social media tools that it integrates with as you expand your social media activities.
In the beginning you really just need to set up a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and BreweryFans. Then, focus energy on building local relationships and have them join your social media channels. You can measure the return on investment of marketing events and tactics by seeing who and how many people have joined your social pages. You can begin to measure the ROI of energy spent on updating your statuses and adding photos to Facebook by seeing how many people attend your events or go to a new location that serves your beer by sending a message to everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and BreweryFans. At the event, take a random sample and ask people, how did you hear about the event, etc. Good luck with your initial social media endeavors. This will be an ongoing theme of this blog and I will discuss the next phase of social media soon, which is getting your feet wet with YouTube and online videos!
We talk to a lot of breweries. We also have been looking at hundreds of brewery websites in the past few weeks to gather their beer data to put into BreweryFans.com. When going through each website or talking to a brewery owner, brewer, or marketing/sales manager it always strikes me to learn their story and what their goals are for their brewery. The size of the brewery, or should I say the growth stage of the brewery, dramatically alters the business goals usually, but for the majority of craft breweries out there I would categorize them as small to medium or 5,000 to 15,000 production barrels per year.
So, many of those small to medium sized breweries out there are seeing consistent strong demand for their brews and face many ciritical business choices in order to move up to the medium to large sized brewers like Brooklyn or New Belgium. Some of those choices are:
Do I focus marketing on a core group of beer styles that are generally popular or do I experiment with new styles to differentiate and maybe sell at higher profits?
Do I focus sales on local and regional selling tactics or do I begin to expand outside of the region into other states?
Do I want to establish one flagship beer name (like Fat Tire) or have fairly equal attention across all names (like Clipper City)?
Should we spend money hiring more sales people or should we spend money on advertising and marketing to drive sales instead?
Are our current distributors going to give us the attention we deserve or are they going to brush us off?
Should we focus sales on specific retail accounts or to court new distributors that have ties to many general retail accounts?
These are just a few questions that rattle off the top of my head when I think about what the average brewery must consider on a regular basis. So, how do they make those decision? That is what we intend to find out over the course of 2010. We hope to build many positive relationships with many breweries and share their insights on how they are overcoming these challenges and share what is working and what is not working. If you have a question that you would like us to include in our brewery interviews, please let us know.
As BreweryFans.com is about to launch next week, we have to take our hats off to my father for believing in what Gavin and I are trying to do by backing us with a financial investment and being a critical business advisor as we set sail.
Larry has always been a connoisseur of beer, whiskey, and recently wine. Larry lives in Oklahoma City and lately has seen an explosion of craft beer options in the nation’s heartland. When we approached dad with the idea of starting a software business for craft brewers, he immediately knew that we were targeting a niche that was growing and had a lot more room to expand.
We put together a business plan centered around an online service for craft breweries to leverage their existing fan bases to make better decisions when expanding into new markets and to know what styles of beer to brew in the future based on fan data. The main problem we presented is that craft brewers do not know where their fans geographically live and do not really know what their fans are drinking by gender or age profile. If craft brewers could know that information, they could make much more informed business decisions and convince specific retailers to carry their beers instead of others. My dad of course asked why this hasn’t already been done and the only answer we could come up with is that craft brewers are focused on making and creating amazing products and use traditional sales and marketing techniques. Gavin and I will bring our technology and social media expertise to the market and offer an online software suite of tools that will empower breweries to tap into their fan bases for a unique sales and marketing approach.
A big thank you to Mr. Lunardi. He will be at the craft brewers conference speaking with brewers about BreweryFans.com. My dad brings a long history of business knowledge and wisdom to the team.
Jonathon
PS – credit for the photo goes to my talented sister Melanie Lunardi.
The above video is really a test video. We will have many more videos explaining how to use BreweryFans.com and why it is valuable to breweries. I really just wanted an excuse to drink the TenFidy Imperial Stout by Oskar Blues in my fridge, so I thought this was necessary!
BreweryFans.com is website for fans of craft beer and a software package for breweries to datamine their fan bases so they can sell more beer, make smarter distribution decisions, and track the changing tastes of their fans. The site was built by Jonathon Lunardi and Gavin Guest and is partially funded by Jonathon’s father, Larry Lunardi who is an active investor in the venture. We have built the site for three audiences:
Craft Beer Fans and Enthusiasts
Brewers, Brewery Owners, Brewery Marketing and Sales
Distributors and Wholesalers of Craft Beer
Each audience has specific tools designed to meet their needs. Craft Beer Fans can tap into our rich set of distribution data to find where to get their favorite beers. Breweries can see what beers their fans have tried and where their fans live geographically. Distributors can add their data which will be pushed to our web 2.0 google maps interface and eventually to external web widgets, a facebook app, iPhone app, and Droid app.
There is plenty more to come and we will be updating this blog often. We are crazy excited to launch BreweryFans.com and begin working with our partner breweries and distributors to aggregate their fan bases around the site. If you have suggestions on how to improve the site, please let us know as well.
Cheers and come back often!
Jonathon
How to Use:
This blog is written by Jonathon Lunardi and Gavin Guest, founders of BreweryFans.com. We will be adding content to help breweries navigate the complex social media world out there and we will also be posting information about our progress developing the BreweryFans.com business. If you have any questions or would like to write a guest post, please email us at jon@breweryfans.com.
Every brewery owner and brewmaster has to ask himself/herself how their brewery is going to sell more beer at some point in their brewing journey. More importantly perhaps, they must determine what makes a beer sell better than it currently is and versus the many other brand possibilities to consumers. I think many brewers first start with product quality, which is definitely the first step. The product has to be damn good to keep a person from buying more and telling their friends. So, I would argue that many craft brewers out there have a damn good product, especially when compared to the big houses and imports.
If you are a new brewery or a brewery who is thinking about getting into the social media game, it may seem daunting to decide where to begin and how to evolve your social media campaigns. I think everyone in the craft beer industry understands the power of the social media to attract new customers, connect with loyal fans, and ultimately drive your fans to purchase more of your beer. The question I hear a lot though is: where should I spend my time and how can I measure the return on my investment. So, in this blog post, I am going to give you my recommendation on where to start with social media and how best to evolve your social media channels as you grow your brewery business.
We talk to a lot of breweries. We also have been looking at hundreds of brewery websites in the past few weeks to gather their beer data to put into BreweryFans.com. When going through each website or talking to a brewery owner, brewer, or marketing/sales manager it always strikes me to learn their story and what their goals are for their brewery. The size of the brewery, or should I say the growth stage of the brewery, dramatically alters the business goals usually, but for the majority of craft breweries out there I would categorize them as small to medium or 5,000 to 15,000 production barrels per year.
is about to launch next week, we have to take our hats off to my father for believing in what Gavin and I are trying to do by backing us with a financial investment and being a critical business advisor as we set sail.