Nine More Ways to Jump Start Your Marketing

Here are nine more ways that can quickly increase visitors to the tasting room and traffic to the website. Urgent daily tasks tend to consume our time and marketing can take a backseat, but if you follow these tips, you will see positive results.

1. Enter your winery tasting room through the front door and put your ‘Customer’s Glasses” on. Most winery owners or managers enter the winery through the back door and don’t see what the guests see. Make it a habit to come in through the front door to make sure everything is as it should be. Dead flowers from the summer should be removed from the planters and replaced with evergreen plants. A clean and inviting entrance is the beginning of a memorable customer experience.

2. Add phone numbers and addresses to the home page of the website. It is frustrating when you can’t find a winery address or phone number on a winery website home page. Most people will go to a competitor’s site if they can’t easily find what they want. Make contact information easy to see in big bold letters and numbers. In the photo below, Illinois River Winery includes their address and phone number prominently on their website home page.

3. Have a mobile friendly website. 9 out of 10 searchers have taken action as a result of a smartphone search. If visitors have to pinch and squeeze to see your website on their smartphone, they will leave your site and find a competitor who has a mobile friendly site. In the photo below, Ferrante Winery has a great example of a mobile friendly website.

4. Add calls to action to the website. The ultimate goal of a website is to get more business by converting visitors into leads or customers. Calls to action have the power to grab people’s attention and get them to do something; “Buy Tickets Here,” “Sign Up Now,” “Join the Club” and “Save Big Now.”  Add calls to action to every web page and use colored buttons to make them stand out.

5. Schedule Facebook posts. Scheduling Facebook posts in advance allows you to line up great content all at once so you don’t have to spend hours on Facebook every day. Continue to make posts that are happening in the moment but scheduling allows you to post more regularly when you are busy. As shown in the photo below, click on the clock symbol in the lower left hand corner and add the year, month, day and time you want the post to go out. There is a also a user friendly Facebook app called  Post Planner, which suggests content ideas so you are never at a loss for content.

6. Use the Facebook ‘About” section to your advantage. The about section is hot property so use it well. If your page is a Place or Local Business, the default information will be the address and phone number. Make sure you look at what the ‘About” section looks like when you click the link. Use that space wisely to link to your website’s pages for products, events, and other services.

7. One in ten Facebook posts should be a sell message. Sales should be the obvious goal for a Facebook page but there are secondary goals that lead to sales too. Other goals might include, increasing awareness of your brand, attracting new customers and engaging with your fans. Asking questions and sharing funny wine cartoons is a great way to engage your brand with followers without making it look like a hard sell tactic.

8. Add guest book names to your email newsletter data base. The guest book is the place to ask if customers would like to receive your email newsletter. Include a question asking ‘Would you like to receive our email newsletter with event info, special deals and recipes?” Ask them to circle “Yes” or “No”. If customers are going to take the time to give you their email address, they are very interested in your business. Add the names to the data base in a timely fashion and if you promised a newsletter, send one.

9. Hire a social media manager/marketing person to do all of the above☺. Most of you are Superwomen and Supermen and think you can do it all. But, life is too short to go crazy. There are qualified people out there who specialize in small business marketing tasks. They can teach you how to do something or outline what you need to do to stay on top of your marketing.

Don’t let another month go by without implementing some of these ideas to see your revenues increase. For more marketing tips, email patty@pattyheldconsulting.com or check out her website, www.pattyheldconsulting.com.