YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING CHECK-UP

The Landscape

The world of consumer marketing recognizes that social marketing is an essential spoke in the wheel of a brand’s media mix.

As social targeting continues to improve along with the efficiency of self-service advertising, it isn’t surprising to see social media emerging as a stand alone department. This trend continues to develop in many consumer products and service businesses and, more specifically, the wine industry where customer service, accessibility, and quality content are crucial.

But you wouldn’t hire a HR professional to make wine, so why do so many wineries try to leverage underskilled or over-tasked persons to perform such an important part of the marketing function?

Where Does the Responsibility Lie?

Until recently, the responsibilities of social media have typically fallen on the shoulders of a junior member of a winery’s marketing department. It might even be an intern straight out of college who has the savvy to “post and reply”. But how much do they know about geo targeting, segmented audiences, and the application of relevant stat tracking?

The responsibilities could also fall on a talented marketing director or winery owner who is balancing the media mix of digital exposure, live events, and running an efficient team. But how much time do they have to execute the full scope of content creation, conversion tracking, and ad optimization?

Each winery may have differing expectations for the results of social media management and marketing (as well as other marketing functions) and the person(s) who executes it, yet the question remains, “Where should social media sit within your company's structure?”.

Where To Start? – Three Things To Do Today

1 – Internal Analysis

To understand where you want to go, you need to know where you are now. Get a status of where your social media management/marketing currently is.

This could include:

• Strategic analysis of top competitors
• Benchmarking your top achievements in the past 6 months
• Allowing an outside analysis by an independent firm

When finished, you should have an internal group acceptance of where you are NOW.

2 – Map Your Goals

Consider the objectives and goals/expectations you have for social media. Ask your organization the following question:

What is/are the end goals of our social marketing plan?

• Website traffic
• Tasting room traffic
• Engagement with your fanbase
• Building a larger fanbase
• Sale conversions
• Email lead generation
• Enhanced brand awareness
• Other

Depending on your goals, each of the skill sets required to perform these targeted areas of social marketing likely absorb a majority of an employee’s weekly workload. The tasks can include writing original content, capturing images, targeting, checking links, responding to fans, keeping up on trends, building custom landing pages, creating captions, interacting with other businesses, ad creation, reporting, stat tracking, and countless other tasks.

Understand what goals are important to your business and make sure you have the right skill sets available to achieve those goals.

3 – Stay Up To Date

The person or team you need to achieve your goals should be able to efficiently handle any subset of tasks that go hand in hand with the execution. Staying up to date on the daily evolution of social media is a MUST.

Set your team up to succeed by:

• Regularly attending informational seminars
• Performing regular check-ups with an outside digital agency
• Promoting internal dialogue that utilizes your employees to keep the team up to date
• Encourage research on latest digital marketing trends and best practices from inside AND outside the wine industry

The End Game

Simply put, the importance of social media marketing is, and will continue to be, too significant to deploy as an afterthought. Whether your winery is just getting off the ground or is led by a seasoned social veteran, thoughtful emphasis on your goals and the subset of skills needed to perform the tasks to achieve them should be the compass that “points you north” on where to fit this crucial skill on your org chart.

Are you satisfied with your social marketing strategy?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this article. Please comment below or email me at: Ryan@astradms.com