Are you an alcohol brand looking to make a splash?
Understanding and establishing meaningful connections with your target audience while observing strict regulations is crucial to thrive in a competitive alcoholic beverage market.
Many wine and spirits brands strive to achieve long-term success by crafting marketing strategies that engage consumers and adapt to their changing preferences.
Today’s consumers seek an experience rather than just a drink so brands need to adjust their marketing efforts accordingly.
In this article, we’ve covered how the best alcoholic beverage brands are marketing themselves online.
We will examine these ten key tactics to implement in your next marketing campaigns.
How to Market Your Alcoholic Beverages Online
- Reveal your brand's origin story
- Explain and highlight your fermentation process
- Create fun content
- Highlight the ingredients of your products
- Promote bundled products
- Invite them to opt into your subscription plan
- Provide a seamless purchase journey
- Highlight your product convenience factor
- Introduce your winemakers
- Show off your awards and recognition
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are the common restrictions when marketing alcoholic drinks?
- Who are the target market for alcoholic beverages?
Integrating these strategies into your marketing plan will pay off dividends. Before long, you will be raising a glass, celebrating your success!
Reveal your brand's origin story
Each brand has its own story.
From humble beginnings to the company's current position, unveiling your unique narrative to the audience is powerful. It humanizes your brand, fosters a deeper connection, and casts it in a different light.
Each story adds a layer of authenticity and purpose, expanding your brand into something more than just a product.
Bev's narrative revolves around culture and positivity. In this newsletter, the founder shares how and why they created their drink. They emphasize the ethos they hold and their growing Bev family.
June Shine weaves a tale of commitment to sustainability and crafting honest alcoholic beverages. In this email, they share the two important pillars that serve as their USP: sustainability and transparency.
DrynxMyth tells the story of the birth of their cocktail and how they aim to redefine premium alcohol. They also provide a link to direct readers to the full interview with their co-founder.
Advertising through video on social media is also an effective way to spread your brand message. Take this ad from Sayso as an example.
Explain and highlight your fermentation process
Providing interesting facts to your audience can spark their curiosity.
If possible, choose lesser-known topics so that your readers will be more likely to check them out. For instance, fermentation, a major process in alcohol production, is a topic you can use to educate and engage wine lovers.
Usual uses its newsletter to impart information about wine production, adding depth to the subscriber's understanding of its product. They also take this opportunity to drive traffic to their blog.
Create fun content
Injecting fun into your newsletters is a must-try idea. People engage with feel-good content.
Adding games or gamelike elements encourages participation.
Spritz cleverly integrates gamification into its email content.
In this example, they use the popular icebreaker "Two Truths and a Lie" in their version called 3 Spritz and a Lie to present the benefits of their product and its composition. They incentivize the participants with a 10% discount on their next order.
A simple game like this can transform the exploration of your products into a more enjoyable and rewarding experience for your audience.
Highlight the ingredients of your products
Brands should be committed to ingredient transparency to build trust with the consumers and allow them to make informed choices.
For alcoholic drinks, the alcohol content labeling can help the customers monitor their drinking to prevent alcohol-related accidents and diseases. The disclosure of calorie and nutritional content is also crucial in helping them stay within their daily calorie limits, especially for those with dietary restrictions.
June Shine showcases the ingredients inside the can of spirits and helps their customers drink in moderation by providing nutrition facts, which are also accessible via a QR code.
Promote bundled products
Product bundling is a technique in which several products are grouped under one stock-keeping unit (SKU).
This marketing strategy is widely used across industries, including alcoholic beverages, as it encourages sales, increases Average Order Value (AOV), and promotes cross-selling.
Bundles give customers a convenient and cost-effective way to explore your offerings.
Let’s say you offer drinks with a wide selection of flavors. You can provide a variety of bundle options as Bev does below so that your customers can try different flavors in a single order.
To add a personalized touch to the shopping experience, Ohza gives its customers the option to create their custom bundle and emphasizes savings on several Call to Action (CTA) buttons and different parts of the email.
Here's another way to encourage sales...
Invite them to opt into your subscription plan
Subscriptions take the guesswork out of replenishing your customers' supply, fostering loyalty and long-term relationships.
Aside from convenience, consumers are drawn to subscription plans because of cost savings.
Ohza promotes savings to their customers with an enticing offer of 40% when they order their first subscription.
Provide a seamless purchase journey
As a business, you should pay attention to how seamlessly your customers can purchase items.
It signals customer satisfaction and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases knowing that they can count on you for a hassle-free experience.
Spritz ensures a user-friendly experience on their website and retailer (here, GoPuff). They emphasize the fast and convenient process of ordering online from their shop.
Highlight your product convenience factor
Convenience is a crucial aspect of how customers make buying decisions and can even be featured as a product benefit.
For instance, Maivino's Sauv Blanc bag provides a convenient way to carry wine when on the beach. This ad highlights the product's suitability for outdoor activities as it comes in a handy bag.
Introduce your winemakers
Introducing the person behind the product adds a personal touch to your brand. It adds a human element which allows your company to connect more deeply with your customers.
We've seen many brands feature their founders & co-founders while telling the story about their brand and their innovation. Other companies would go beyond that and introduce their team members as well.
For wine brands, it is interesting to know an important person that makes wine creation possible–the winemaker. Highlight the people responsible for your winemaking process in its various stages including harvesting grapes, crushing and pressing, fermentation, and aging & bottling.
This email from Empathy Wines with the subject line Have You Met Brandy? 🍷🌟 is a great example.
They give a brief description of Brandy's agrarian roots and passion for viticulture, what inspired her to become a winemaker, and her favorite part of her job.
She also answers the question regarding the personalities associated with each Empathy varietal, which also bridges the content toward an important Shop Now button.
Show off your awards and recognition
Add more credibility and prestige to your brand by showing off the recent awards you've won. You can also include a history of the recognitions you've acquired over the years to boost brand awareness.
It is essential to showcase your achievements to instill confidence in potential buyers.
In this newsletter, Ohza makes their audience curious to try and find out what made their drink a gold medal winner for two consecutive years in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Served creates a celebratory vibe around the announcement of winning the Global Spirit Masters for three of their products. As part of their celebration, they give a 30% discount on these three award-winning cocktails.
Successful alcohol marketing requires a crystal-clear understanding of this diverse landscape. Alcohol brands should experiment with different marketing approaches, messages, and channels to assess their impact on their target audience.
Like in any industry, alcohol brands need to know what their competitors are doing in terms of their marketing efforts (newsletters, paid ads, etc.) to stay informed of their next moves.
We hope that these insights can help you get ahead and stay ahead of the competition.
FAQs
What are the common restrictions when marketing alcoholic beverages?
Promoting alcoholic beverages and beverages with alcohol content shall clearly state or inform consumers that such drinks contain alcohol, and therefore not to be promoted and advertised to be sold to and consumed by minors.
Websites and advertisements are normally accessed only after verifying that the site visitor is of legal age.
Who are the target market for alcoholic beverages?
Men and women ages 18 to 64 are considered the target audience for drinks containing alcohol, with emphasis on men aged 18 to 49.
