Targeting digital audiences is just a matter of creating content that informs, inspires, and attracts the right customers. With up to 98 percent of B2B swearing by content marketing, it’s opportune for wines & spirits marketers to capitalize on the opportunities digital marketing offers.
Most brands have had success with the use of social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Only a few, however, have invested in developing content for their audiences. Creating content allows you to present your brand most consistently.
On the other hand, producing plenty of content without any plan won’t cut it today. Remember, up to 79 percent of visitors just scan pages without reading. You, therefore, need to focus on producing content that truly resonates with your audience.
What You Need to do when Creating Content
With every piece of content you create, the title is just as essential as the introduction, body, and conclusion. All these parts are crucial in helping your customers fully understand your message and brand. So, here are tips you should use.
1. Know Your Target Audience
The whole point of marketing is reaching your potential customers. Doing it blindly, without a target audience in mind, is simply pouring money down the drain. Instead, your efforts should be linear and focused to make it easy for you to generate content ideas.
The traditional way of identifying your audience is market research. Research allows you to know the location, interests, age group, and other key demographics about your ideal customer. You can use great tools, such as Tableau, Google Keyword Tools, and Google Trends, to understand the market.
Be sure to engage your followers on social media and read their comments and feedback. Take the chance to ask them to complete surveys or participate in polls to gather valuable information. You should also evaluate your competitors to understand their brand voice, strategies, and content types.
2. Leverage Relatable Experiences
When creating content, you should ensure it’s built around your potential customers. Bear in mind that you’re creating the content for them, not you. While the content should demonstrate your expertise, it should also share experiences that your audience understands.
You can share interesting stories or situations that happen at parties or in clubs. A post educating your audience on interesting vineyard or production techniques can really work magic. The aim is to cover everyday scenarios that your ideal customers have experienced while providing solutions to problems they might have.
For example, if you’re targeting older adults, you may share some of the classic pairings they’re familiar with, such as those with the aroma of Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. Such audiences are usually loyal and are likely to share your message when it’s fun and consistent.
3. Make Your Copy Scannable
Long posts with huge text blocks are usually a major putt-off. Most of the time, visitors come to your website to find information. So, they will likely abandon your website if it’s hard for them to find what they want.
The right approach is to break up the copy with headings (much like we’ve done with this piece), which guide readers through the post. Keep your paragraphs short, no more than 2 to 4-sentence long, and the sentences should be precise to make them digestible. Whenever you’re discussing anything, always get to the point and avoid waffling.
Materials such as quotes, a summary of benefits, or testimonials should be put into text boxes to stand out.
4. Tell Your Unique Brand Story
People love a good story, whether it has a happy or sad ending. The aim is always to capture their attention and drive the message home. No one said content should always be impersonal. So, your behind-the-scene works can really make a great story.
Showing your customers your processes and efforts can make them appreciate what you do. For example, if you make wine, you can share what grapes you use and where they are sourced. Show them your brand’s points of difference (POD) while aiming to be personable and authentic as possible.
Stories help to create personal ties between your customers and brand, as noted by McKinsey & Company. People want to be able to trust the information you share, and they’re likely to share via word-of-mouth if your stories are engaging, relevant, and accurate.
5. Use Images and Videos
Do you have quality snaps of wine bottles, wine cellars, or cocktail mixes? They’re not just ideal for social media; they work magic in posts, too. Your content need not be boring, and you can use visuals to spruce up your content while communicating your brand at the same time.
In the wines & spirit industry, brands, such as Johnnie Walker, Guinness, and Heineken, have really aced the art of sharing quality visuals. These brands aim for the same personality for all their visuals. This is something you can do too, regardless of your marketing budget.
While creating visuals for your content, focus on your labels to help you create a stellar personality. Use them creatively within your content to share more information, break up your post, or even tell a story.
Mistakes to Avoid when Creating Content
It really hurts to invest in content creation when it doesn’t benefit you in the long run. In most cases, this happens due to certain mistakes that marketers tend to disregard.
1. Ignoring SEO
Besides sharing your content on social media and via email, you also need to ensure that it is discoverable online. Bear in mind that content will live on your website long-term, so it can continue offering value if visitors find it online. We call this “long-tail” content. Search engine optimizations (SEO) is the only way to guarantee that.
Not optimizing your content using keywords denies you the chance to earn organic traffic, which is usually valuable in generating leads. Be sure to perform keyword research to identify the right keywords and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) phrases for your content.
2. Not Setting Goals
What goals do you have for your content marketing campaign? It’s easy to lose focus when you have no campaign goals. This is also worsened if you don’t have key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the success of your campaigns. Remember to know why you’re creating the content and what you aim to gain from it.
3. Ignoring Supporting Content
While written content has proven effective and successful, it works even better with other content types, such as eBooks, white papers, podcasts, videos, and infographics. Having supporting content to complement your blog posts helps diversify your campaign, and it allows you to meet the unique needs of your audience groups.
4. Running One Promotion Campaign
It’s true that the content you create can live on your site forever, but it won’t be of any use just sitting there. Content marketing is not a one-time thing; it’s a long-term strategy. As such, it helps to continue sharing and promoting your posts, especially when you invest in creating evergreen content. You can also work with bloggers, influencers, and content creators for wider coverage.
Benefits of Quality Content
According to HubSpot, high-quality content marketing can help you build reputation, credibility, and trust. It offers a way of answering your customer’s questions and providing them with more information about your brand, company, and products. Consequently, it’s possible to establish your website as a reliable place to get wines & spirit information in the long-run.
Quality content helps to grow your leads, too. Customers are more likely to purchase from you if you offer value through your content. It even works better when you have call-to-actions (CTAs) placed strategically throughout the piece, and you can also guide visitors to your landing page to take action.
Your SEO efforts can also improve when you invest in quality content. Google’s search algorithm uses quality content as one of the key ranking factors. So the more high-quality content you create, the higher you’re likely to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). This means a consistent flow of organic traffic to your website.
It’s also possible to ensure optimal audience retention by creating content that appeals to your audience. Whatever your target audience, people are wired to follow those that offer value to their immediate and future needs. Once you establish yourself as a credible source of information, it becomes easier to grow and retain your audience.
Final Thoughts
The art of content marketing is not new, and it has proven to yield results for businesses in just about any industry. As wines & spirits marketers, creating quality content allows you to build a visible brand presence that attracts the right audience. And it doesn’t end there; you need to know how to promote it, too.
Wines and spirits brands need to learn how to present stories that inspire their customers to take positive actions. Strive to highlight the unexpected, explore relatable topics, and go behind the scenes to deliver the most engaging content.
While this process take time, the results are usually worth the effort.
