Contemporary marketing involves running and monitoring different processes to attain the desired results. This can make it quite difficult for businesses to grow sustainably if they lack the right tools for collaboration, communication, customer service, and marketing.
Today, over 75 percent of marketers use at least one type of marketing tool to optimize their campaigns. Such tools can be quite valuable in the wine and/or spirits industry, where advertising restrictions have limited the industry’s businesses for years.
Even with such restrictions, the alcohol industry is still highly competitive, and investing in technology is the only way to cut costs and increase efficiency. This post will cover some of the top tools that wine and spirits marketers should consider to refine their processes and operations.
1. MailChimp or Similar
Social media and content marketing strategies garner the most attention in the marketing world. Yet, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to grow your audience and generate new leads. Thirty-five percent of marketers send about 3 to 5 emails per week to their customers.
Also, about 80 percent of business professionals believe that email marketing boosts their customer retention rates.
One of the best marketing tools to use is MailChimp, if you’re looking to invest in email marketing. This is a full-featured marketing platform that provides both free and premium versions for marketers. It offers automation features, different templates, and integration options for a seamless experience.
This tool has even added more features, including hosting and domain name search, as well as website design. Such a range of services makes MailChimp stand out among the different email marketing tools.
All-in-One Integrated Marketing Platform
Over the years, MailChimp has gradually morphed into a complete marketing platform to offer new features and products. Wine marketers can take advantage of its e-commerce functionalities, intelligence backed tools, and a visual automation builder to boost their marketing efforts.
Mailchimp allows you to target the right people, create better content, and automate your marketing to ensure value-delivering campaigns. Besides, it provides valuable insights into your campaigns, activities, and customers to help you make informed decisions.
Pricing
You can choose to use Mailchimp as an email marketing tool or marketing platform. As an email marketing tool, it costs $10 to $20 per block of emails. The price per block gets cheaper when you send more emails per month.
As a marketing platform, MailChimp has a free version that offers all the multi-channel tools for growing your audience and business. If you want even more features, you can opt for the Essentials plan at $9.99, the Standard package at $14.99, or the Premium version at $299 per month.
2. Zoom or Microsoft Teams
Effective marketing campaigns require seamless communications between teams or team members. This is particularly imperative if your wines and spirits business has remote teams or different geographical operations.
About 58 percent of businesses use video conferencing in their everyday operations. Most of these businesses are using Zoom or Microsoft Teams for online meetings and video conferencing.
Zoom
Zoom
has become the go-to option for video conferencing and webinars. It allows your marketing teams to chat and meet online to ensure consistent messaging across all your departments or locations.
It supports up to 1,000 video participants and 10,000 viewers if you opt for the Enterprise Plus version. Otherwise, you can start with the free plan, which lets you host meetings of up to 100 participants, but they’re limited to only 40 minutes.
The Pro plan also supports 100 participants, while the Business plan supports up to 300 participants.
Microsoft Teams
Another great option for chatting, meeting, calling, and collaboration is Microsoft Teams. Initially, MS Teams was designed for large organizations, such as educational institutions and multinationals.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity for Teams to exploit new user groups. Today, Teams has become a powerful alternative to Zoom as well as Microsoft’s own Skype for Business. It allows you to share files and screens during a meeting, and you can also set custom backgrounds during video calls.
You can start with the free version to try out the tool. If you like it, the basic plan starts at $5 per user every month, while the premium option costs $20 per user. Bear in mind all paid plans have an annual commitment.
3. Salesforce CRM
Traditionally, the Excel table was the go-to option for managing customer data and sales teams. This was time-consuming and quite intensive. Thanks to technology, customer relationship management (CRM) tools make such situations things of the past.
Over 80 percent of businesses use CRM tools today, while 63 percent prefer a cloud-hosted solution, such as SalesForce CRM.
Powered by Customer 360, Salesforce CRM allows small businesses in the wine and/or spirits industry to improve their customer relationships and services. You can easily handle your customer requests in one central place across every channel.
This CRM tool lets you know your customer well, personalize their experiences using artificial intelligence (AI), and increase engagement across every interaction. Additionally, you can connect sales and support teams to streamline your sales processes, improving your conversation rate.
Pricing
Salesforce CRM’s pricing depends on your use. Ideally, pricing varies across different verticals, including sales, commerce, marketing, engagement, industries, productivity, service, and small business. For example, if you opt for Marketing Cloud, you can expect to pay about $12,000 to $65,000 per month for the Customer 360 Audiences option. That’s unlikely to be affordable for most of us, so the Sales Force Essentials or Professional are $25/user/month or $75/user/month respectively. At Balzac, we use Professional.
You also have the option of trying the tool for free to determine whether it suits your unique needs.
4. Canva
In social media and content marketing, visual elements play a crucial role in improving your engagement rates. In fact, 80 percent of social media marketers use visuals in their campaigns. Visuals help your audience to comprehend your message, and they also improve your on-page times.
Creating images for every blog or social media post has never been easy. However, Canva is changing this, and it now lets you create presentations, social media graphics, posters, and other visual content with a simple click of a button.
Canva offers different ready-to-use templates for social media, marketing, business, and more. Whether you want to design a flyer, logo, or poster for your wines and spirits business, this tool lets you create stunning designs in minutes, even if you don’t have any experience.
Features
Canva gives you access to different document types, such as posters, logos, and brochures. You can create content specifically for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube. It allows you to create a team to improve productivity and work together in real-time as well as share ideas.
This tool has a photo editing feature that lets you crop images, add speech bubbles, insert text to any photo, add effects, and straighten photos. You can also use Canva Folders to organize your assets for quick access whenever you want them.
Plans
While you can use the free version of Canva forever, Canva also has paid versions: Pro and Enterprise. The Pro plan costs $9.95 while the Enterprise version comes at $30. The Enterprise plan has unlimited storage and 24/7 support.
5. Emetry.io
Data-driven marketing helps marketing teams to optimize communications and brand messaging based on customer information. This lets you create personalized experiences across your channels. In fact, over 78 percent of marketers use this approach to grow their businesses.
While standard data analytics apps allow you to narrow down by industry, getting industry-specific software can be a time-saver. Luckily, the wine and/or spirits industry has one, Emetry. This tool offers complete customer and wholesale data in one interface for actionable insights.
Emetry uses your historical data to predict outcomes and prescribe actions to help you identify viable opportunities within the market. It also provides county and state data, letting you use customer density and other attributes to ensure effective targeting.
This software is always current to provide invaluable data on any market you want to target, resulting in high-impact outcomes.
Final Thoughts on Marketing Tools
Running multiple campaigns for your wine and/or spirits business can be quite a demanding process. There are several tasks to complete, metrics to follow, and teams to work on a project. You can simplify such processes by using these marketing tools.
Bear in mind that marketing tools come in different forms, such as communication, email marketing, social media, and SEO, to automate different tasks or processes within your campaigns. There are also many options out there, so picking the right tools can be somewhat a hurdle.
The best way to pick the right tools is to identify processes or tasks you want to automate and compare tools that offer the features you want. It’s even better when a tool provides a free version to allow you to test different features before opting to subscribe.
We have listed some of the best marketing tools you can use for your wine and/or spirits business. Hopefully, these options provide the solutions you want for your campaigns and business operations.
If you are interested in implementing any of these solutions, we can help. In some cases, we may even be able to get you better pricing if you work through us. Feel free to reach out to us.
