While some brands are experiencing abundant success – broadcasting a live event series to millions of social followers, achieving 64.7 million impressions via a single hashtag, even crowdsourcing the winemaking process with help from over 200k Facebook fans – others are floundering to connect social media to a sales funnel.

Most wine businesses “don’t really think about what they are trying to communicate from a strategic perspective,” says Dr. Liz Thach, distinguished professor of wine business at Sonoma State University and co-author of Successful Social Media & Ecommerce Strategies. As a whole, Thach admits that the “wine industry is definitely not an early adopter in terms of social media,” however, participation is up and everyone from wineries and importers to wholesalers and retailers are eager to harvest the rewards that social media marketing can offer.

When asked to identify some of the biggest blind spots wineries have in terms of social media marketing, Thach noted a number of things that businesses tend to miss or misunderstand. Bypassing these blunders is the best way to squeeze every lead from even the leanest marketing budget and to ensure a social media strategy that survives over the long term.

5 Social Media Slip-Ups and How Your Wine Business Can Avoid Them:

1. Not Taking Social Media Seriously

Whether or not they’re able to admit it outright, many wine professionals harbor deep-seated skepticism when it comes to social media marketing. This skepticism is evident not only thanks to the occasional eye-roll but also in a general unwillingness to invest human and financial resources into what they view as fruitless Facebooking and Twittering away time and money.

Frankly, there are a lot of wine businesses that “really don’t take social media marketing all that seriously,” and Liz Thach has seen their resistance first hand. Inherent bias against social media can be a hard hang-up for businesses to overcome, however, it’s the first of many hurdles on the way towards digital domination.

Top 3 Reasons to Take Social Media Marketing Seriously:

  • Social media is one of the most affordable forms of digital marketing and has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing (State of Inbound Marketing).
  • Approximately 78% of consumers say a company’s Social Media Updates influence their purchases, according to Forbes.
  • Social media is a treasure trove of customer data, from persona attributes and preferences to campaign reach and engagement – the insights are yours for the taking.

2. Starving Social Media of Vital Resources

One of the most common side effects of social media skepticism is initiating a social media campaign only to then starve it of funds over the long term.

In her work as a researcher and consultant, Liz Thach has found that many wine businesses “jump into [social media marketing] and don’t provide enough resources to keep things going. Often times they hire an intern or a part-time person to just get started who does a great job for a few months and then leaves and no one keeps it up.”

Just as traditional marketing stretches a single brand across multiple channels, social media marketing involves (potentially) dozens of platforms and profiles – all of which must be in alignment with a single mission as well as an expression of a single voice. That’s not an easy thing to master, particularly when most businesses start and stop social media every few months, as interns come and go and priorities shift. Creating and sustaining your brand online requires ongoing maintenance, oversight, and investment.

Not to mention that lack of continuity comes at a cost: lost momentum, lost sales opportunities, and diminishing credibility. Six-month gaps between blog publications and random Facebook posts once every blue moon communicate to visitors that no one’s home – or worse, that no one cares enough to engage with the digital community. If you’re embarking on social media marketing, plan for the long term. Nail down a sustainable marketing budget that will get you through the year and establish standards to bring new team members quickly up to speed and to avoid compromising your momentum and credibility.
Implement & Act:

  • Evaluate your resources to determine how you can reasonably sustain your social media presence every month. How much time can you reasonably allocate to this project? Who will execute regular postings and engagement? Will you assign an in-house team member or will you contract a freelancer? How will remote team members be managed? Etc.
  • Foster longevity by creating a social media manual that all team members can refer to and add to. The manual should contain a social media mission statement, account/ login information, rules of engagement, and debriefs on every campaign you run.
  • Consider using a social media management platform such as Hootsuite, Buffer, etc.

3. Missing the Mark on Metrics

It’s staggering to learn that approximately 53% of social media marketers don’t measure their success, according to Awareness, Inc. That’s akin to hiring a personal trainer who can’t be bothered with pesky measurements such as body mass percentage and weight. So, if marketing professionals aren’t actively looking into the effectiveness of their campaigns – what seems to be the problem?

The problem is confusion about which measurements are meaningful and meaningless. The biggest offender of them all: Facebook likes.
“Facebook likes are a little bit passé,” admits Thach, primarily because “likes don’t mean dollars.” What’s more, they don’t really mean all that much at all. As more and more businesses shamelessly beg for FB likes or pay to buy them from shady marketing firms, those little blue thumbs up mean less and less – particularly was Facebook shifts to an increasingly “pay to play” advertising model. At the end of the day, no marketing manager will ever lose his job for increasing FB likes – it’s what the bosses like to see – but over the long term, their verdict is really more of a false positive.

While each social platform comes with its unique set of metrics for marketers to focus on, Thach recommends “focusing on the action that means [additional revenue],” or the metric that gets as close to money in your pocket as possible. Such metrics may be visits/ impressions, click-throughs to landing pages, social media traffic that follows through to website conversions (such as buying wine, joining a wine club, signing up for a newsletter, etc.).

Implement & Act:

  • Identify what meaningful metrics will be measured to determine the success of your efforts, and set a schedule for regular debriefs to tweak your approach as you go.
  • Don’t be afraid to change your approach based on what your audience engagement is telling you. Don’t fight your feedback, use it to make your campaign more successful.

4. Not Nurturing

An essential piece of a successful social media strategy involves community engagement and nurturing leads. Digital leads may not necessarily be interested in buying products or services yet, but they do have the potential to become paying customers in the future. However, in order for that conversion to take place – a conversation has to take place, and it’s a conversation that could span weeks, months, even years.

When it comes to positioning your wine business on social media, Thach insists that “community engagement is where you start. You can then build credibility and trust, and then start luring [followers] over to your website.” In marketing language, this is a soft sale – a very, very soft sale. One that feels more like a social conversation than a sales pitch and one in which you have to give before you can ever hope to get in return.

An inbound marketing strategy such as this requires focusing on genuine fans and quality conversations, rather than massive (and ultimately superficial) reach. After all, when your business earns a group of genuine, authentic followers, it’s no longer necessary to plead for retweets and shares – because people will engage with your content without ever having been asked.

Community nurturing can also involve crowdsourcing techniques.Crowdsourcing in this context is not just about getting money for new ventures, it is about inspiring participation, and sourcing meaningful feedback. Thach recommends finding innovative ways to “feature your consumers,” and to turn to them for content and collaboration. “Really engage your consumers, that’s exciting to them. When they see themselves involved in your community they invite their friends to join in as well.”

Implement & Act:

  • Promote (like & retweet) the content of complementary brands in your area as a means of promoting tourism in your region
  • Reward existing fans both formally and informally (offer exclusive rewards or simply give likes and shout-outs to fans who upload photos of your product)
  • Take photos of visitors during tastings/ visits, ask for their permission to post the images online, and invite them to tag their friends and family
  • Implement Fan Photo Fridays, where fans submit photos for social media publication and may be entered into an album or contest
  • Ask followers to tell what they’re drinking tonight, to caption a photo, to respond to a trivia question, to share their favorite wine joke, pairing suggestion, recipe, or to submit a wine-related question

5. Not Selling (Or Over-Selling)

When it comes to taking a stand on social media, wine-based businesses struggle to strike a successful balance between soap-box salesmanship and socialite. Sell too hard and you’ll push people away, sell too soft and your marketing budget goes up in smoke. The solution to this balancing act is both simple and unsatisfying: it depends.

Your sales style depends on your brand, your chosen social media platform, and how that platform fits into your overall integrated marketing strategy. The key is to designate when and where to deliver a hard sale, and not to shy away from the conversation when you do. For example, some social media sites are ideal for pitching direct-to-consumer sales, such as Pinterest and Instagram. These photo-heavy platforms invite beautiful photography of products and experiences, and can seamlessly link back to an e-commerce product page or sales page. On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter invite a softer sale – one in which brands must ease into the pre-existing digital conversation, rather than popping up with pure self-promotion.

Implement & Act:

  • The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) considers social media “advertising” and therefore strictly regulates what wineries can and cannot do to promote their brands. Inform yourself about the laws of the land prior to launching your campaign.
  • Offer contests and giveaways for non-alcohol products such as wine glasses and cookbooks (keeping in alignment with TTB regulations).
  • Remember that social media is a social hangout – don’t intrude on people’s space, instead, find a way to add something to the conversation that is already taking place.