Reflecting your brewery’s brand identity effectively and ensuring consistency across all types of platforms is something that is always on the mind of Tom Guzick.
With five pub locations that Voodoo Brewing owns and operates, the brewery has also expanded across the country through its independently owned franchises. So having that brand identity not get filtered in different ways can be a challenge.
“We have a small team of four people — between Voodoo Brewing Company and Voodoo Franchise group — that hat work on the overall vision and strategy for the brand image itself,” Guzick, Voodoo’s Chief Marketing Officer, explained. “Luckily one of those is our amazingly talented artist, Tom Ness (@tom__ness), who helps to create the artwork, labels, assets, designs and provides a vision for what our branding looks like.”
Being employee-owned, Voodoo does give a lot of leeway to each Pub Manager to control the social media vibe of each location as well, while following a brand book and guidelines.
“They can give it little flairs of their own,” he said. “We also encourage our Franchise owners to add their own little flair and nuances to their imagery, while staying true to the brand as well.”
Guzick and others in the industry shared how they focus on crucial pieces that should be a part of any brewery’s website and social media direction.
A consistent message in regards to the products that Almanac creates is key, said Executive Vice President of Sales, Kevin Scoles. It’s about core brands that connect, and portray the same core values.
“That’s as simple as logo placement, and label design tie-ins,” he said. “But also extends to things like gravitating away from ‘beer descriptors’ and moving towards ‘lifestyle descriptors.’
“When we create positive, consistent, messaging with our products it makes it so much easier for that to carry into website, social, and activations in the market place.”
Website Info
Enhancing your online presence to cater to consumers who prefer evaluating and purchasing products online before visiting the taproom, buying off-premise, or ordering through third-party channels means involving adding more educational content about each beer. Migration Brewing, for instance, is updating its website and Untappd profile with detailed information and educational videos about each beer while Urban Artifact emphasizes the value of visual content over lengthy text descriptions.
“A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say,” said Urban Artifact‘s Bret Kollmann Baker, the brewery’s Director of Operations. “We’ve found this to be more true than anything we could possibly type up.”
Adding things like what Garage Brewing has done in which its website offers comprehensive details on each beer; including flavor, aroma, style, ABV, IBUs, and availability through a detailed product release calendar.
Stoup Brewing takes a scientific approach, explained co-owner Brad Benson.
”For those that want to geek out, we have organized our beers into a ‘beeriodic table’ on our website but in general we really like to highlight the hops we are using — especially when we get to play with experimental varieties.
”And we also let people know what to expect in terms of ABV, IBUs, and color.”
Social Media/Content Creation
Voodoo tends to do a lot more community-focused and organic posts versus promotional content.
“We look for opportunities to do more promotional content, but a lot of our current content is very much organic,” Gruzik said.
A lot of Voodoo’s most successful campaigns revolved around involving and featuring employee-owners in the content.
“I think people like to see employees having fun and enjoying themselves and not just being pitched a product to buy,” he said.
Almanac works hard to foster a brand — and environment — that is created around community.
“In many ways that comes before the beer itself,” Scoles said, “which happens to be award-winning.
“But engaging and being part of a community is part of our DNA and the starting point for most projects. In many ways that story then carries over organically into the content we create.”
Creating content outside the beer realm — if your brewery does have other alcohol programs º can also connect to new consumers.
“One other thing we’ve noticed is that beyond being a brewery, people absolutely go crazy whenever we announce our VBC Spirits Cocktail Flights,” Gruzik said. “There is just something about six different flavors of colorful margaritas, spiked ciders, or mules that get people engaged.”
Analytics Matters
Gruzick said they will take a look at the analytics from its website and social media on a bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
“For our website, we just switched over to a new host and completely updated the design and are continuing to improve the user experience,” he said. “We take a look at visitors, how they are finding us — whether through Google, our newsletter, or other means — as well as how they are visiting our website — either Mobile or Desktop.”
They also check out what parts of the website someone is visiting and monitor those types of pages to make sure that the brewery can continue to improve any user experience.
When it comes to analytics from the brewery’s social media accounts, they take a look at the overall impressions of all the social media accounts and then break them down individually by reach and engagement rate.
“We try to figure out what types of posts do the best and try to figure out how we can replicate and improve those posts,” he said, adding that for each individual location’s pages, they can suggest the most impactful styles of posts to help broaden reach more effectively.
Engagement rate is still the top tool for Almanac, Scoles said.
“What resonates with our customers, and brand advocates-what resonates outside of our current customer base,” he said, adding that they always look to figure out how to connect that to the message they want to deliver in a holistic manner.
Website Revamps
Fat Head’s Brewery is among those breweries that has recently redesigned its website. It’s not a simple task, Sales and Marketing Director Bill Wetmore said, because of the prominent role social media plays in businesses’ digital footprints.
“The evolution to mobile and people’s reliance on social sites like Facebook and Instagram as de facto websites are the biggest developments/challenges,” Wetmore shared.
Because of this, Wetmore pointed out that content needs to be more concise and impactful than ever to combat what he referred to as ‘linger-rates’ being shorter.
Despite social media’s growing role, he said a website had, if nothing else, to do one thing: be an updated, consistent source of information that doesn’t conflict with the dynamic and ever-changing landscape that is social media.
“Info is so readily available at fingertips from so many different places that I don’t think websites have to work as hard on deep content delivery as they once did,” Wetmore said. “But with that in mind, it’s probably more important than ever that your website is completely real-time current because if it’s in conflict with info from other sources, that’s definitely going to reflect poorly and erode consumer trust.”
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