Finding Targets for Your Social Media Reach

Establishing and blending an identity into your branding can be a key moment in transforming your brewery’s growth progress. For Cincinnati’s Esoteric, a new Black and Asian-owned brewery, connecting with the community around them and reaching out to niches was important in its messaging from crowd-based fundraising as it started through its social media pages.

“I always tell my team that there are so many other channels besides social,” said co-founder Marvin Abrinica. “It’s good, but we tend to lean on socials too much as a Gen Zer.”

Abrinica, who spoke at the 2022 Ohio Craft Brewers Conference, said to think about different channels and go back to marketing roots.

“There’s a ground game that needs to happen in your neighborhood, in your communities that you can’t forget about,” he said. “You also can’t forget about traditional marketing.”

The brewery worked with the local University of Cincinnati this past year as one example and used that partnership to push from the events to social media.

“Social is one of those things that just amplifies all of that stuff,” Abrinica said. “It’s not the main channel that we use, but we know it plays a role. Being able to use social media to amplify our core strategy, which is really about reaching people of color, Hispanic, Asian, and women with our brand.”

When it comes to marketing to these groups, a general populace intermingled with craft beer fans can be a key to expanding growth. Finding that balance can come down to looking at your brand, crafting an overall message while targeting specific types of events and social media posts.

“We’ve always been in the school of thought and training that you really got to understand consumer insights and consumers themselves,” Abrinica said. “For us, we really have to start with what our neighborhood looks like. And then from there, we started building our brand.”

Being in a 1930s Art Deco building, Esoteric built a brand around the idea of opulence, safety, and elegance.

“That appeals to a certain demographic,” he said of the look and feel of the place. “For other demographics, it was part of identifying the audience and understanding that we wanted to reach the fastest-growing demographic, which is women. And we wanted to reach that 1-in-5 of beer drinkers, who consider themselves non-white.”

But that doesn’t mean ignoring other avenues. The brewery mixes in Black History Month posts to publicize other Ohio black-owned breweries along with posting about a Super Bowl watch party and new beer releases.

MadTree similarly has worked to make all of its social media pages — the main brewery page, a taproom page along with a new bar and restaurant concept called Alcove — to be unified while separate.

READ MORE: 4 Ways Your Brewery Can Keep Up With Social Media Trends

“We just started listening and seeing what kind of questions consumers are asking across all platforms,” said Trevor Self of MadTree. “In the taproom, no matter how big or small your space is, you have a wealth of opportunity to start capturing what drives people there, why they’re coming out, and really taking that and translating it into your brand and your social media pages.

“We started gathering a bunch of information, what are people asking for? What posts are resonating and doing well, and collectively as a team starting to compile all together, and extracting themes from that.”

MadTree looks at four key traits in making a post: people, product, place, and purpose.

“That helps guide us with what we’re posting about,” Self said. “It’s been really, really beneficial in seeing what people are engaging with and also reflecting back to what we’ve done a bunch of research on.”

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