Digital marketing gives breweries more information than almost any previous generation of brewery marketing had available.

The problem isn’t necessarily getting data. It’s knowing which data matters.

Social platforms can tell you how many people saw a post. Your website can tell you where visitors came from. Email can show opens and clicks. Paid advertising can tell you what you spent and how many people responded.

But none of those numbers automatically tell you whether your marketing is helping the brewery grow.

For brewery owners and marketing teams, the goal isn’t simply to maximize online reach. It’s to understand which channels, messages and audiences are producing meaningful business results.

That requires looking at digital marketing as a system rather than treating every social post, email or advertisement as an isolated effort.

Quick takeaway: Don’t ask only, “How many people saw this?” Ask, “What happened because they saw it?”

Start With a Brewery Marketing Goal, Not a Social Media Post

Barry Elwonger described to BREWER that setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely rather than simply spending money and hoping an audience responds. That’s the right place to start.

“Pick one thing and do it very well,” he said. “Start and actually look at what your analytics offer on your social media and see how you are doing against your competitors. If you start doing ads on there, make sure that you’re looking at the metrics. Because most of the people [doing this] are already familiar with the interfaces. It’s something that you can see and it doesn’t cost you anything.”

READ MORE: Better Understanding Your ​Online ​Marketing Reach

Before launching a campaign, decide what you’re actually trying to accomplish. That might be:

• increase event inquiries
• drive traffic to an online store
• increase taproom visits
• build an email list
• introduce a new beer
• increase retail awareness
• reach consumers in a new market
• grow awareness among a specific demographic

Those are very different objectives. They should produce very different campaigns.

“Get more engagement” isn’t a marketing strategy. “Generate 25 wedding inquiries from people within 50 miles over the next 60 days” is a marketing objective you can actually measure.

Don’t Confuse Social Media Reach With Marketing Success

Social reach is easy to understand. It’s also easy to overvalue.

A large following doesn’t necessarily mean a large active audience. Jack’s Abby, for example, noted the changing economics of organic social reach as platforms increasingly pushed brands toward paid distribution.

​“Social media has evolved wildly in the past five years or so as the algorithms choke off organic reach and push brands to paid platforms,” Rob Day lamented to BREWER in a 2021 article. That means the brewery’s social budgets and efforts are being compared to all other media tools at Day’s disposal.

That distinction has become even more relevant.

Dovetail found a similar problem: the brewery had more than 20,000 Instagram followers, but some posts were reaching only about 1,500 to 2,000 people.

That’s an important lesson: Followers are an audience potential. Reach is actual exposure. Neither necessarily equals a customer.

Track followers, but don’t use follower count as your primary measure of marketing health.

Which Brewery Social Media Metrics Actually Matter?

MadTree focused on engagements per post and engagement rate per impression rather than simply counting followers.

“This is helpful in seeing how some brands post all the time with content all over the place, but no one is really interacting with them,” Trevor Self explained to BREWER. “When the content is really engaging and driving the engagements per post positively, less is actually more brand building.”

Those metrics help answer a better question: Did people care enough to do something?

Depending on your objective, useful social metrics can include:

• reach
• impressions
• engagement rate
• engagements per post
• video views
• link clicks
• profile visits
• follower growth
• saves or shares
• conversions

The important part is matching the metric to the objective. If you’re trying to drive website traffic, likes aren’t the primary metric. If you’re trying to build awareness for a new brand, impressions may matter more. If you’re trying to generate event leads, neither one tells the whole story.

Choose the metric before you launch the campaign—not after you see which number looks best.

Use Engagement to Find Out What Your Customers Actually Want

Self described comparing content performance to determine what was actually compelling and then using that information to influence future messaging. That’s a much more productive approach than simply asking: “What should we post today?”

Instead ask: “What have our customers repeatedly shown us that they care about?”

You may discover that your audience responds more strongly to:

• people than products
• events than beer releases
• behind-the-scenes content than polished advertising
• food than brewing
• local community stories than brewery news
• educational content than promotions

The data doesn’t replace creativity. It helps direct it.

Your best-performing content isn’t just content that worked. It’s information about your audience.

Use Website Analytics to Understand Who Is Finding Your Brewery

Elwonger encouraged breweries to install Google Analytics and use it to understand who is visiting, where they’re located and how they’re finding the website. That’s valuable because your assumptions about your customer may be wrong.

You might believe your brewery primarily attracts: local craft beer enthusiasts while your website data shows substantial traffic from: tourists planning weekend trips. That changes the marketing opportunity.

Your website can help reveal:

• geographic audience
• traffic sources
• landing pages
• device usage
• popular content
• search queries
• referral traffic
• conversion behavior

Don’t build your marketing strategy entirely around who you think your customer is. Use your data to find out.

Your Brewery Website Is Part of Your Marketing Funnel

The website shouldn’t exist separately from social media. A customer might discover you on Instagram, search your brewery on Google, visit your website, check the tap list and then decide whether to visit. That’s one customer journey.

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.

That makes the website an important measurement point between marketing exposure and customer action.

Every major marketing channel should eventually answer: Where do we send people next?

READ MORE: Crucial Elements for Your Website & Social Media Platforms

Make Your Brewery Website the Most Reliable Source of Information

Fat Head’s Bill Wetmore made a useful point: even as social platforms function increasingly like unofficial websites, a brewery’s actual website needs to remain an updated and consistent source of information.

Today’s customers turn to platforms like Google, Yelp, Digital Products, and Facebook before making purchasing decisions, meaning that a single glowing review—or a scathing one—can influence a company’s success. Businesses, especially those in competitive industries, must not only monitor but also actively engage with reviews to maintain trust and credibility.

“The evolution to mobile and people’s reliance on social sites like Facebook and Instagram as de facto web-sites are the biggest developments/challenges,” Wetmore shared.

That’s especially important for:

• hours
• tap lists
• locations
• events
• food
• online ordering
• private events
• contact information
• distribution information

A social post can disappear down a feed. Your website can remain the destination. Use social media to get attention. Use your website to provide certainty.

Use SEO to Capture People Already Looking for Your Brewery

SEO is about appearing when someone is already searching for something relevant. For a brewery, that might be:

• brewery near me
• brewery with food
• breweries in [city]
• private brewery events
• wedding venue brewery
• brewery taproom
• brewery beer garden
• specific beer styles
• brewery tours
• live music brewery

The goal isn’t necessarily to rank for “beer.”

It’s to identify high-intent searches that connect to something your brewery actually sells or offers.

The best SEO traffic isn’t necessarily the largest traffic. It’s the traffic with a reason to become a customer.

Compare Your Brewery’s Digital Performance With Competitors

Elwonger described using SEMrush to see where Motorworks ranked in search, identify competitors and find keywords where the brewery wasn’t ranking. He also monitored competitor social engagement and posting activity.

“You can actually see where you’re stacking up with the search engine results for organic on Google,” he said. “If you typed in the word ‘brewery’ and ‘Bradenton,’ we are the first thing that pops up because we have awesome backlinking from focusing on our digital media.

“If I was a brewery in another market, I would want to see how we’re doing against all of those other local breweries, and what we could make sure our site’s better, or has better content. We’re ranking for keywords, or finding keywords that we’re not ranking for at all, and making sure that we’re incorporating those on the website.”

That’s essentially a competitive intelligence program. Your competitors can show you:

• which keywords matter locally
• what content attracts attention
• which products they promote
• what events they emphasize
• how often they post
• what pages attract search traffic
• where your brewery has an opportunity

But there’s an important caveat: Don’t copy the competitor’s content. Use it to identify gaps.

Ask: What are customers searching for that my competitors answer better than I do?

That’s a much more useful question than: “Why does their Instagram have more followers?”

Paid Social and Google Ads Need Different Goals

Not every digital marketing dollar should be judged the same way. Social advertising can be useful for awareness, audience development, event promotion and targeted local campaigns. Google Ads can be particularly useful when someone is already searching for something you offer.

As an example, Motorworks found PPC potentially valuable for its event business because weddings and other events generated enough revenue to justify the advertising cost. That’s an important business distinction as a $1,000 campaign isn’t expensive or inexpensive by itself.

It depends on what the campaign produces.

Evaluate advertising against the profit opportunity—not simply the cost per click.

Build a Brewery Marketing Dashboard

Instead of looking at dozens of numbers, start with a small dashboard.

Monthly

Website

• users
• traffic sources
• top landing pages
• conversions

Social

• reach
• engagement rate
• link clicks
• follower growth

Email

• subscribers
• open rate
• click rate
• conversions

Paid

• spend
• clicks
• cost per result
• conversions

Business

• event inquiries
• online orders
• reservations
• taproom traffic
• attributable sales

You don’t necessarily need to measure every metric every day. You need enough information to make better decisions.

Analytics should change what you do next. If the report doesn’t influence a decision, question why you’re tracking the number.

Brewery Digital Marketing Checklist

Strategy

• Define the business objective.
• Identify the audience.
• Set a measurable goal.
• Choose the appropriate channel.
• Establish a timeframe.

Social media

• Track reach and impressions.
• Monitor engagement rate.
• Compare content types.
• Watch competitor activity.
• Identify repeat-performing topics.

Website

• Install analytics.
• Monitor traffic sources.
• Track popular pages.
• Monitor geographic traffic.
• Keep essential information current.
• Create clear calls to action.

SEO

• Research relevant local keywords.
• Optimize important pages.
• Create useful search-driven content.
• Monitor rankings.
• Look for competitor keyword gaps.

Paid advertising

• Define the desired conversion.
• Set a budget.
• Establish a benchmark.
• Track cost per result.
• Compare advertising cost against business value.

The Goal Isn’t More Marketing. It’s Better Marketing.

A brewery doesn’t necessarily need to post more, it doesn’t necessarily need to spend more. And it certainly doesn’t need to chase every platform.

It needs to understand: Who it’s trying to reach. What it wants those people to do. Which channel can reach them, and what the data says happened.

And then it needs to adjust.

The most valuable digital marketing metric isn’t the biggest number. It’s the number that helps you make a better business decision.