blogging, branding and public relations

Blogging, Branding& Public Relations

How to use blogging to help sell more wine and build your brand

Josh HermsmeyerPresident, Capozzi Winery

Pinotblogger.com

Haven’t sold a single bottle of wine (yet)

You lost me at

“Hello”

What’s in it for me?

1. Help you sell more wine

2. Build your wine brand

Reason #1Help You Sell More Wine

Why blog?

Case Study

Stormhoek

Hired Hugh in 2005 and started a blog

Stormhoek

Sales went from 50,000 cases

to over 250,000 cases

after they started blogging

Stormhoek

That’s a five fold increase

in less than two years

Hugh sent bloggers free samples of Stormhoek wine and they blogged about it.

How?One explanation:

What happened According to Hugh:

“Bloggers and their friends didn't start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers.”

Source: gapingvoid.com

What happened According to Hugh:

“What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets' customers).”

Source: gapingvoid.com

What happened According to Hugh:

“[The challenge is that] there are hundreds of thousands of vineyards in the world, all trying to sell to the twelve or so mass market wine buyers in the UK.”

“You need a story that cuts through the clutter.”

Source: gapingvoid.com

Case Study #2

Pinotblogger

No sales #’s,but here are a couple

interesting stats

800# of mailing list sign-ups

via pinotblogger.com

10,000# of monthly visitors to pinotblogger

Tee-shirt giveaway

Hundreds of links=

a conversation with the market

Cool Bonus: Got a book deal

• Mention in the Wall Street Journal led to being contacted by a literary agent.

• A book on starting our winery has to be good for sales, right?

Remember...

Haven’t sold a single bottle of wine (yet)

So Just Imagine...

what you can accomplish with some actual juice to sell!

Caveat #1

You need to make your blog a main focus ofyour marketing to really be successful

Caveat #2

Both Stormhoek and I are new to the industry and have nothing to lose

Takeaway:

Blogging can help you sell more wine indirectly

and

The results can be phenomenal, especially given the extremely low cost

Reason # 2Build your winery brand

Why blog?

What’s the difference between Marketing,

Advertising,PR, and Branding??

But first...

Marketing

Advertising

Public Relations

Branding

Blogs help you outsource your PR to hundreds of people who can build your

brand by word of mouth, for free.

...your wine and customer service are remarkable

IF...

If your wine sucks and you act like a jerk, they’ll be happy to blog about that as well!

Google Juice

Google loves blogs

Around 40% of searches on Google are people looking to buy something

Blogging helps those people locate youbecause Google loves blogs

(and the number of people shopping for or researching wine online will continue to grow)

Examples:

Text

Search for: “robert parker pinot”

Search for: “russian river pinot”

Search for: “cool russian river wineries”

Takeaways:It is cheap and effective to use your blog to

get people talking about your wines. You just have to be remarkable.

and

Blogging helps your Google ranking, which will help more people find you.

Thank You!