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Newsletter April 2009

INNOVATIVE MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR THE AUSTRALIAN WINE INDUSTRY

INVEST IN YOUR FUTURE SUCCESS

The latest WBM Magazine had a great little article by wine marketing Lecturer, Professor Larry Lockshin... "The rest of my optimistic forecast will come from existing wineries putting in the time and effort to make good wines and to communicate them to the market. This takes time and direct in-the-market activities. Some of Australia's wineries will have to increase their quality and communications or they will fail..." (WBM Magazine, Feb 2009, p21).

This is a succinct message - get the quality of your wines up and spend time in the market, tasting your wines with key stakeholders (retailers, consumers, media) as well as being active with you media relations strategy.

If you would like to discuss marketing concepts for your brand, please contact us. We'd be happy to sit down and develop a marketing and PR strategy for you.

CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING

Marketing is fast becoming a two way conversation with your customers. It is all about building a relationship and engaging with them, both trade and consumer.

As I have mentioned previously, there are a number of web based forums to assist you with this. These include wine forums on Auswine and Winestar, as well as newer opportunities on Twitter, Winetwo, Linkedin and Facebook. Another new wine based site is Boozemonkey.

According to Matt from BoozeMonkey...

"BoozeMonkey is a social network for lovers of Australian & NZ wine, an eclectic mixture of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking (chat, friends, groups, blogs, photos, videos, personal profiles, business profiles, etc), marketing, information and sales.

There are thousands of wineries in Australia, but the wine industry is a complex business and the information on the internet is disparate, confusing and fragmented: even if you know what you're looking for, it's not easy.

Our goal is to change that, to make the information more freely available and to create the most comprehensive database of Australian & NZ wine on the internet, bringing together all the best bits of the very latest internet technologies to enable wine-lovers to discover new wines, to learn more about the winemakers who produce them, to meet fellow wine-lovers and to make more informed choices about the wines they drink."

Another avenue that I have mentioned in previous newsletters is Twitter. What's all the fuss? Here is a link to a good article about the uses of Twitter to market your business.

There's really no excuse - start building those relationships! Contact us to discuss how we can help.