A. B. S. #5 - Thirsty Thursday #2 - Marketing in a Craft Beer World

In this article I am going to be going over 4 tips for better marketing experiences when trying to help develop your brewery in all ways of the business and environment.

Tip #1: Branding

As we continue to develop into more craft beer engaging cultures around the world, one thing that has kept the big craft beer names, and mainstream beer, relevant in such an ever changing market is branding.

I personally know people who if you give them the highest quality lager in the world and you tell the that it is, and then you also give them a Budweiser and tell them what it is, even if they prefer the higher quality beer, they will still choose the Budweiser. They have gained brand loyalty from that consumer over countless years of great marketing tactics and paid advertisements.

You can increase your branding by producing consistent beer CAN labels which should represent the essence of what your business (brand) stands for. For me, One Life represents my "Go Get Em'" attitude and I want all my beer names and descriptors to capture that attitude also.

Tip #2: Influencer Marketing

As we all know, humans are social creatures, whether we like it or not. The person who has the most influence in any given industry is considered an "Influencer" and you may notice them as very popular in your industry, maybe even promoting different brands or accessories.

Because these influencers are looked at such high appeal from those all around them, many business's want to work with these influencers to help promote their business to the influencers audience. For us, our industry is the craft beer industry.

You might try researching people who are very popular in the craft beer industry on Google, Instagram, Facebook, Blogs, Etc. and follow these influencers, learn their content, how they engage with their audience, and how they may make big ripples in the craft beer industry.

Over time you develop good relationships with these influencers and might want to start having them promote your brand and they might as for an exchange of money for their services and you can go from there. If you've made great relationships over the time they may even promote your new product or service for free!

Search on all social media's #craftbeer, look at the top ten posts that come up and they will most likely be influencers with thousands of followers who are also craft beer people.

Tip #3: Social Media

I can't stress this enough, your brewery or business HAS to have social media accounts at this day and age. In the even more advancing technological world that we live in, it is necessary to maintain composure, don't be like the radio when the TV came out, or the TV when the Internet came out... Get on social media...

It's not difficult... make content through the documentation of the experiences you're going through at the moment.

Let's say I'm starting a brewery right now, I would film myself on my phone or video taking machine simply going over what I did that day to advance to open up a brewery... If you're fancy you can have a person behind the camera filming you and maybe they can edit the videos to make them more of a welcoming, not raw, video.

Take pictures of Johnny and Emily as they're rocking out while cleaning out the fermentors at the brewery and put those pictures on your company Instagram page. Caption it saying "This is Emily. She enjoys death metal, cleaning fermentors, and ripping demons throats out" This will get a lot of engagement off the caption, coming up with witty captions is best but can often be time consuming thinking of amazing captions.

ENGAGE IN OTHERS POSTS! You have to start liking and commenting on others posts about craft beer, build relationships within the communities you're trying the enter and over time you'll become a real member of said community.

Tip #4: Location Based Marketing

If your business has a physical location, or if you business services a specific geographical region, you have an advantage, all your customers are easily identifiable and found based on their location.

You can go to Instagram right now, search "#YOURLOCATION" and scope out the Instagram feed. You will find that, most likely, the top 30 or so pictures you see will all be influencers with huge followings. You may like their photos but not always worth chasing them. Get to the people who don't have huge followings and go through their news feed, comment on the picture of them with their cousin at the county fair saying how fun it was last year and you can't wait to go there this year and pour your own beer! You can also use location based marketing for ads. If you are trying to gain the local crowd and are willing to run ads, you can go on Facebook Ads right now and market to people aged 21-60 within a 5 mile radius of you breweries location.

You can host events at your physical business location and run ads promoting this event targeted at your local neighbors even.

Reach out to local podcasts, try to get on there shows, bloggers, YouTubers, local fellow business's, become part of your local community.

Thank you guys for reading this blog and as always, if it brought you and value, please comment, like, share with friends!

Until next time

Cheers,

Ty Stevenson