Wine + Tech: Three Right Ways That Wine Brands Engage Online

The first session of this year’s Wine Industry Technology Symposium, held earlier this week in Napa, kicked off with these statistics:

• The top 20 wine bloggers have a combined audience that is larger than Wine Spectator online.
• More than 700,000 people view wine-related videos each month.
• Wineries are the third most popular subject on Pinterest.

Surprised?

Not if you’re interested in the ways that wine and tech intersect, such as social communities like Delectable (a wine journaling app that’s chronicled some 3 million wines), Drync (a wine discovery app with 150,000 monthly active users), and HelloVino (a wine recommendation app with an installed base of 1.7 million users).

Additionally, Silicon Valley Bank, in their State of the Wine Industry presentation in January of this year, reported that an average of 1.5 million organic conversations about wine happen every day across all social media channels, and 450,000 new people talk about wine on social media every month.

It adds up to an enormous audience with massive potential.

Here’s the catch: over 80% of those mentions go unanswered by wine brands.

For most wine brands, that’s an equally massive fail.

But those brands who do tap into the bandwidth of tech’s tools, data sets, and platforms – who meet their customers where they are online – are capitalizing on customer engagement, loyalty and, yes, sales.

Here are three things they’re doing right.

Social Prospecting

Using social media prospecting tools, wineries can go far beyond simply monitoring keywords and truly listen to social media conversations. This means identifying patterns of customer behavior and preferences such as frequently visited restaurants or bars, “liked” wines, and current locations. With that knowledge, wineries can reach out to high-probability customers, not necessarily with a hard sell, but rather with helpful or welcoming information.

Craig Camp at Cornerstone Cellars in Yountville, California models successful social prospecting. He is a superuser of VinTank’s suite of social monitoring and interaction tools, including its geo-fencing capabilities, to identify and reach out to wine enthusiasts who visit Napa Valley. As a result, he attributes a full 10% of his tasting room traffic to his outreach efforts on social media.

Mobile Increases Contextual Relevancy

Meeting customers where they are starts with identifying where they spend their time. In practice this means screen time (such as Facebook on an iPad, or ads on cable television) and it means the in-person shopping experience with a smartphone.

Karena Breslin, Vice President for Digital Marketing at Constellation Brands , Inc. described their partnership with Shopkick , a mobile platform that rewards shopping for in-store behaviors like scanning UPC codes. Those behaviors, or “kicks,” are translated to points, which are translated to rewards such as store gift cards.

For one campaign, 1.2 million people used their mobile phones to scan the UPC code of a Constellation product; the scan leads the user to content about the product, such as a video. Eleven percent of those users purchased the wine they’d scanned, which amounted to an ROI of 320% for that particular campaign.

Engaging customers via mobile can result in such on-the-spot purchases but, depending on the content presented to the user once an item is scanned (surveys, for example), mobile can also act as a powerful customer acquisition vehicle to gather data for longer-term engagement.

Mobile + Maps + Inventory = Sales

By the year 2019, 64 cents of every dollar will be spent by digitally influenced shoppers who buy in brick and mortar stores. (Currently it’s 24 cents of every dollar.) That was part of the data presented by Tim Schulz who, until last week, was the Emerging Products Lead for Retail and eCommerce at Google. “Customers care less about the platform or the device than they do about the seamlessness of the experience,” he said.

Schulz sees the intersection of hyperlocal content, maps, and inventory as fertile ground for wineries and retailers. With Google’s In Stock Nearby product, for example, retailers can essentially say, “We have this wine for sale, it’s currently in stock, we’re located close to where you are right now, and here are the directions for you to get to us.”

Wineries who have collaborated with retail partners have seen major returns: every dollar spent on In Stock Nearby, Schulz said, became eight dollars in purchases.

Follow me on Twitter @cathyhuyghe.