Digital Marketing Trends To Follow Now!
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“Today, a great eCommerce experience in wine is no longer a nice-to-have option. It is a must-have channel for consumers. The digital space in wine is evolving before our eyes”, says Justin Noland, Senior Director of DTC Marketing and Ecommerce for?Treasury Wine Estates ?in his Podcast “Libation Domination ”.
The impact of Digital Marketing on the wine industry calls for dedicated attention from brands, vintners, and enthusiasts alike. Here is a list of Digital Marketing trends that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy in 2023 to see a massive impact on your digital presence.
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencers can make the world go round. This trend will continue in 2022 and it is high time to incorporate influencer marketing in your marketing plan. Not only will the right kind of influencers speak to your target audience well, but they will also become ambassadors for the premium experience your range of wines offers. Influencers are renowned for bridging a slice of life narrative with an aspirational lifestyle projected on digital media. Your influencer marketing plan for 2022 should have a good balance of micro, nano, and macro-influencers that both occupy a niche in the wine industry as well as talk broadly about food and lifestyle. This will help target a wider range of audiences in different formats.
Raquel Royers, the marketing manager for?Napa winery Clos Du Val , believes that “Influencer marketing is leveraging bloggers, writers, and online personalities within the digital space to help increase your brand reach, authentically share your story, and garner new customers/fans. We would rather have a long-standing relationship with a few influencers who understand our brand, over many influencers who are simply only there to reap the benefits of a free product or a check.
2. Conversational Marketing
In this digital-first thrust into sales and marketing, wineries often find it difficult to keep up with everything that is happening at once. Digital Marketing requires you to be studying past insights, working on current campaigns, and envisioning future plans at the same moment. While this can be overwhelming, one of the best things to come out of finding solutions for this problem is Chatbots. When Stephanie Chevalier, an internet and eCommerce researcher, studied chatbot commerce, a whopping 67 percent of millennials said they were likely to purchase products from a brand using a chatbot.
Conversational Marketing is growing exponentially as it is bringing a whole new level of personalization and convenience to Digital Marketing and eCommerce. It allows for the brand to deliver information effectively using automation. As a wine brand in the industry, you are aware of the most general and brief questions users can have while interacting with your brand. Messengers and chatbots help streamline an automated flow of FAQs that not only answer most queries of a consumer but also help build a user flow when they seek more information. Chatbots, when coded well, can also double up as virtual sommeliers recommending the right wine for the right occasion.
3. Geostrategic Marketing
Geostrategy in marketing will prove essential for this hybrid world. Not only will it just allow wine brands to enter new markets but also reach out to the audiences of these markets to introduce themselves through innovative campaigns. Platforms like GeoStrategies can analyze existing data of a winery and help them identify newer markets with similar demographics and interests. This helps understand the market potential and build strategies to expand or franchise accordingly. If you believe your wine can have a global audience and demand, you can start with GeoStrategies to analyze the true numbers of this global reach. Just like Derton and Anthony Harvell, director of sales and operations at William Chris, wanted to expand beyond Texas. They reached out to GeoStrategies to expand into newer markets. With the focus on GeoStrategies, they are able to ascertain sub-markets and subregions down to the street level. They are also able to identify potential customers within geographic zones and see how close they are to a potential future target location. It primarily helps them plan their pop-ups, activations, and collaborations that are key for the future of the Wine Trade.
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4. Voice AI Marketing
One of the most innovative things that have come out of the AI revolution is AI assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and the likes. Digital Marketing has gone a step forward to find the right ways to market on the Voice AI networks. The first winery to begin marketing on Alexa is?JaM Cellars . For starters, the winery offers a voice message from the winery’s founders, John and Michele Truchard on Alexa. It then can help users find the nearest store with JaM Cellars’ wines through voice commands. The team at JaM can analyze monthly unique users and the number of their utterances, the amount and percentage of time they spent on each feature.
Alexa also collects the phone numbers of users that ask her to find the wines which are then shared with the winery. This data can be used for two purposes. Firstly, one can study the patterns of what locations are these enquiries coming from and use that for Geomarketing activities. Secondly, one can study the ordering trends and integrate ‘order online’ options that link back to an online shop, allowing verified users to purchase their wine on the go. Voice AI is going to be one powerful trend worth observing in 2022.
5. Short-form Video Content
Tik Tok and Instagram reels are not limited to just viral dance trends. Wine can now be spoken about while grooving to viral trending songs. The Wine Industry has leveraged the virality of short-form videos to educate audiences about all things wine. From how to acquire wines, how to appreciate them, what wines are a must-try, to what are the things one shouldn’t do while enjoying wine, and so much more are served in bite-sized pieces of information for viewers to consume. Short-form content on wine today ranges from budget to luxury choices and from bare basics to vintner knowledge. Short-form videos have revolutionized access to wine, especially for the Millennials and the Gen Z. 2022 will only go on to show the impact of short-form video content that can be employed by wine brands as well as establishments on Tik Tok and Instagram Reels by themselves or via influencers to accelerate their impact on Social Media.?
The oncoming year will also make progress in AR and VR involvement in the Wine Trade in leaps and bounds. It will hopefully go on to affirm what Justin Noland believes is revolutionary about Digital Marketing trends in the Wine Industry, he says “Wine marketing varies so much from one winery to another, one brand to another, but it mostly boils down to telling stories, engaging consumers, and delivering a quality experience. Very little of the “what” is new or particularly innovative, but the “how” is. Our industry excels at world-class in-person experiences and hospitality. We need to bring these experiences in an approachable and fun way to a broader group of people online.”
In the end, as?Sarah Morra Qualters ?— Director of Marketing, Corporate Brands & Emerging Channels, at The Wine Group — says, “Ultimately, wine provides joy to people’s lives on a regular basis,” she says. “I love that having wine can elevate any experience and make it much more memorable. There’s a real passion there.” This passion is what will continue to drive the digital revolution in 2022 and years to come.