What is Inbound Marketing and Why Should Wineries Care?

Inbound Marketing is a term you might have heard thrown about a lot in the last few years. By definition, it is the process of drawing customers to your products and services by content marketing, social media marketing, SEO & branding. In simpler terms, it is creating awareness of your business to attract and help new customers.

Sounds complicated right? It might surprise you to discover that many wineries are already using Inbound Marketing for their DtC wine sales without even realising it.

There are four stages involved in Inbound Marketing:

Attract – the first step is about attracting the right customers to your business. The important thing to note here is that it’s not about attracting any customer – you need to find the customer that is right for you. These customer groups are called Buyer Personas.
Convert – this is where you get the contact details of your customers in order to maintain a relationship with them
Close – you probably know what this one is about, but remember, it is not always about getting the sale right away. You need to offer the customer value in order to get that.
Delight – post sale, you should stay in touch with customers to nurture that relationship and get more sales in the future.

So, how does this apply to wineries?

By simply having an active Facebook account, you are engaging in Inbound Marketing. By having a website, you are engaging in Inbound Marketing. If you attend an event, you are engaging in Inbound Marketing. That’s because these things help to attract customers, but they are also giving customers value. Now, of course in person a lot of this value comes from the experience of tasting your wine, but online, it extends beyond that. It includes information about that wine, about your story. It excites your potential customers and helps them discover if you are the kind of winery they’re interested in.

But the single most important connection to Inbound Marketing is your cellar door. Customers will come to your cellar door for any number of reasons – they might have a recommendation from friends, they might have tried your wine before, they might be part of a tour or they might simply have seen a sign. What really matters is the role the cellar door has in identifying your unique customers and how it can help you progress through the final three stages.

Consider the type of customers who come to your cellar door for the first time. If someone buys a single bottle of wine, they are a different type of customer to someone who joins your wine club. If someone buys Shiraz, they are likely a different customer to someone who buys Sauvignon Blanc. Without thinking about it, you’re probably already dividing these customers into groups when they’re in front of you, but to truly be successful with Inbound Marketing, you need to be able to capture this information and use it to sell in the future.

Which leads us to the next stages. While closing a sale in your cellar door is important, you need to look beyond that to how you can maintain a relationship with customers. But how can you sell to customers in the future if you don’t have their contact details? If you’re like most wineries, you collect the majority of emails in your cellar door. Once again, your cellar door is crucial in this process and if used right, can truly drive sales far beyond this first visit.

The final stage of Delight is about bringing together all of the information you have to nurture your customer relationships. When you are creating anything for your winery, consider your buyer personas and whether this information will add value to them. Is it something they would be interested in? Is it something they didn’t know? Whenever possible, you should create segmentation to make sure the right message is reaching the right customer. This will help grow your customer relationships, but also maximise the chance of getting future sales.

Interested in learning more? Here at WithWine, our wine software is built to match the Inbound principles. We make it easy for wineries to get customers email addresses and collect the data that can help them identify buyer personas so it’s simple to nurture customer relationships. The best part, you can get started with our free Mobile POS!