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Many brewery marketers know that creating quality marketing content will help your brand to stand out. The next question becomes, where do I get the time to focus on my content marketing? I already have to focus on brewing my beer, running the taproom, and coordinating events. Rather than fret about all the extra hours it takes to create and implement a solid content marketing strategy, focus on streamlining certain marketing tasks that you routinely perform.
Here are 5 ways to streamline your digital marketing and focus more on the quality of content your create.
The rise of digital marketing has opened up a whole new world of connections. What do we mean by connections here? Compatibility between platforms such as Facebook, MailChimp, WordPress, Google, and hundreds of other services. Even services such as UPS and Square now integrate seamlessly with a properly designed website. There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of these to create efficiency that let you focus on other tasks first. Digital marketing is evolving and by taking advantage of this you can focus on other tasks like producing content.
1) Set Up a Social Media Dashboard
Everyone knows that social media is one of the most effective digital marketing channels. We also know it can be a huge distraction. Especially if you’re going on there multiple times a day to post content. Rather than take time out of each day you should schedule out your social media content in advance. This will allow you to set up your content ahead of time and only occasionally post things that come up. There are numerous apps such as Buffer and Hootsuite that are simple and will help you to schedule content, save time, and manage all your profiles right from one screen.
While this is great for setting up posts, setting up ad campaigns across Facebook and Instagram can be more complex. Take advantage of the updates Facebook provides to create a variety of ad campaigns that will post to Instagram, as well as target your past website visitors and email subscribers. Your marketing channels have never been so connected.
2) Sync Your Events Feed or Calendar
Many of you participate in events and festivals on a regular basis. Where are your followers going to go to check this out? Social media and your website. Regardless of the size of your brewery these need to be kept up to date.
Maybe you have 10 sales reps across the country who need to add events to your calendar. If so, look into using a Google Calendar feed on your site. This will allow any of the designated people to post a new event directly from any device and have it show up on the website. Or maybe you’re simply too busy to update both your Facebook and website events. Integrate a Facebook events feed and have it all done at once. This way you’re connecting with your audience on the most popular social network, keeping your site up to date, and spending half the time doing it.
3) Automate Emails
Sending a blog or newsletter out to your email subscribers is a great way to recap a festival or announce a new beer release. Don’t waste time manually creating an email every time you write a blog. You can have this automatically go out once the blog is live on your site? Using an RSS Campaign you can do just that.
Platforms such as MailChimp have now made it relatively easy to set this up. Now every time you post on your blog a new campaign will automatically go out to designated lists. Think of all the time you’ll save not having to create a campaign every time! Further customization even allows you to determine which days and times to have content go out. Anyone that updates their blog or posts articles frequently should seriously consider an RSS feed.
4) Ecommerce Integrations
Selling merch online can often be portrayed as a difficult and time-intensive task. In reality it should be just the opposite. The only thing you should gave to do to fulfill an order is box up that glassware and hand it to the mailman at your doorstep. If your site doesn’t allow you to do this then you should seriously consider switching things up. Additionally if your site is built on an up to date CMS platform, you’re able to host everything directly on your site without using any third party store services. This may be more intensive to set up at first, but the up-front costs heavily outweigh the monthly payments you’ll make for an equivalent third party provider. Not to mention it will allow you to really tie in your identity and story into the checkout stages.
Develop your store on site, set up your checkout stage, and receive updates right in your inbox. The only thing left for you to do is box up the order and hand over to the mailman. We can already see your schedule opening up for some content marketing creation.
5) Website Updates
Finally one of the most important things you should be consistently doing is keeping your website up to date. Why did we put this on our list? Because every piece of digital content should allow someone to navigate back to your website where they can learn more. If a user arrives on your site and something isn’t working properly you can be sure they’ll remember it.
Setting up notifications to remind you an update is out is one of the first steps you should take. This could be an update for your email marketing sign up forms, beer finder, or social media feeds. There’s nothing worse than having a customer go to your site and tell you something isn’t working correctly.
The time you spend keeping your site up to date will be much less than trying to fix something that’s broken. It’s also much easier to increase your brand awareness and stay in front of potential customers than reach out to cold leads. So use your website as your digital marketing hub and keep it up to date to give users a great look at what you do.
You may have heard this before, but it’s still all about connections. Not just personal ones but technology too! Take the steps mentioned above and give your digital marketing a boost this year.
