6 Tips for Driving Local Traffic to Your Winery

Luckily, there are some marketing strategies your winery can use to break into the market. The trick is focusing on your local presence. With these 6 tips, you can establish a solid customer base by driving local traffic to your winery:

1. Optimize Your Website

Your website is your fixed digital presence in the world. Furthermore, it is an integral part of your marketing strategy. You want your customers to find you online easily. Your website will provide them with product information, your winery’s location, and a glimpse into what makes your brand unique.

Your website is also an important part of your customer buying cycle, as 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchasing decision.

To optimize your website, you may need the expertise of web designers and search engine optimization (SEO) experts. A web designer will design your web pages so they speak to your brand and set up your website’s layout so it is easy for visitors to navigate.

They can also ensure that your website is easily viewable on a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet. SEO experts will optimize the various texts and meta descriptions on your web pages to make sure search engines find them more effectively.

2. Claim Your Local Search Listings

Claiming your local search listings can also assist in driving local traffic to your winery by showing potential customers that you are a notable business. There are many different types of business listings. They vary by industry, business size, locality, and the size of your market. A good first step is to claim your listing on Google.

Local winery listings are especially effective for small to mid-sized wineries because they reach local customers who are actually looking for your product. You can find most of these listings by looking online, but marketing experts can tell you which ones will be the most important to claim. Claiming a listing may also involve multiple steps.

3. Connect Over Social Media

Connecting to your customers on social media isn’t just a great way to keep them informed; it can also be an engine for driving local traffic to your winery. In fact, 90% of marketers claim that social media gave their business more exposure.

You should first decide which platforms will be most effective for your winery and create your accounts. Facebook has more users than any other platform and especially effective for marketing to consumers, so that’s a good place to start. Other platforms, like Twitter and Instagram, would also be effective places to market your winery.

Partnering with social media marketing experts can help you make the best decisions regarding your social media marketing strategy. They can help you decide which types of images, articles, and written posts will work best on each platform. The more your customers share your content with their friends, the more local exposure you’ll receive.

4. Reach Customers Through Email

Although email marketing has been around longer than most other types of digital marketing, it is still heralded as the most effective digital marketing strategy. 73% of companies believe email is a core marketing strategy and businesses attribute email as giving them the best ROI of any marketing effort.

The reason email is so effective is actually quite simple. 72% of consumers prefer email over other methods for receiving communications from businesses, which means it is generally more effective than ads and other marketing tactics.

Email allows your winery to send out newsletters, promotional materials, and news about events or sales. It can also be a tool for answering customer questions. Conducting a successful email campaign requires more than a friendly message, however.

The goal of an email campaign is to get recipients to open the email, read it, and click on a provided link. Doing so begins their buyer’s journey. This link may lead them to sign up for an event or receive some type of promotional material. The most effective emails are designed, written, and tracked by professionals who have the right tools to do so.

5. Host and Promote Events

If you’ve been in the wine business for any length of time, you already know how powerful wine events can be to your business efforts. Tastings, tours, and other events draw more interested customers to your business and create customers for life. They also get people talking to their friends about your winery. From a digital marketing perspective, events also offer you a great opportunity to generate more customers through promotion.

An event gives you a good reason to post to social media, send out emails, and create additional pages on your website. Engaging in many of the marketing tactics listed above can help you maximize the attendance of your winery’s event. When your event is well-attended and successful, you can push out follow up messages. this will further empower your efforts for driving local traffic to your winery.

6. Show Your Authenticity

Every marketing effort is dependent upon one essential component: your winery. Promote your winery on your website, through social media, and through email to establish your brand. Your winery’s authenticity is what makes you stand out from all of your local competition.

Therefore, it should seep through all of your marketing channels.

If your winery has a fun atmosphere, it should be apparent in the images and written posts you share on social media. If you market to a more refined clientele, design your emails with those customers in mind. Marketing and design experts can take the best of what you do and showcase it to the world.

After you display your authenticity through all of your marketing channels, you’ll start driving local traffic to your winery and establishing yourself as a popular fixture in your community.