Wine & Spirits / Apr 12, 2020

11 Ways to Adapt Your Winery Social Media During the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Brand Leader

How do you adapt winery social media marketing to changes in consumer buyer behavior and social media usage?

The social media content agency, Convince and Convert, held an excellent webinar this week titled, 11 Things You Must Adjust in Your Social Media During these Crazy Days.

We've paraphrased their key points and suggested some ways to apply them for wineries. The summary includes practical tips and common sense reminders for winery social media marketing managers, whether they are in-house or third party partners.

Here are their 11 adaptations:

1. Update Your Social Platform Bios: Specify ways your operations have changed. Change your Twitter bio, and create an Instagram Story highlight focused on virus-related info or promotions.
   • Implications for Wineries: Put a link to special offers in the Instagram link in bio.
2. Increase Time for Community Management: Right now, many consumers are more emotionally sensitive and tense, so make sure you are checking and responding to post comments frequently. And ensure that internal protocols are established for responding to both positive and negative comments.
   • Implications for Wineries: Devote more internal or third-party support to community management, as we are at Benson.
3. Only Post with a Purpose: This is always good advice, of course, but posts should reflect a deep understanding of your audience, have a specific communications objective, and be geared to create a desired behavior or outcome.
   • Wineries: Reduce your editorial calendar planning window. At Benson, our content development time frame for some clients has reduced from 2 weeks to 2-3 days. Now is not the right time to post something just to check off a task or hit a metric.
4. Humanize your Posts: Focus on people, on individuals, not the company. Example: the Getty Museum asked fans to recreate famous artworks at home from everyday materials. It’s a simple idea that puts the focus on art fans.
   • Wineries: Feature staff, club members, etc. For Hahn, Benson did an Instagram story of their employees enjoying wine in their homes, #HahnatHome. That struck a positive chord.
5. Double Down on Influencers: Convince and Connect reported that clicks on Instagram posts with #ad in early March spiked 76%, meaning that influencer content was getting a lot of engagement.
6. Make Sure Visuals Follow Current Social Norms: Ensure your post photos and virtual seminars are following government guidelines for social distancing, etc. Many companies (outside wine) are replacing their images of groups of people with individuals.
   • Wineries: Double check those images in future editorial calendars and ads.
7. Test New Formats and Publishing Times: New content consumption patterns have likely changed with COVID-19-related disruptions to consumers' normal schedules: work from home, no gym time, no commuting, etc.
   • Wineries: Test assumptions of formatting and timing–try posting on weekends, late at night, and try text only posts, or carousels, or other formats you don't normally use. Watch the frequency of other winery virtual tastings, which tend to cluster around 4:00-5:00pm PT.
8. Paid Social Media: Don't Stop. Overall, Convince and Convert reports a drop in social media ad costs last month, but also a drop in CTR (click through rates). Their recommendation: reassess your return on ad spend (ROAS).
   • Wineries: Test new creative, messaging and formats for your ads, measure ROAS in a narrower time-frame to understand the dynamics.
9. Maintain Your Consumer Relationships. People may want to buy, but cannot right now. That doesn't mean you should stop posting — play the long game.
   • Wineries: Be the wish board for the wine industry or region. Show those dreamy vineyard photos that transport your consumers and inspire a future visit to your winery.
10. Re-purpose Your Successful Content: Simple enough. Recycle what has worked in the past, and expand it across your channels, including emails, website content, etc.
    • Wineries: Understand what resonates with your followers, and double down on it.
11. Focus on Helping, not Selling: What can you do to help? Sage advice at any time.
    • Wineries: Consumers want to engage with wineries via virtual tastings, chef demos, and even normal posts that allow them to escape the day's news. (For CA wineries, the ABC has relaxed some enforcement restrictions on donations for COVID-related beneficiaries.

If you've got 60 minutes, we also recommend you view Convince and Convert’s webinar.

Convince and Convert works with a wide range of industries, from health care to education. and during the session they were careful, as they should be, to point out that some results are based on their own client base and may not apply to other industries, like ours. But even their common sense recommendations make for good reminders.

Thanks for reading.