How To Market Your Beer’s Special Release
When someone has a baby, there is a lot of hype around it. As there should be! You see birth announcements, baptisms, Facebook albums, the whole nine yards.
So, if your brew is like a baby to you, you should give it the same royal treatment when it comes to marketing.
Brewing a special release beer involves a lot of moving parts. When you plan ahead of time, you can coordinate at least some of those parts to create a fantastic marketing campaign.
Each brewery has its own story to tell, and its own brand to build. But, there are a few commonalities across most special releases that are easy enough to plan for ahead of time.
Document the process.
If you want to tell an amazing story, you’ll need some photos and videos to help you out. From the hop harvest to the late-night brewing, make sure your team has their cameras ready.
Control the brand ahead of time.
Prepare all the communication you need to make sure your brand’s story is told correctly. This includes writing beer descriptions, providing written documentation of the brewers’ inspiration, determining hashtags, creating videos, and getting professional photos taken.
In this step, you should go above and beyond. Even a well-planned marketing campaign can flop if you don’t make it interesting. Why take boring product shots against a white background when you could make a video interview of your brewer while they’re harvesting hops?
Share brand information.
Now that you’ve compiled all this brand information, you need to get it in the hands of the right people. If you plan to use one hashtag for the release event, and another for the beer itself, you need to let people know.
Share your brand information with distributors, your marketing team, and maybe even your uncle in Ohio. The easier you make this information to process, post, and share, the better the release will be.
Manage the brand as you launch.
Check in on common platforms such as Beer Advocate and Untappd to manage reviews. Respond to comments on Facebook and reply to tweets. At this busy time, it’s easy to neglect this kind of stuff, but it’s still important. So, don’t forget it.
Blog.
This is an easily understood, common, and shareable platform for communicating information about your special release. There are a lot of ways to make sure your blog is top-notch, but here are a few:
- Provide hyperlinks to other relevant pages and posts
- Use important keywords about the release so your post ranks high in search engines
- Incorporate some of the graphics, images, and videos you’ve prepared
- Use “click to tweet” buttons for important information in the blog
Post.
Your story isn’t any good if you rely on other people to tell it for you. This is where all the planning ahead from before will come in handy.
Get a social media plan in place. From hashtags to Facebook ads, be sure your departments are in conversation with one another about messaging and timing.
You can also schedule many of your posts ahead of time, which allows for controlled quality before the chaos of the release.
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