Why bother making a marketing calendar?
Because you’ll finally…
A. Measure and plan out your goals so you can review what’s working and what’s not.
B. Take the last minute scramble out of your releases/ campaigns/ communication. By shifting sporadic wine club emails into strategic touch points, you’ll improve wine club retention.
C. Get your employees on the same page. With everyone working towards the same vision, people won’t be accidentally working against one another.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Start with your goal for the year
Do you want to increase DTC sales? Increase wine(s) price? Launch new wines? Your end goal is the filter we’ll put everything through for the year.
2. How will you get there?
For instance, increasing DTC sales might come down to strengthening brand awareness or growing your email list or strengthening your tasting room’s sales tactics or tuning up your CRM and/ or SEO… Perhaps it’s a combination? This is where looking at what’s working/ not working well in your business is crucial and why everything we do is custom built for you.
3. Map out your key dates
These will be the non-negotatiable anchors in your calendar. Some ideas are:
* If you roll straight into vintages, look at your last 5 years of sales. Have your volumes stayed the same? Are you switching vintages around a similar time? What else do you notice? Use this to predict a date when you’ll switch over.
4. With your goal in mind, work backwards from your key dates
Using the example of increasing your DTC sales, perhaps you add in a pre-release email series to build anticipation (demand) for when wines are released. And simultaneously talk about these wines/ where in the vineyard they come from etc. on social media. What’s the cadence? Do you want a month of pre-release content? How many emails/ posts per week?
5. Create seasonal themes to use across your marketing channelsFor instance, to increase DTC sales, in the spring we’d suggest highlighting the benefits of visiting the tasting room in the off season. Talk (at the tasting room, in your newsletter, on social media) about what you’re doing in the vineyard to prepare for the growing season, what’’s happening in the winery (ie. blending, disgorge etc). Choose a wine(s) and follow it through its life cycle starting with the dormant vines in the early spring.
6. Take a monthly view
Now take your seasonal themes and break them down into offers/ strategies/ storytelling/ sales goals across each month. You might decide to pair your key campaigns with PR or media outreach to maximize your efforts and reach. You’ll need to build in extra time for this. Generally, we suggest submitting a wine 2 months ahead of when you’re hoping to see the review published. However, if a review comes out early, you can work it into your pre-campaign and likewise, if it’s later than anticipated then use it during your post-campaign. More on that below.
7. Strategize your pre- and post-campaign
Think about this like building anticipation for a party with the save the date (pre-campaign), then the party (the campaign), then thank you letters afterward (post-campaign). Leaving out the post-campaign period won’t tank your campaign but it could make the difference of having a customer ready with their credit card for your next offer. Your post-campaign might look like an email segmentation for the wine they clicked on during the campaign but didn’t purchase. That email might include an offer like “the wine you almost didn’t get” as a 3 pack instead of the original 6. Or you might post cellar or vineyard content that didn’t make it into the campaign. Or you could re-post user-generated content to show how other people are enjoying your wine — maybe there’s still time for this person to buy the wine or maybe they missed out…which could encourage them to act faster next time.
8. Look back over everything
Do your timing and deadlines make sense? To prevent last minute scrambles, work in when assets are due so that you have time for review before publishing. Anything you’ve missed?
If your head is spinning and you’d rather us make a custom marketing calendar for you, send an email to Geoffrey at gmoss@lithica.wine. We’ll start with a free call and go from there. No sales pressure. We’re Canadian like that.
