When it comes to starting or operating a craft alcohol business, there are many options to consider when planning your marketing strategy. Each option comes with its own benefits and drawbacks, but one of the most helpful is audience targeting or target marketing. This technique focuses on reaching your specific audience. Those people who are most likely to truly fall in love with your brand. This strategy leads to deeper relationships and, in turn, more sales for your business.
To see how this works, let’s look at what makes this strategy so successful, for all of your marketing tactics.
Do you want to find your target audience?
Our Craft Alcohol Marketing Bootcamp covers everything you need to know to to help you market your craft alcohol business. It covers everything from social media strategy, to tasting room traffic, to paid advertising.
Plus, we have a course specifically created to help you do audience targeting for your craft alcohol business!
Today, to help with that, we’re sharing an article our founder, Suzanne, originally wrote for Distillers Magazine’s fall 2020 issue. Let’s dive in!
Find Your Tribe With Target Consumer Marketing
Originally published in Distiller Magazine, August 2020.
As a marketer, defining your target market is one your most important tasks. Why? Helping you find your consumer tribe ensures you waste as little money and time as possible when trying to reach them and increases your odds of actually converting as many of them as possible into buyers. Know your target consumer deeply and you will find, build and nurture your tribe while ensuring all of your marketing is more effective and efficient.
First, let’s dive into why it’s important to have a clearly defined, niche target market and why it’s not helpful to try to talk to or appeal to everyone. Now, it’s common for craft makers to want to get the word out about their brand and products as widely as possible. Seems like a good idea, right?
When You Try To Talk To Everyone, You End Up Talking To No One
The important thing to understand is that when you try to reach and appeal to everyone, you’re talking to a lot of consumers who don’t care or for any number of reasons aren’t very likely to ever convert into paying customers. Furthermore, in order to appeal to everyone, you have to water down your message to make it generally appealing. So essentially, by trying to talk to everyone, you’re talking to no one at all, at least not in a very compelling way.
If you do understand your target market, however, there’s a continual upside. As you steadily deepen your understanding of your target market over time, the effectiveness of your marketing increases. Meaning you’ll start to see higher conversion rates and better return on your marketing investments. And I don’t know about you, but as a small business owner myself, getting better results for less money is an objective that is always worth spending my time on.
Knowing Your Target Consumer Fuels All Of Your Marketing
Okay, so repeat after me: “Your target audience is not everyone.” In fact, your target audience isn’t even people who like to drink the spirit(s) that you’re making. That is just too broad. You don’t want your core, target consumers to be any ol’ whiskey drinker that would be happy with any ol’ whiskey from any ol’ distillery. Because, sure, maybe they’ll buy your whiskey once. Or stop in for a visit once. But your target consumer? That’s the consumer who tells all of their friends about you, comes to your events, gets to know your team and is there buying your spirits whenever you have a new release.
This is the base you need to build to create a successful brand. The value of that consumer versus someone who just passively enjoys any ol’ whiskey is tenfold over time. And if you’re going to spend your money on reaching consumers, you bet you’re bourbon that you want to spend it on those people who are worth real, sustainable value for your business.
