“What gets measured gets improved.”
– Peter Drucker, iconic management consultant, educator and author
In a 2017 article in The Economist, the paper’s editors called data “the world’s most valuable resource,” an idea evidenced by the fact that the five most-valuable publicly traded firms in the world—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—are also some of the most intensive collectors and analyzers of consumer and performance data in any industry anywhere. And they’re far from alone; virtually all companies, large and small, track their performance and that of their industry, enabling them to identify and understand regional, seasonal and industry trends, and allowing them to strategically react to changes in the market and prepare for predicted seasonal adjustments.
Marketing departments within these companies also track and measure reams of data, including the number of leads they’ve created, the quality of each lead, how quickly they can move leads through the sales funnel to convert, what types of marketing and which campaigns are most effective, and much more. In fact, modern marketing in any industry requires at least a basic understanding and measuring of important metrics in order to drive performance improvements and make appropriate adjustments to sales and marketing efforts.
How Data Helps Destination Marketing Organizations Improve Performance
For Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs), too, understanding actual business performance, actual visitor trends, and being able to compare them to competing destinations and regions, is absolutely essential when it comes to being able to measure and therefore improve the return on your marketing dollars.
Website traffic and social media impressions can provide an idea of who might be coming to your region, but in order to track actual visitors and gauge their quality, metrics like visitor numbers, purchases, club signups, conversion rates, average sales per visitor, and average sales per purchase are critical.
Benefits of Real Performance Data to Wine Associations
1. Unveiling Crucial Insights via Precise Measurement
As mentioned above, more-exact performance indicators—including visitor numbers, purchases, club signups, conversion rates, average sales per visitor, and average sales per purchase—provide the actual reality of how your region is performing, far beyond social media metrics and website traffic.
Website analytics provide only surface-level, extreme-top-of-the-funnel measurements, while essential performance metrics like the above provide real, actionable insight.
Tracking actual visitor analytics is the only way you’ll have access to an accurate view that will drive improvement across your region.
2. Tracking Performance Over Time/Seasonality
Without the real and detailed story of your region’s actual performance, you are basing seasonal decisions on a gut feeling, anecdotal conversations, and at best surface level measurements rather than hard data.
- Are you positive you know which months or events are your best and which are your slowest?
- Do you know how the quality of your region’s traffic, sales, and events this year compares to last year?
- Or are you potentially missing opportunities based on inaccurate–or missing–data?
In short, tracking your region’s performance over time enables you to truly understand seasonal performance and, consequently, set appropriate seasonal goals.
3. Generate New Initiatives, Reinvest In the Best
Understanding how and when customers interact with all your winery segments allows you to set appropriate goals for your region and, more importantly, identify the quality of the visitors your region is seeing, and understand their intent – small purchases or large, recreational tasters or serious buyers, and so on. This information, in turn, enables you to market and sell to them accordingly.
Having detailed performance data can stimulate new sales and marketing initiatives, and then track their effectiveness. When you know what’s working and what’s not, you can reinvest time and budget into your highest-performing projects and aggressively support your winning ideas.
4. Proving the Value of Membership in Your Association
Access to accurate, timely regional performance data is the only way wine associations can monitor the return on their regional development promotions and efforts, both for the region at large and to individual wineries who may be considering membership. Proving the ROI of membership with hard Visitors and Sales data not only makes it much easier to collect dues and other funding sources, it is also be an invaluable recruiting tool for new members.
The most-successful global companies and DMOs are using big data to inform performance improvements and drive increasing business to their member businesses. In order to be successful in the modern world of sales and marketing, winery associations need to do the same.
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Learn more about using real performance indicators to improve your association’s decisions here
Learn more about using sales and visitor data to inform your winery’s business decisions here, and request a demo here.
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About Community Benchmark: Community Benchmark is a Santa Rosa, CA based software company helping wineries identify growth opportunities by comparing key performance metrics with their peers.
LEARN MORE at www.CommunityBenchmark.com