Questions & Answer:
How do you know you’re spending the right amount on marketing? How do you know you’re spending the most marketing dollars and the most effective programs? How do you continue to drive more sales for your winery or region, with the same marketing spend?
The answer is experimentation. But experimentation requires two things; measurement and analysis…
…and to do those you need data.
The Purpose of Marketing is to Generate Demand
Marketing can be fun, creative, inspiring, rewarding…but if it’s not generating incremental (that means more) demand (that means people who want to buy your products), then you’re wasting your time and money.
So if you want to generate more demand, you need to experiment with marketing.
Where do you start?
Matching Marketing Activities to Sales
Every change you make to your marketing plan, marketing budget, or marketing program is like a little experiment to see how your changes affect sales. The key is to be able to see what you have done differently from one time period to the next and compare that to changes in sales.
Let’s say, for instance, that last Fall you ran a region-wide wine tasting promotion during September and spent $10k advertising the event to targets within 100 miles of your region. How much should you spend this year? This is the perfect time for an experiment.
Getting Better Results from Marketing with Experiments
What if this year you instead tried only spending $5,000 on advertising and found out you drove the exact same number of tasters during the promotion period and wine sales in your region were exactly the same?
Obviously, you wouldn’t spend $10k again next year; instead you might question if the type of advertising you were doing is worth anything at all. At the very least you just found $5,000 that you can reinvest into something more productive next year (Hooray! We’re on the road to getting better!)
At the end of the day, you must do everything you can to connect your marketing activity to sales outcomes. It isn’t always easy, and it won’t be a perfect science, but the closer you can get to connecting your marketing activities and spend to end sales, the better you will be at determining which activities are worth keeping or expanding, and which activities should be changed or eliminated.
Community Benchmark allows you to compare your stats over time against yourself and your peers. Did your campaign move the sales or visitation needle? Did you get the Wine Club signups you were looking for? Our software can help identify the efficacy of your campaign and it’s the key that can help leverage your marketing budget!
Schedule a demo today to explore Community Benchmark.
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.