Marketing tactics go beyond defining strategic objectives, improving your Google ranking through SEO, or using complicated Excel sheets to sort through various metrics and KPIs. As an alcohol brand, you have unique advantages that you should be applying in your marketing strategy template. Since alcohol is associated with being consumed in fun, high-energy, and social environments, your brand should be utilizing the opportunity to connect with customers personally and in an entertaining tone. 

The Community text marketing platform is designed to create, build, and manage personal connections and social interactions with your audience members. It’s the perfect addition to any alcohol brand’s marketing strategy template. Let’s get into the leverage you have in the alcohol industry and the key ways that SMS can help you grow your audience. 

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The Advantage of Marketing an Alcohol Brand

One advantage that alcohol brands have when it comes to marketing is that there isn’t much product education required for average audiences. This means that potential customers can usually skip right to getting to know your brand. Focus your tactics around building connections with your audience and getting them to associate a specific feeling with your brand. 

As discussed above, because alcohol is often consumed in social environments, it is commonly associated with universal concepts like having fun, relaxing after hard work, or being in love. Center your brand’s messaging around the feeling that makes the most sense for your alcohol products and use it as the theme of the text message conversations you initiate with your audience members. 

Encourage engagement with your audience by asking how their weekend was or what they’re most looking forward to doing this summer. Keeping your texts upbeat, social, and fun is an easy way to build the feeling you want to be associated with your brand. 

Here are some other key points to be sure to include in your text marketing strategy template to cultivate a loyal audience and convert leads into sales.

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Key Points for Your Marketing Strategy Template

When you include Community’s text platform in your marketing strategy, your brand can engage in direct conversations with leads and customers in a way that will make you stand out from competitors. 

You can also gain key insights into your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from your text conversations to create SWOT analysis outlines. Competitor analysis and situation analysis will help you stay on top of your game, and using Community will give you a competitive advantage when extracting key performance indicators and coming up with a good marketing plan. 

Understanding buyer personas and largest demographics through connecting with your audience directly will help you better define your long-term and short-term business goals, your marketing goals, your content marketing strategy, your social media strategy, and your target market. 

Build a loyal following by interacting personally with every member of your audience, letting them get to know your company and what you represent. As a Leader, you’ll use our Community app to send messages that appear as regular, real texts to your audience. Here are some key ways to use SMS in your marketing template. 

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Promote Your Number to Build Your Audience

The first key point you want to hit in your marketing strategy is growing your audience. You can easily do this by promoting your personal Community text number. Post it on your social media accounts like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and incorporate it into your social media marketing strategy. You can also put it in your storefront, add it to your blog posts, send it in an email marketing blast, add it to your logo, or embed your URL link onto your website. Members simply text the number and are automatically subscribed to your Community audience.

When members subscribe to your Community, they can give as many identifying characteristics as possible through various Keywords you designate. These Keywords will automatically sort your audience into subgroups or smaller “Communities” within your account that you can then customize.

Grow your audience as big as you want without having to worry about keeping everyone’s details and data organized within the Community app. Our user-friendly interface does the work for you. Start promoting your custom phone number today so your customers can subscribe to your audience.

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Connect with Your Contacts

After your Community members have opted in, show them what your alcohol brand is all about. What do you want people to feel when they think about drinking your products? Incorporate messages and themes around these emotions in all of your campaigns and marketing messages. Send them a welcoming text message about why you started your company, how you’re different, and how you hope they’ll enjoy your drinks.

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Segment Your Audience for Curated Content

Once you sort your audience into segments, you can customize the content of the messages you send them. Separate the wine-loving moms from the beer-drinking college students into their own category within the Community app. 

Another way to segment your audience is to use the Community Filters function, allowing you to send a text message to your contacts that fall within certain characteristics. Filter your audience by location, age, gender, or the date they joined your Community. 

Doing this lets you curate the content of the messages you send to each segment or filtered group to keep it relevant and personal.

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Build Connections

Engage in two-way conversations directly with your audience through the Community app. Research shows that 65% of business comes from your existing customers. Building real connections with your existing audience is vital to your brand’s continued success and growth. 

Our Clustering feature lets you group similar message replies to send one response message to multiple people at once. This function allows you to build relationships with all of your members quickly, keeping them engaged and more likely to stay loyal to your alcohol brand. 

Text out a Friday promotional offer and ask them what their plans are for the weekend, then easily reply to every audience member with the Clustering feature. Have real back and forth conversations with every single one of your audience members in a way unlike any other platform can offer.

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Track ROI and Manage Campaigns

The Community app lets you track and manage your SMS campaigns from wherever you are. Access the Insights page within the app to easily track your text messages’ success and engagement. Use this data to shape the content, targeting, and timing of your future texts.

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Ideas for Engaging with Your Audience

Customer acquisition and retention data show that loyal customers engage more than new ones, which means that building brand loyalty should be the primary goal of your marketing strategy template. 

Let’s look at ways to optimize promoting and using your Community text number and entice new customers to come purchase with your alcohol brand.

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Host Fun Events

As an alcohol brand, there’s no such thing as “too much fun.” Promoting an event like a wine tasting, mixer, fundraiser, game night, or anything similar will help you gain audience members. 

Hosting events where alcohol is served is a great way to grow organically and connect with your customers. Promote your event on the Community platform by using location and age filters to send the perfect event invite to the right audience. Plus, you can easily encourage them to bring their friends and family to try out your products as well. 

Community lets you sort your audience by their Join Date to track the success of the events you host. This type of sorting helps you see what your customers enjoy and continue to host successful events for them.

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Try a Pop-Up Shop or Branded Truck

Bring your branded truck or pop-up to a local event like a street fair or college basketball game. Use signage to promote your Community number with a designated Keyword that will automatically sort the attendees who text it into an audience subgroup. 

The Keyword that is specifically associated with your vehicle or pop-up will help you track the success of that marketing effort and engage uniquely with the leads it creates.

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Strategic Texts with Perfect Timing

In the alcohol business, holidays and weekends are times that you want to capitalize on targeting the right members of your audience. Schedule text messages to go out to your contacts on holidays when they’ll be looking to choose which alcohol brand to purchase for their gathering. 

Stay top of mind at the times that make the most sense for the alcohol industry by directly notifying consumers with your holiday or weekend promotions—right in the palm of their hand. 

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SMS is How You’ll Stand Out from Competitors

Set yourself apart from your competitors in the saturated alcohol industry by being the brand that consumers can connect with personally. Larger alcohol brands that dominate the market are spending millions on their advertising dollars. What they’re not doing is connecting personally and building relationships with their consumers. SMS marketing through Community is the way to leverage your smaller alcohol brand to take hold of your market share from the bigger companies. 

With Community, you can speak directly to every customer and build personal relationships at scale. Clustering makes it easy to group replies and send one message to dozens or hundreds of your audience members. 

Community also makes it easy to access the details of any individual member by simply clicking on their name in the app. The interface looks identical to a text message and provides Leaders with all the same conveniences as regular texting. SMS is how you’ll stand out from competitors and build brand loyalty.

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Marketing Summary for Alcohol Brands

Your alcohol brand should leverage the advantages of a fun marketing campaign and prioritize socially interacting with your consumers. The Community platform makes it easy to keep your contacts engaged by sending and replying to text messages at scale. Whether you're trying to write a new business plan, redefine your mission statement, perform market analysis, launch new products, or create a roadmap for your next year, connecting directly with your target audience through Community is a resource that will significantly aid the success of your business.

When you download the Community app, you and your marketing team can collect important information from your customers and easily group them into categories for providing the relevant content they want to see. Track the success of messages you send and see members’ information from the Community app on your phone. Standing out in the saturated alcohol market will be easy for your brand when interacting with your audience instantly and directly through Community.

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Sources:

CUSTOMER RETENTION STATISTICS - The Ultimate Collection for Small Business | Smallbiztrends.com 

Customer Loyalty Retention Stats | Markinblog.com 

Spirits Brands - Statistics & Facts | Statista.com

Photo by David Straight on Unsplash