Leeann Froese
Collaboration with key partners will lead to success
After a few difficult seasons, we are collectively ready to throw open the doors and welcome the world. In many cases tasting room sales can make up 40 per cent or more of a winery or cidery’s direct sales.
Cellar door sales are the most profitable channel, so linking to tourism and thus attracting more visitors to wine regions, wineries, cideries, distilleries, breweries, hotels, and restaurants will lead to increased profitability.
To make the most of this renewed fervour for in-person experiences, here are a handful of ideas to help you market your tourism offering.
There Is Strength in Numbers
If you have not yet, take the time to get to know your neighbours. This neighbourly connection will be very helpful as the first idea is to bundle your offerings. Work with your neighbouring restaurants, farms, breweries, distilleries, and other companies that offer related activities to yours.
These ‘bundles’ should be comprised of offerings that have complementary but non-competing activities that will enhance the visitors’ experience, give them more reasons to stay in your area, and help you forge relationships in your community. You can work together to create a package that could include visits with each other, or you can simply refer visitors to and from one another’s properties.
Adding to this, research conducted in western Canada revealed that highly motivated, long-distance wine tourists prefer destinations offering a wide range of cultural and outdoor attractions. In other words, you should also get to know your local golf courses, ski hills, museums, boat rental companies, and hiking trails as well, and work together to cross-promote one other.
Carry It On Your Shoulders
It’s time to rethink and reshape your shoulder season. To bring traffic into your tasting room at the different, quiet, less-travelled time of year from November to the end of April, consider what kind of unique things can you do and offer to encourage people to visit you.
There have been some very successful initiatives around holidays such as Valentine’s Day, where wineries from a region have joined, all on the same day, to partner with a bakery or chocolatier and customize wine and chocolate pairings. Or, perhaps there are end-of-harvest celebrations that can take place as November approaches. Some wineries hold winter wine activities as well.
Think about what you can do to collaborate with local restaurants or your neighbours to make something unique happen that will bring traffic to the area and populate hotel rooms.
Here are a few ideas that have worked successfully in some regions during off seasons: A themed 5 km or 10 km run (for fun, or a longer one that is formally sanctioned), concerts, film festivals and fashion shows.
Embrace Technology
Be sure that your business listing is up to date on Google Business and Tripadvisor, and make yourself easy to find. This is especially important for those of you who are not located on main roads.
Encourage your visitors to talk about you socially and give them a free and easy way to do it. Post your Wi-Fi code so they can connect and post that photo in your wine shop. Publish your own social handles in a prominent place so your visitors can share where they are and tag your business. You want your visitors’ friends to know about you as well, so make it easy to be found online.
Along these lines, use social media and listen to what is happening around you. If you notice on social media that someone is traveling in your area or has tagged one of your neighbouring businesses, say hello to them online and invite them to come to your tasting room.
Work Closely With Tour Operators
Let tour operators know what you are pouring or doing at the top of each day. Other things to consider that your local tour operators might like to know:
- Is there access to the winemaker?
- Are there night tours, or tours after hours? 8 PM? 11 PM?
- Do you offer any kind of food pairing experience?
- Do you offer any kind of behind-the-scenes experience?
- Is something taking place at the business that visitors can watch, such as harvest or bottling?
With this kind of information readily available, when bookings are made, the tour operators can find out what their customers are interested in, then take it from there and bring the visitors to wineries that meet the preferences and requests.
A Passport to Wine Country
This is a tried-and-true tactic that has worked in many wine regions: The visitor is invited to use a free or for-pay touring passport, visit X number of wineries, collect a stamp at each winery, and when a certain number of stamps is reached, earn a prize.
The passport encourages wineries in a region to send visitors to and from one another and provides a wide range of tasting experiences for those who are collecting the stamps. Note that overseeing the creation of a passport is something that does require a coordinated approach, budget, and a professional touch, so this is where the BC Wine Passport or regional wine associations come in.
Join Your Regional Wine Association
As noted above, there is strength in numbers, so play nice in the sandbox. Be willing to cooperate and share.
To have successful tourism you need to be proud of what your area offers; not just your own winery, vineyard, and people, but also those across the road.
Band together and pool resources to co-market yourselves, host events together, and so much more. When the wine country visitor is offered not just a single vineyard, but an entire region with diverse offerings that may also include cideries and places to eat, there is so much more potential for a diverse and memorable experience.
We’re all in this together, and our industry will give a stronger visitor experience if we all work to promote and support each other.
What ideas do you have to create and promote tourism?
Leeann Froese owns Town Hall Brands – a marketing and graphic design agency with 26 years experience branding and promoting beverage alcohol, food, and hospitality. See more at townhallbrands.com or on social @townhallbrands
