If you own a craft brewery, you know how hard it is to rise above in a highly saturated marketplace. Craft breweries must fight not only the big-name beer brands but also the local rivals literally down the street and new entrants upping the ante on innovation and experimentation. How do you cut through the noise to attract and retain loyal customers who love your beer and your story?
How?
The answer is having a solid brand strategy. A brand strategy is way more than a logo, a name, or even a slogan. It articulates what your brewery stands for, what makes it different, and how it speaks to its audience. The brand strategy leads every other area of your business, from product development to marketing and customer service.
We will share some tips on implementing a brand strategy into your craft brewery that will make you stand out from the competition, connect with your target market, and grow your sales.
Tip #1: Define Your Brand Identity
Your brand identity is the core of your brand strategy. It is a mirror of who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Your brand identity should express your values, mission, and personality and correspond to your product quality, style, and culture.
The definition of your brand identity requires an idea regarding some key questions:
- What is your brewery’s story? How did you start, what inspired you, and what do you feel passionate about?
- What is your brewery’s vision? What are your goals, where to go, and how can you make a difference?
What is your brewery’s value proposition? What makes your beers different, better, or more appealing than others? - What is the voice of your brewery? How do you speak with your customers? What is the tone of voice that you use? What kind of words do you use?
- What does your brewery look like? How are you visually showing up? What are the colors used? What fonts do you use? What images and how do they all align with your voice?
Once you clearly know your brand identity, you can create a catchy name, a memorable logo, and a compelling slogan to capture the attention of your would-be customers and pass on the message.
Tip #2: Know your target audience
Your brand strategy should be adapted to fit your target audience’s needs, preferences, and expectations. Your target audience will be those individuals most likely to buy your beer, remain loyal to your brand, and be evangelists to others about your brewery. You’ll need to know who they are, what they want, and how they behave.
To know your target audience, you have to perform some market research, such as:
- Research your current or future customers through surveys or interviews to get an idea of their opinions, preferences, and satisfaction.
- Research data on your website, social media, or even sales platforms to track their behavior, interests, and demographics.
- Observe or interact with them, either in person or online, to learn about their lifestyles, hobbies, values, and personalities.
From this, you will be able to build customer personas. That means typical profiles of your target audience based on the research. Customer personas will be fictitious characters describing their characteristics, needs, goals, and challenges. You can use this to guide product development, marketing campaigns, and customer service.
Tip #3: Position yourself in the market
This would also permit your brand strategy to position yourself in the market. Your positioning in the market is how you want to be perceived by your target audience about your competitors. A niche needs to be sought out where one can offer something unique, valuable, and relevant that sets you apart from the rest.
You are required to position your brand in the market for which some competitive analysis needs to be done, such as:
- Identify who your main competitors are, their strengths and weaknesses, and their strategies.
- Compare them to yourself from a product quality, price, distribution, and reputation standpoint
- Based on this, you can decide what the gaps or opportunities are within the market you can fill or exploit
- Based on your analysis, you may develop a positioning statement or summary of how you want to be perceived by your target audience.
A positioning statement should address
- Who would you like to reach?
- What is your category/industry?
- What is your differentiation or key benefit?
- Why over others?
For example, here might be a positioning statement for a craft brewery:
“To beer aficionados who care about quality, craft and innovation, XYZ Brewery is the craft brewery that offers a diverse portfolio of unique and full-flavored beers created by passionate and imaginative people.”
Tip #4: Drive brand awareness
Your brand strategy should, therefore, focus on building your brand awareness. Brand awareness describes the degree at which target audiences recognize and remember one’s brand. It is important to increase your brand awareness in that it helps attract new customers, retain existing ones, and provide word-of-mouth referrals.
In building your brand awareness, you need to have some marketing tactics applied, such as:
- Set up a website and a blog for products, story, and values.
Be active in social media as a means to converse with your audience, distribute your content, and drive traffic to your events. - Join online or physical communities, forums, or groups related to your niche or industry.
- Partner with influential, popular bloggers, or media representatives with a wide or very active coverage in your target market.
- Events, contests, giveaways, and other activities that spotlight your brand and product.
- Hand out branded merchandise like stickers, coaster, and glassware.
Tip #5 – Measure and improve your brand performance
It shouldn’t be static; rather, it is dynamic and susceptible to change, considering the changing needs and preferences of your target audience and the development of new trends and challenges that surface in a market. You also have to measure and improve brand performance from time to time to make sure you achieve your goals and are competitive.
Some of the metrics and tools that should be used to measure and improve your brand performance include customer satisfaction. How happy are your customers with your products, your service, and your overall experience? Customer loyalty: how often do your customers buy from you, how much they spend, and how likely they are to recommend you to others?
- Customer retention: How many of your customers are sticking with you over time, for how long, and at what cost to keep them? Brand awareness: This is the number of people who recognize your brand, remember it, and mention the name.
- Brand reputation: How positive or negative the opinions and reviews of your brand are; perceived trustworthiness and credibility; how complaints or crises are dealt with. Brand equity: Market share, profitability, growth potential, customer loyalty-the value of your brand.
You might want to gather and analyze data on these metrics through direct surveys, interviews, or focus groups, supplemented by online reviews, social media analytics, web analytics, sales reports, or financial statements.
From these results, you could know about your strengths and weaknesses, developing from there a concept to adjust your brand strategy further.
The brand strategy will detail the roadmap to success of craft breweries. It helps in defining the brand identity, targeting the audience, positioning in the market, building brand awareness, and measuring and improving brand performance.
By following these tips, you’ll have a brand strategy that can make your craft brewery noticed, connect with your customers, and develop your business.