Brand Challenge
Sacre Bleu Wine is launching a new brand in Texas through the Central Market Grocery Chain and sought to engage wine loving Texans online prior to the June 15th launch in stores.
I have worked with Sacre Bleu for the past year on building their online presence and teaching their chief executive, Galen Struwe, how to use his personal social accounts, the company’s corporate social accounts and blog in a way that builds community and engages customers. When I understood the direction they were about to take in Texas, it became clear that they needed to cast a wide net for consumers that had not yet heard of the Sacre Belu brand in a specific geographic market.
Strategy
Our strategy was to create unbranded accounts across various social networks like Twitter and Facebook, provide general information about local wine events and interesting wine related news and finds.
The specific strategy for Twitter is to create an unbranded account that is 20% engagement, 80% automated Tweets where we push frequently read Texas wine bloggers, wine news and custom Google News feeds through RSS2Twitter to publish large volumes of area and wine specific content to the community. The account also uses Social Oomph to follow within the wine community and identify users that Tweet about wine from Texas. It is also set to auto follow all new followers to build community and SEO value for the profile. The profile was designed to push readers to the unbranded Facebook Page where the company can more fully engage with and message users. The Facebook page reached 100 fans within a day and claimed the custom URL VinoTexas. It also shares mostly generalized wine news and events in Texas with only occasional corporate messages to get the best engagement out of a community not yet familiar with the brand. The goal is to generate a large online community from Texas that is interested in wine and would be receptive the brand. By building trust with the community as a geographic specific wine resource page rather than as a corporate broadcast channel, when the company does message it’s fans, there is higher conversion on special offers and event announcements.
Once the fan numbers build and the launch date grows closer, a Texas Specific contest and landing page can be rolled out and traffic generated from the Facebook Page, Blog, email marketing and PPC. A single purpose landing page that offers a high value proposition for registration and incentivizes users to suggest the contest to friends through Facebook Connect, Gmail, Yahoo and Twitter can be used to not only generate buzz but also build community. The incentive for users to share the contest is to propose that for each friend they suggest that enters, they will receive an additional entry. This collection of registered contest users can be further leveraged through a Groupon style drip email campaign of succinct high value offers for local wine events, sponsored offers and other brand related events.
This total approach combines very simple technologies that funnel a geo specific group of online users with similar interests to conversion points through inbound and outbound marketing with minimal ad buys and a touch marketing campaign to keep the community engaged with the brand in ways that will incite action.
Testimonial
Good morning, Mary.
It was two weeks ago today that you submitted recommendations on how to enhance the social media effectiveness of our brand, Sacre Bleu, prior to our June 15th Texas launch.
Your strategy to create a separate (unbranded) Twitter page along with a separate Facebook Fan Page for the Twitter account has so far been brilliant. In just two weeks our VinoTexas Facebook Fan Page http://www.facebook.com/VinoTexas has added close to 500 fans while the Twitter VinoTexas platform is near 400 followers. http://twitter.com/VinoTexas
Creating these new platforms specific to Texas and apart from Sacre Bleu is innovation incarnate. I expect the impact of this effort to be measured in full in two months and at this pace of growth the Facebook page will likely see near 2000 fans, all of whom will be qualified to the extent that they enjoy wine and live in a market close to where the brand will be available.
Thank you, again.
Galen Struwe
Popularity: 8% [?]
