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Katrice Sutherland, GM of beloved boutique winery Lightning Rock, talks about a holistic marketing approach that combines social media, emails, events, and little surprise gifts to keep you top of mind to your customers.

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Sean Corbett:
Good day, everybody. It’s Sean Corbett here again at Websites.ca Marketing. Today, rather than drilling down into a specific online-offline marketing topic, we’re going to speak in more general terms about how the marketing for a small business works from a high-up bird’s eye point view. We’re joined by a general manager who’s also in charge of marketing at a boutique family-run winery in the Okanagan. That winery is Lightning Rock and that manager is Katrice Sutherland. Hey, Katrice. What’s up?

Katrice Sutherland:
Hello. Thanks for having me.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, thanks for coming. So why don’t we just jump right into it. Tell us, give us an overview of the general marketing operations you do at the winery.

Katrice Sutherland:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we are super small, family run. So a lot of our marketing, as you can imagine, is done in-house. We’re very fortunate that we do also partner with the Bottleneck Drive Association, which helps account for some of our marketing on a grander scale for the region. But in-house, a lot of our marketing is social media based. We’ve got a couple different sales channels that we work through with web sales, wine club sales, wholesale, and alongside all of those channels are also several opportunities for marketing as well.

Sean Corbett:
So you do live events, you do online events, and then you said e-commerce, email and social media, mainly.

Katrice Sutherland:
Yep.

Sean Corbett:
Okay. So from that high-up 50,000-foot view, I was going to ask you what is your strategy for creating and releasing content, specifically social media content, but it can also be email content and other promotions?

Katrice Sutherland:
The biggest strategy I would say is making sure that your content is authentic and includes anecdotes and personal experiences. That is the driving force to connecting with your audience, and that will keep the audience intrigued.

Sean Corbett:
Right. So specifically, what do you guys do? Do you have a schedule? Do you say, “I want to do one piece of content per week that, I don’t know, that peels back the layer in our business, and then one piece of content that promotes a product?” Do you differentiate and plan it like that?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yep. So on a monthly basis, we do one email that goes out, and we call it our 10 things email. And it’s short little spurts that sum up what we’ve been up to throughout the winery. So that gives you an overview of our events, what’s happening on the winery side, what happens in the vineyard, fun little anecdotes that maybe happened on a personal level for some of our team, or it’s a good opportunity to shout out to fellow businesses in the community that we’ve partnered with. On the social media side, we post on a more regular basis. We’d love to build up our email strategy so that we’re offering more emails throughout the month, but right now, we’re just focusing on that one. Social media gives you a behind the scenes glimpse on a day-to-day basis. So we tend to post there between five to seven times a week.

Sean Corbett:
Right. And that’s also a mix of what you were talking about, giving shine to community members, talking about new products, showing the day-to-day operations in the winery, things like that.

Katrice Sutherland:
Yeah.

Sean Corbett:
Okay. And just to clarify, you said one email a month, but obviously, I’m on your list and I know for a fact that you send more emails because you also sell products, correct?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yes. So we’ll also do feature emails where we’ll take a single product and tell you all about it, the vineyard site that it comes from, the quality, unique features of the product, sometimes just about the vineyard owners. We have also done an email structure so that we’re reaching out to our club members on our VIP list on a frequent basis to let them know of any changes in the company or upcoming events. And yeah, our public reach right now is on the quieter side, but is because we want to reserve that conversation for our VIPs and our super fans that decide to sign up to the club.

Sean Corbett:
Which is a lot driven by in-person visits. Is that right?

Katrice Sutherland:
Absolutely. So our biggest marketing opportunity is right on the home field in the tasting room throughout the tasting season.

Sean Corbett:
Right. Yeah, so I think sometimes, and that leads into my next question, but a lot of business owners maybe who listen to this or just in general who are looking to improve online are thinking of approaching new customers cold from online channels. And what a lot of businesses are doing, and I’ve observed you guys do, is that you are creating a great experience for your visitors in person because of course, the business runs like that with people coming in, and then you’re making these touchpoints online in different areas. So now, they’re more familiar with what you’re doing. You’re not necessarily relying on online to bring them in, but to keep them and to turn them into better customers. Is that right?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yes.

Sean Corbett:
Okay.

Katrice Sutherland:
A lot of our conversions come from either recommendations from other wineries in the area or from retails, retail settings or restaurant settings where our wines are featured on really well recognized wine lists put together by sommeliers who have either come to visit us or tasted us again through word of mouth from one of our other suppliers. So by the time you get to the tasting room, you already have a general idea of what you’re getting into. And when you’re there, it’s more about developing an experience. And for us, the goal with our marketing moving forward is that you take that experience that you had and enjoy it outside of the products and services that we’re giving you.

Sean Corbett:
That kind of leads into also joint ventures and things like that, like you said, with restaurants and so on in your case, but small businesses could think whatever plays to their industry. So in most industries, what I’ve noticed is there’s a disconnect between what the owner expects and is aware of and what the marketer can do or what’ll be effective marketing. And we have mostly small business owners listening to this. So obviously, I’m asking this question in good faith, not to down-put anybody, but just to help them understand where the marketer’s coming from. Could you tell us a few misconceptions that owners in your industry typically have about the types of marketing that you’re doing?

Katrice Sutherland:
That you should not send a ton of emails out. You should absolutely be hitting up your pre-vetted list as much as humanly possible. Every single email that you send, whether it’s an anecdote or a product feature or announcement of something happening at your winery, can have a link to a sale. And nine times out of 10, those sales are going to, or those links are going to convert to sales for you. One of the things that I think owners worry about is that you’re going to push your list to the point that they unsubscribe and that you lose people who might have someday one day in the future purchase wine or any product that you’re offering. But the truth of it is, is you’re dwindling your list and you’re focusing in so that you’re only left with people who are super fans that you know for sure are going to buy repeat purchase.
And at that point, you have an opportunity to not only offer them more products, but to get to know them and build rapport, and they then themselves become a sales channel on your behalf. One of the things that we’ve done, for example, is really key into our wine club members because they are super passionate about what we’re doing. They’re passionate about our vineyard stewardship, they’re excited about the product, they’re excited about the events. So there’s no better person to market it than those super fans. They take pictures at the events, post them to their social media page. They’re drinking wine, they pull it out at dinner parties. This kind of conversation is what brings in new people to our sales channel.

Sean Corbett:
And what about for, I understand there’s content, like you said, that the customers produce, but there’s also content that you guys make, let’s say, for social media. And do owners or other managers ever have misconceptions when it comes to creating content, say for instance, it has to be done in a super professional way, or we have to come up with something very creative or anything like that that you’ve encountered?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yep, absolutely. I think the dynamic of that depends on what your branding outline is though. Because for example, there are some wineries who have taken a very hands-off approach with their marketing where the only pictures that you will see on their page is really clean-cut photos of the vineyard, only photos of brand new released wines. There’s not a lot of interaction votes, staff, or the faces of the business. They don’t tell you the in behind the scenes secrets. It’s very polished. And if that’s your style, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you are missing some opportunities to connect with people who are looking for more in-depth.
The worst thing that happens is… The worst thing that happens with putting out more content is that maybe that content doesn’t hit every single time, but the benefit to that is that you’re now hitting self-segmenting groups. You’re getting people who love that insider scoop that are going to interact with the insider scoop content. And the people who like that professional more polished look, that’s great to reach new clients who are for the first time seeing your company and want to vet if it’s of quality.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, it ties back into that authenticity thing you were saying at the start of the conversation that some people can be very scared about showing their, I don’t know, it could be the messy office of the business owner on video, or they’re not perfect on camera or whatever. And they don’t realize how much of us as an audience, not marketers, but as an audience, when we are interested in a brand or a product, that kind of thing is probably the most memorable and titillating content. It’s just not comfortable for the person who’s asked to do it for the first time.

Katrice Sutherland:
I think it’s because we are not trained to be unapologetic about the way that we operate business or the way that we’re perceived by other people. Of course, you always want to put your best foot forward in a business setting because the risk is that your bottom line decreases if you do it wrong. But that being said is you don’t know if it’s wrong for your business and your clients and your audience until you try it. So the great thing about social media, for example, is that you have access to such a multitude of insights and reporting features. You can actually track, gage and then reposition yourself. If, let’s say, the video of your messy office doesn’t fly and people aren’t engaging with it, don’t post that style again. Try something else. And the ones that you do post and you find out when the best time to post is, you start building your repetition that way. You start building your content to suit your audience in that way.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, I think the tendency is to believe that if you don’t do a great piece of content, people will hate it or get mad when the reality is people will just ignore it and completely forget about it. So from that sense, every new piece of content’s a blank slate, and folks needn’t be worried about it. I mean, that would be a great problem to have if people were getting mad at your content because you would be doing at least something right. So my final sort of serious question that I had is I usually ask all of our guests to provide a few easy wins to the audience, something they can take away from the podcast and go in action immediately.
But in your case, I wanted to focus on a specific here in our conversation. It’s something that I know that you do that we haven’t really talked about yet on this episode, and we’ve never really talked about it before on the podcast. And that’s the little gifts, surprises, or fascinators that you give to your wine club members that you work into your business, particularly the physical and tactile stuff. So I wondered maybe if you could just guide us quickly through the concept and then give a few examples of what you do, why you do it, and some of the outcomes from that.

Katrice Sutherland:
Yeah. So for our wine club members, when you receive your quarterly wine shipment, of course, you get your six bottles of delicious wine, no-brainer. And it’s really good, and you’re going to be excited when you open that box either way. But what the goal is for us, by adding these additional little gifts, is to drop little tidbits of excitement into your life, we’ll just sprinkle it in there, that goes beyond you opening those bottles of wine. So for example, most recently, we have done in our wine club packs a branded corkscrew. Now, only one of our bottles… In the future, we actually switched over to a selfing cap, which doesn’t require a corkscrew, but we have one bottle that came in their pack that has a cork. But that corkscrew, they’ll use on that one bottle that one time, and then it’s going to get pulled out for every single bottle of wine that they open that isn’t ours.
It’s a constant drip reminder that we’re their friends and we’re reliable, and the brand is going to be in their face every time they touch it, and it’s going to be a marketing feature for their guests whenever guests come over and see it. We always make sure to choose some type of higher quality gift that makes them feel special. But we also have taken an angle over the last year where we do more childlike wonder gifts, and the goal of that is to just create a little excitement in your life. So we did blowing bubbles, which sounds really silly, but we turned it and focus it so that it was relatable to the winery as well. So the bubbles were locally made, the essential oils that we added to them were locally made, and then we add a “here’s what we envision you doing with this” postcard.

Sean Corbett:
That was included in the shipment that you sent out?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yep.

Sean Corbett:
Okay. And of course, no one knew that was coming. They just expected wine.

Katrice Sutherland:
Yep.

Sean Corbett:
Okay.

Katrice Sutherland:
So that for us was a bubbles release. We actually put out three bottles of sparkling wine in that pack, and you got this little thing of bubbles and it said, “Here’s what we envision, is you will blow these bubbles at night before you head to bed. The bubbles pop in your room. It becomes a sense of aromatherapy.” You’ve now created this tactile visual experience that involves, this sounds weird, but it involves their mouth. And so we made a joke like, “You can go straight from blowing bubbles to sipping bubbles. Enjoy.” And the amount of people who have come back and given us feedback and said like, “Oh, we love that. It was so cute,” or, “I think this is silly, but my kids thought it was awesome.” We’re looking to make sure that everyone who’s involved in the experience, be it the adults opening the box or the kids that are sitting at the kitchen table with the adults opening the box, have something exciting to look forward to.

Sean Corbett:
And then I’m sure a lot of those people not only came back and told you the next time they visited, but they probably did social media posts and tagged you on your behalf, right?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yes.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah. And so yeah, that’s what my marketing mentor says about creating unpaid marketing interns to go out into the world and do your work for you. So that sounds great. Well, Katrice, tell us what’s upcoming for Lightning Rock and how can the listeners find you guys and buy your wine?

Katrice Sutherland:
This year is very exciting. We have lots of new events coming out over the 2023 summer season. We’re doing, for the first year ever, some live music and food truck popups. We’ve got a couple of very talented chefs and caterers coming to host pop-up dinners on site at the vineyard, and of course, a whole slew of brand new wine products that are being released for the very first time, as well as vintage renewals. We’re definitely excited to have people join the wine club, which is where you access those brand new releases for the first time. Try to keep it exclusive for you guys. So if you’re interested in grabbing some of those wines, slide on over to our website, it’s lightningrockwinery.com. And take a peek, see if it matches.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. We’ll put that in the show notes. So final word goes to you, Katrice. Anything else you want to say just about a general overview of marketing for a small business?

Katrice Sutherland:
Yes. Your people are the most important part of your business. The people that you hire, they have amazing visions with how to connect with the people who are your clients. So in both sides, always looking to the people, looking for ideas from your people, looking to entice your clients, looking to make sure that your people are taken care of in every way possible. This year, one of the most interesting things that I’ve discussed with my owner was an approach called 33 Touchpoints. And the concept is just that every single person on our list and every single client, and as much as we can, every person that interacts with our business, we try to be in touch with them 33 times within a year. And what that does is builds that rapport and those relationships, that trustworthiness. And quite honestly, it can be a really amazing generator for new ideas as well. So yeah, don’t be afraid to reach out to your people and get your people involved. And yeah.

Sean Corbett:
There you go. Yeah, marketing feeds back in on itself, and then the audience generates more ideas for you based on their reactions to current assets and ideas. That’s awesome. Kat, thanks for being here today.

Katrice Sutherland:
Thanks for having me.

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