You need to sell more beer, but even excellent beer doesn’t sell itself. Your customers and their punters need to choose your pint from the vast array of other craft beers available before they can fall in love with it.
So, what can you do to come out on top at the bar? Enter our Sell More Beer 101. Here’s the first three points from our ‘to-do list’ to make your tipple top of the pile:
1. Excellent Beer
Yes, this is the basis of a successful brewery, but you know that already. You can work as hard as you like on everything else but without a quality beer you will soon be found out.
2. Know Your Stuff
You need to know your beer inside and out.
- What is in it?
- What flavours does it evoke on the palette?
- What does it pair with best when eating or snacking?
The more you can tell your buyers and end users about your beer the better.
For your buyers, this will inform sales advice to customers at the bar, food and drinks offers that may work for their venue and marketing assets that will help promote your product at point-of-sale.
Don’t forget that the same information repackaged is quality content for direct communications with your end users through social media and advertising.
The more you can support your customers with knowledge about the product and ways they can promote the product will make buying from you more attractive than your less helpful competition.
3. Create A Brand
Ok, this seems obvious, but it is easy to skip past the basics of knowing who your brand is targeting. “Surely, it’s for everyone because it is delicious?!” Well, yes and no. Or maybe you are thinking that it’s up to your customers to figure it out as they are the ones that have to sell it? Come on, this is your product and only you should be in charge of how the world views it.
You need to own and steer your brand to success. Don’t rely on any one element of your brand to carry you to profit. Thinking beyond the brewing process may not be your area of expertise but there are a few simple questions to help you find out where you fit in:
Ask yourself:
- What could your product be compared to?
- Where are you going to be selling your beer?
- Who are your customers for this product or each beer?
- Do you think you need a range of messaging to suit each different type of customer at different venues?
- How does the above influence what your product looks like? (its packaging, logo etc.)
Don’t copy or mimic another brand. You may be influenced by styles or know who you are positioning your product against but be careful about trying to be a new version of something that is already successful.
How to stand out:
- Be unique with your visual identity. It may not always be easy to be unique, but you should aspire to be.
- Create a list or scrapbook of things that relate to your beer. This could be flavors, places, images etc. These will help you shape your image for each beer or your whole brand.
- Test your ideas out on your co-workers and do some research online to make sure nothing too similar already exists. Your assumptions about who your target market is should be tested before you invest a lot of your time and money in a full campaign.
The key is not to have a branding idea and try to force your product to fit in with it. ALWAYS start from your product. Your beer is the star of the show and everything else should support and reiterate what makes your product special.
Join me again for Part two of this Sell More Beer 101 blog next week to learn how to tackle social media, how to make the most of your team and how to break the mould when it comes to brewery sales techniques.
