It’s easy to get wrapped up with social media and digital or email marketing efforts these days and forget your winery's referral network. We all tend to forget about these face to face interactions that used to be the cornerstone of our business.
When it comes to business to business outreach for wineries, face to face meetings can still be your biggest strength. Creating and maintaining your winery's referral network requires a significant investment of time. In-person interactions will speed up your progress in this key winery marketing pillar.
You might be thinking, ‘I already have a referral network at my winery. X, Y, and Z are always sending customers to us and I have my tasting room manager drop off bottles at the key neighboring tasting rooms every few months.’ And that’s great! That’s more than many wineries do to nurture their referral network.
But… it’s not enough. A bottle of wine as a gift is great, but will it convince a concierge that the experience at your winery is one that will send their clients back to them impressed and thankful. And, unless they are given in response to a specific action, (for instance receiving a large number of referrals of high-value customers during a particular week and thanking that person for those referrals), it may not be very effective. Like Pavlov's dogs, referrers need to associate your reward with a specific action.
The most important things to the businesses and people who are thinking about sending customers to your winery are:
- What kind of experience will their customer have at your winery? If they are getting rave reviews from the customers they send, you should expect more! Encourage visitors to provide feedback to the referrer.
- What kind of relationship do they (the person doing the referring) have with your winery or a key representative of your winery? Building strong personal relationships takes time, but the long-term payoff is worth it! Plus you'll make a new friend.
- What are their customers looking for? Is your winery a fit? (for instance, if a referrer's customer is looking for a harvest event and you happen to have one on the calendar or the customer is looking for a winery with a bocce court and they like you better than the other two vineyards that have bocce courts……..etc)
The only way the people referring business to you can be confident in how amazing the experience is at your winery is to:
- Have it themselves (and this is why holding small industry outreach events to give these folks the same experiences you give to their guests/clients is so effective)
- Hear from multiple customers what a great time they had at your winery (in detail)
- Get to know your winery through your outreach efforts and come to see how serious you are about being a partner to them and making their clients happy
Since you can’t cover the first two options on as regular a basis, or as quickly as C, you should focus a majority of your effort on outreach. Doing C right will make B a reality (as long as your staff gives an excellent experience on site).
Outreach efforts that work:
- Create a spreadsheet of top target referrers. Include their contact information, a plan for when you will reach out to them, how you’ll be reaching out, and a space for notes on what happened.
- Dedicate 4 days minimum per month to complete the outreach. The implementation of your plan shouldn’t be random. This should be thought out. Hotel concierges and quality tour guides want different information and features than tasting room managers or tasting room staff. Make a plan that specifically focuses on filling the needs of the different types of businesses. Meet with the key people at these businesses to determine what their needs are. This is a valuable use of time!
- Creating support materials that make it easy for referrers to refer customers to your business. At a minimum, create one-page event flyers on high quality paper stock. Include all pertinent event details (date, contact information for reservations, description of event, location, etc) so that concierges, B&B owners, and tour guides have everything they need to suggest your event to their clients.
- Postcards, rack cards or whatever POS you have that is most effective/easily displayed and that includes a description of any special tastings or tours you offer, contact/reservation information and appealing images of your property.
- Special offers as applicable. It isn’t recommended to leave stacks of free tasting cards at tasting rooms, because this gives you no control over the type of customers you will receive nor does it guarantee any thought or planning on the tasting room staff’s part to send you good customers. Leaving cards for ‘Complimentary tasting experience’ or ‘complimentary guided tasting’ at nice B&B’s or hotels, however, does narrow the focus and, normally lead to better results as the recommendations are more person at these types of business.
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