IN-HOUSE PUBLIC R E L AT I O N S
Create a conversation around your distillery
Public Relations, or PR, efforts could be described with some accuracy as an octopus: one entity with many different arms, all working in tandem to create a conversation around your distillery. If you are running your own PR, it’s unlikely that you will be able to see satisfying returns from just one of the many tools in the toolbox. Instead, you will have to maintain several different continuous endeavors. Among them are content marketing, outreach, and social media marketing.
CONTENT MARKETING Content marketing encompasses multiple formats of company-generated content that adds context to the product or service you offer. Blogging is a big aspect in content marketing and can be a successful tool. With minimal startup costs and resources, blogging is one of the most accessible tools to young businesses, though it is important to try to post regularly. The actual content of the blog posts should and will change as you explore different ideas. What’s key is to remember that the blog acts as an opportunity to showcase your expertise in your field. You have inherent and potentially untapped value that you can offer consumers through the knowledge that you’ve gained about distilling, spirits production, and cocktails. To succeed, you should think of your content as W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M
an effort to create and communicate that value to your customers through multiple channels and in different, fresh formats consistently over time. Sounds easy, huh? Yet it’s not as bad as it appears, or at least it’s more manageable that you might guess. First and foremost, don’t feel as though you need to immediately be posting on the blog twice a day every day. It’s unsustainable, especially at first as you get your bearings, and not likely to make the best impression on your audience. Focus instead on creating quality content rather than an enormous quantity. In the beginning, set an achievable goal — perhaps two blog posts a month, each totaling at least 1,200 words. The content of these posts should be related to the aspect of your business that makes you unique, usually referred to as your “unique selling proposition” (USP). This can act as a great guide for the body of your posts, so if you have not developed and written down your USP then it’s
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recommended that you do so. Your USP is elemental to setting your business apart from the competition, and as such it plays to your strengths and is based on what about your products make them uniquely valuable to consumers. That same element should be featured repeatedly throughout your blog posts in a variety of formats, including articles, listicles, PowerPoint presentations, videos, and more. The format of these posts should be changing and evolving, and you need to track the response to understand what delivery options work best for your audience. Be sure to cross-post the content on your blog to different social media platforms to maximize the impressions that you can make. The key to what you create, regardless of the specific format, is to offer episodic content, or content that is delivered in digestible amounts over regular intervals. This approach encourages website visitors to return to your site regularly to check what’s new for your page. Search engine optimization (SEO) elements such as word length, word choice, and backlinking will become important in time but don’t need to be top of mind right away. SEO can be an area of growth and focus as you continue to build out your online presence and the content offered on your website. Be sure to take time to research the basics of SEO before you start to apply it; the best approach when dealing with a website is a proactive one. 71
