10 Digital Tools Every Wine Marketer Should Check Out
The number of free and paid digital tools available to marketers keeps multiplying.
In the relentlessly competitive world of wine, marketers can be so consumed with creating content, planning email campaigns and reporting to ownership, that little time is left to explore tools that could likely improve efficiency and insight. That’s where we come in.
In our consultations with wineries, importers and restaurants, we keep returning to the following 10 tools. Some of these might be new to you; others you likely already use. We’re also well aware that marketing budgets can be tight depending on the size of your operation, so the tools below also give you the most bang for your buck. They are presented in random order.
Copy.ai
Cost: Free 7-day trial, then $35/month.
We’ve all been there. It’s getting late in the workday, and you still have a blog post to write and Instagram posts to create for the 3 brands in your portfolio. You’ve been seized by writer’s block. Thankfully, there’s Copy.ai, a helpful but developing online tool designed to get those creative juices flowing.
Copy.ai uses artificial intelligence to help you nail down everything from an Instagram caption, to blog headlines and topics, SEO keywords, email subject lines and much, much more.
Copy.ai is only as effective as the parameters you give it. You enter your product or brand name, and then in 400 characters or fewer explain what you want your blog post, Instagram post or email to accomplish.
Once you click “Create,” the system returns 10 ideas based on your parameters. If you find any one or more of the 10 especially intriguing, you can click on that idea for 10 additional ideas based on the original.
Copy.ai is still perfecting its technology — some of the ideas it generates will not be usable — but it is sophisticated enough to at least get you unstuck.
Using Copy.ai to come up with an email subject line.
Canva
Cost: They have a “forever free” plan, but for $12.99/month ($9.99/month if you pay annually), you get vastly more free templates, an image background remover (which I love) and the ability to post to your social networks directly from Canva. The paid versions all offer a free trial.
Canva! Of course, Canva! Once you’ve used Copy.ai to help you with your Instagram caption, now you can create the post (and a billion other things) in Canva.
Incredibly easy and intuitive to use, Canva has given confidence to legions of marketers for whom graphic design is not their forte. We mention them here because we believe they have thoroughly distanced themselves from their competitors.
Certainly there are graphic design projects that call for more sophisticated software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. For more common tasks such as designing an invitation to your summer wine club dinner, putting together an attractive presentation for your boss, or fashioning a perfectly proportioned post for all the major social networks, Canva is a must.
When they say “Design Anything” they’re not kidding.
Moz for SEO
Cost: 30-day free trial for Moz Pro, then $99/month for Lite version ($79/month if paid annually) and $149/month for Medium version ($119/month if paid annually).
With thousands of wineries and wine retailers competing for space on the first or second page of Google Search for keywords such as “Cabernet Sauvignon” and “smooth red wine”, an SEO strategy is a must.
Moz is one of three outstanding online SEO tools to assist marketers with keyword research, on-page content optimization, link research and more. The other two are Semrush and Ahrefs. You can’t go wrong with any of them, but Moz is our choice for the following reasons:
Superior customer service.
Ease of use. Reporting easy to digest.
While Semrush has more features than Moz, including a robust suite of content marketing tools, Moz is strictly focused on SEO and as such is more affordable.
Moz has a better Link Explorer tool than Ahrefs or Semrush. Keywords are not the only thing that optimizes a page’s ranking on Google Search. Domain and page reputation are also factors. The quality of a website’s backlinks heavily influences domain and page reputation, and Moz does an excellent job of telling you which backlinks are helping you and which are not.
A quick reminder is in order. SEO success involves playing the long game. Moz’s tools will help you create and monitor the progress of your SEO strategy, but it will not catapult your website to Google Search’s first page overnight. This is especially true if you have a new brand whose website has recently launched.
Builtwith.com
Cost: Free. As a B2C marketer, the free plan is sufficient.
Though primarily a B2B platform, Builtwith.com has some useful features for B2C marketers. The good news is that these features are included in the free plan. Paid plans get expensive.
Wine is one of the most competitive industries on earth, so it behooves you — does this even need to be said? — to keep tabs on what your competition is doing.
Builtwith.com allows you to enter any website domain, and then it returns a full technological profile of that website, specifically its widgets, analytics, frameworks, content management systems, advertisers, content delivery networks, web standards and web servers.
How does this help you? Let’s say you need to add an ecommerce solution or switch to a new one. Builtwith.com shows you what the competition is using, and you can narrow down the number of platforms to research.
You can even create a list of sites with specific keywords on the homepage, i.e., “wine,” then filter by technology, technology spend and more.
Using Builtwith.com to see what digital tools the competition is using.
Google Data Studio
Cost: Free. Its main competitor Tableau starts at $70/user/month.
Presenting monthly KPI reports and other website analytics dashboards to management is a fact of life for marketers. Of course, the goal is to make the data quickly digestible for those who are not as close to your campaigns as you are.
In terms of cost, Google Data Studio, which integrates with Google Analytics, Google Search Console and much more, is your best bet. While it doesn’t have the broader functionality and number of calculation functions as its main competitor, Tableau, Data Studio’s learning curve is not as steep.
That said, if you’re responsible for gathering and presenting marketing data for an enterprise-level wine company, you should probably master Tableau. If your operation is smaller and you rely more exclusively on Google data tools, then Data Studio will likely work.
The good news is that third-party data connectors (free and paid) are popping up regularly on Data Studio, which allows for more robust reporting, such as social media paid ads, Hubspot and MailChimp campaign results, and more.
Kickbox
Cost: Based on the number of emails needing verification. $5 verifies 500 emails; $4,000 verifies 1 million emails.
How long has it been since you’ve “cleaned” your email database? Much ink has been spilled touting the connection between clean data and higher levels of email deliverability.
For example, repeatedly sending email campaigns to emails that bounce (whether hard or soft) can slowly erode your domain reputation, thus reducing the likelihood that all your good emails will make it into inboxes. If your bounce rate is greater than 5% you need to take action. Yesterday.
Here’s how it works. You download your email database into a CSV file then upload it to Kickbox. The platform then generates a report detailing which emails are deliverable, which are not, and why. How can you use this information?
See which emails bounce because of a simple misspelling. (You can correct these.)
Hard bounces connected to non-buyers can be deleted from the database.
For hard or soft bounces connected to buyers, you can pick up the phone to verify the correct email.
Depending on the number of emails you add per quarter, you might only need to use Kickbox on an annual or bi-annual basis. If email is one of your top sales channels, then not using Kickbox is akin to leaving money on the table.
Zencastr for Podcasting
Cost: Free for up to 2 guests and 8 hours/month of recording time. For more than 2 guests or 8 hours/month of recording time, cost is $20/month.
Podcasting is a form of content marketing, and while it isn’t the right channel for everyone, if done well it can be an excellent value-add for existing and/or future customers.
Major wine publications such as Wine Enthusiast have jumped on board, and even hardcore wine-loving consumers have made podcasting part of their livelihood. Case in point: Wine for Normal People.
With the exception of Shafer Vineyards, wineries have been a bit slower to adopt podcasting, which is completely understandable. It can take a good deal of work to plan, record and edit a podcast. A successful podcast also requires an entertaining and engaging host who can keep things moving and has an infectious enthusiasm for the topic being discussed.
With social media posting, blog writing and email marketing taking precedence in most marketers’ schedules, it’s no surprise that podcasting can take a back seat, but consider the following. When you have a new wine club shipment scheduled, you could simply put the winemaker notes in an email and blast it out, or in that email you could post a link to a podcast where you interview the winemaker about why the wines in that release are so special.
It might sound like a small thing, but hearing the winemaker’s voice and the enthusiasm contained it can foster much more of a connection with the club member tuning in. The same goes for a chef explaining how to prepare an easy dish to compliment a wine in the shipment, or your barrel rep explaining why French oak is the perfect “seasoning” for your Sonoma Coast Chardonnay. The list goes on.
Pro tip: Make a podcast exclusive to your club members. It can be yet another way of adding value to their membership.
Which brings us to Zencastr. Here’s how it works. You send a link to your podcast guest(s). They click, you record, and then Zencastr mixes the audio automatically. It goes without saying that you need a strong wifi connection and a reliable microphone. Don’t rely on your computer’s built-in microphone if you want the best audio.
If there are serious flubs in the podcast that need to be edited out, you’ll need to download the master file and edit in another platform such as Audacity.
One final consideration. If you want your podcast to be available on iTunes, Spotify, etc., you’ll need to upload the final cut to a hosting platform such as Anchor or Buzzsprout. Zencaster is simply an affordable recording platform, not a hosting platform.
Zencastr’s intuitive podcasting interface.
Planoly for Social Media Management
Cost: Free for 2 social media accounts and 30 total monthly posts between them. $9/month for 2 accounts (one unlimited posts, one 30 posts/month). $19/month for 2 accounts and unlimited posts between them. $29/month for more than 2 accounts and unlimited posts among them. If you have dozens of accounts to manage the monthly cost will be higher.
Planoly? Really? Hold on.
If you run a smallish organization with limited resources, Planoly might be the right choice for you. Its specialty is Instagram and Pinterest, though it lets you push your IG posts to Facebook. It has an excellent planning interface, the ability to publish posts automatically, and rich analytics. You can even use Planoly to post IG Stories.
Planoly even has the ability to edit shoppable links for your posts, which is key if you want to promote your ecommerce business. It even has a tool that allows you to split a photo into separate posts which creates a fun visualization in your grid.
Now, if you run dozens of social media accounts then the obvious choice is Hootsuite, which starts at $49/month.
Google Tag Manager
Cost: Free
First of all, I don’t mention Google Analytics in this blog post because I assume you’re already using it.
Second, this section could easily be its own blog post. (That post is already in the works.)
Think of Google Tag Manager as a way of supercharging your Google Analytics reporting. Tag Manager is especially useful now that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is on the ascent.
You’re probably well acquainted with Universal Analytics, the version of Google Analytics that has been in play for several years, and you most likely have several “Goals” set up in that system. While we don’t yet have a confirmed date, there is the likely possibility that Universal Analytics will be phased out in favor of GA4.
Goals don’t exist in GA4. They’ve been replaced by Events, and while several Events are built in to GA4, Tag Manager allows for a granularity in your Events reporting that can only help you in your marketing efforts.
If you’ve never used Tag Manager, there is a bit of a learning curve. You’ll need to understand the interplay of Containers, Tags, Triggers and Variables, but once you do, a universe of reporting possibilities opens up.
For example — and this is a really basic one — GA4 will automatically track any clicks that happen on your website. But what if you want to see how many of those clicks are on a specific button in your checkout process? That’s where Tag Manager steps in. If set up correctly, and integrated with GA4, you can see these particular clicks in your Event reports.
What about video views and form submissions? Again, Tag Manager can track these specific website actions.
If you are new to Tag Manager, I highly recommend the YouTube tutorials from Australia-based Loves Data.
AppSumo
Cost: Free to join their mailing list.
I’ve been on the AppSumo mailing list for close to a decade now. It’s not a tool per se; rather, its daily emails let you know about relatively unknown digital tools that could boost your business, at obscenely reasonable prices. It operates on a flash sale model, so its prices are only good for a matter of hours.
To be fair, many of the tools they promote have been better duplicated elsewhere. They recently highlighted a tool called Email List Validation, which is essentially a clone of Kickbox. (See above.)
Every once in a while, you’ll find something you need. For us, that took the form of a little tool called Keyword Hero.
A couple years ago, we were having some issues with “(not provided)” popping up in our Google Analytics Search Query report. Keyword Hero eliminated “(not provided)” and showed us the exact keywords our customers used to find us on Google Search, including what they did when they arrived at our site.
AppSumo won’t change your life, but their daily emails are worth a read every morning. One of their tools might make your workday that much more efficient.
A Bonus Tool: Pexels
Cost: Free
If your social media feeds and/or website need a photo refresh, Pexels might be your lifeline. Think of it as a free version of iStockPhoto.com. It can never be a substitute for your in-house organic content, but if you’re in a pinch, it you’ll be glad it exists.