3 Floyds | Joe Steigerwald
Jason, the 3 Floyds team and anyone else that may have happened upon this page, welcome. Before we get started and review some strategies and ideas for brand awareness, branding building, and marketing, I'd like to thank you for considering me for the Marketing Director role. I'm a big fan of the 3 Floyds brands and products. I've also heard great things about the team and would love to be a part of it to help grow the 3 Floyds brand even more. If you have any questions about this site's content, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Cheers, Joe
Use Your audience to grow your audience
3 Floyds has a good start for followership across social platforms. As of the day that I created this site (8.26.2020) here’s how the 3 Floyd’s social audiences stack up:
106k Instagram followers (103k Brewery & 3k Brew Pub)
113k Twitter Followers (88k Brewery, 25k Brew Pub),
144k Facebook Followers (62k Brewery & 82k Brew Pub)
Additionally, the 3 Floyds site sees just under 50k hits on average per day over the last month.
Overall that’s an audience of 413k. For the sake of this demonstration, let’s assume that 25% of the audience overlaps. So we’re working with a base of 309k.
So far, almost all of the traffic to 3Floyds.com has been direct (65%) and search (30%). There is an opportunity to diversify the web traffic and gain more of it.
The strategy that I plan to run is designed to grow, diversify, and increase web and social traffic. Here’s how I set it up and how it works. This works to grow followership in established markets and is easy to roll out to get ahead of new distribution markets.
Email - Email is a great way to keep in touch with the audience that you have already built through social channels and your web traffic. I propose beginning to build on your existing database of email addresses from past events and then building on that audience by installing signup widgets on 3 Floyds sites, and running ongoing signup campaigns on social channels. These could be passive or paid, depending on current campaigns.
To start, email content would be a simple event and release-driven email to subscribers covering all 3 Floyd brands. Once we assess the effectiveness of those communications, smaller interest-based communication will follow. Tracking opens, clicks and traffic from these emails is an excellent indicator of customer interest and can gauge interest in future releases and events.
To see some samples of past recurring emails that I designed and sent, click here.
Retargeting - The 3 Floyds site is already seeing 40k-50k visitors daily (as of 8.26.2020). A great way to re-engage with people that have already shown interest in the brand by visiting your sites is to retarget visitors on social and search channels. These messages can be tailored to quick and easy brand messages or product-specific messages based on pages that they last visited. By setting up retargeting campaigns, we’ll see a higher monthly average in traffic (specifically return traffic) and use bounced traffic to 3 Floyds advantage. The bounce rate in July 2020 was 35.25%, which increased month-over-month from June by 12.8%. Retargeting will use that typically negative stat to 3 Floyds advantage.
Paid Ads - Using insights from 3 Floyds established audience, we can run paid ads on social and search channels. I realize that there might be an aversion to running traditional “buy-now” style ads for 3 Floyds, and I agree with that sentiment. Instead, I propose using paid ads to direct traffic to the 3 Floyds sites, sign up for email newsletters, short-term ads for events (Dark Lord Day), and direct physical traffic to the tasting rooms, bars, and bottle shops that serve 3 Floyds products.
Focus on the people that make it all happen
One of the best assets that 3 Floyds has is their team. From an outsider’s perspective, I have noticed on social posts and in news article comments that any time that the 3 Floyds team is highlighted, the comments are incredibly positive. A significant part of the content strategy that I recommend is to feature the people that make a product. In a past role, I created an entire recurring block of content based around a Master Sommelier (example here), and an Executive Chef (example here). Once I decided on a thematic direction for the content each month, I assigned tasks to my team to create videos, newsletters, and social media content. These pieces regularly performed very well and did a great job of diversifying the social, email, and web content.
At 3 Floyds, there are even more opportunities to focus on the team that makes everything happen. I’d work with the team on creating frequent, diverse content that allows viewers a “peek behind the curtain” at 3 Floyds. I would focus on the following categories and teams to begin to draft content and content schedules - The Brewery, BrewPub, Distillery, and Warpigs.
Long-Form Content, for curious drinkers and super-fans
A way for 3 Floyds to connect with fans and the potential customer beyond the beer and spirits is through entertaining content to passively consume. An excellent way to tell brand stories is by creating and regularly publishing a 3 Floyds branded podcast. It also allows the team to co-brand and collaborate with other like-minded breweries, alcohol producers, bands, and creatives to produce a fun show that's engaging.
Good content goes a long way to establish a brand and gives customers a reason to return to your properties (physical and digital) in the future. I imagine that 3 Floyds has a backlog of stories to tell about the beer, spirits, brewing, bands that inspired the product, pop-culture, and personal stories. Carefully crafted brand podcasts expand on the team's background and the lore behind the characters on the label, the beer in the bottle, and the product's creators. As the audience grows, the marketing potential of the show also increases exponentially.
In the past, I produced a branded podcast for Cooper's Hawk "Off the Cuff with John Inserra." The show's purpose was to give current and potential employees a view of the company's corporate culture (check out the show here.)