I had the honor of presenting at the 2024 Idaho Wine Meeting alongside Eric Degerman, CEO of Great Northwest Wine. This annual gathering brings together professionals from the Idaho wine industry across the entire state to connect and learn about industry trends. The small but mighty team at the Idaho Wine Commission did a fantastic job organizing multiple educational sessions featuring leading industry experts. One of these sessions focused on ‘How to Build a Media Kit,’ where Eric Degerman expertly shared tips and tricks on what journalists look for when writing a story. In my segment, I expanded on Eric’s insights by discussing the importance of aligning a winery website with these journalists’, bloggers’, and influencers’ expectations, ensuring wineries provide relevant and easy-to-find content.
For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a recap of the session, primarily focusing on how you can make simple updates to your website to be more approachable to wine writers.
15 Second rule
I’ll begin by emphasizing the importance of ensuring your website is easy to navigate. Let’s imagine a scenario: a wine blogger hears about your epic Harvest Party and wants to feature it in her blog that reaches over 100 thousand subscribers. The blogger visits your website looking for information about the event, where the details should be readily available. However, after clicking through several tabs on your website, she is unable to find any information about the event. Considering the 15-second rule—that’s approximately how long a user will stay on a website—it’s crucial to make sure your website is user-friendly and information is easily accessible. In this scenario, the difficulty navigating the website resulted in missed exposure and lost ticket sales because the blogger could not find the information she needed. To prevent this, let’s ensure your website provides easy and quick access to important information, starting with this easy hack that I like to call the One Click Rule.
One Click rule
The One Click Rule guarantees that essential information is just a single click away. Now, let me break it down for you. Open a separate window or use your phone to navigate to your winery’s website. Count the number of clicks it takes to reach your online wine shop. Ideally, your wine shop should be accessible from the home page with just one click. How many clicks did you count on your website?
Side note: I’ve noticed wineries using Vinoshipper often require multiple clicks to reach the wine shop. While Vinoshipper is a great solution for shipping wines to states with strict laws, depending on how the website is set up, there can potentially be unnecessary steps introduced. Here’s a screenshot example of what I’m referring to down below. On a Vinsoshipper website before I can see the wine list, I am first directed to a page to select where I want to ship. While This may be easy to navigate for some, I’ve observed how easily a certain demographic can get overwhelmed by even minor additional steps in website navigation leading to giving up the entire transaction. We don’t want you to miss out on any online sales! The best way to avoid potential confusion is to apply the One Click Rule across all your pages. This not only enhances user experience but also provides quicker access to information.
Don’t worry if you’re using Vinoshipper. There is a way to streamline your website with Vinoshipper to achieve the one click approach. I spoke with Vinoshipper and they mentioned there is no additional cost to combine all the shipping options for in-state and out of state. Talk to your Vinoshipper representative to get that started.
Write for your audience
Now that we’ve got the basics of website navigation sorted, let’s dive into making sure that the content on each page aligns with what journalists and customers are seeking. Let’s start with a scenario. Let’s say there is a wine journalist who is writing an article about Malbec. There are two Malbecs that he loves, but he only has room for one more Malbec to include in his article. He’s short on time so he decides to check out details of the two Malbecs online. Malbec #1 has a decent wine description that outlines the nose, palate, and finish. Malbec #2 has the notes, plus all the award badges, plus food pairing suggestions, and even a story about the label of the bottle. I think it is an easy choice to move forward with Malbec #2. So to what extent should you expand your wine descriptions?
Customer PErsona Activity
Here is my advice: when you’re writing, make sure you’re speaking directly to your target audience, and throw in some juicy details that wine journalists would appreciate. During my presentation, we did a group activity to put this into practice. Each group was assigned a ‘customer type.’ Then, we brainstormed what kind of wine-related information would appeal to each customer type based on the descriptions provided. Now, obviously, we can’t do a group activity here on a blog, but I’ll break it down for you so you can see how it works and apply it to your own writing.
Here is one of the customer types from the activity. A chef named Jeremy Allen White. As a group, we decided to include the following components in the wine descriptions for this customer type:
Elaborate food pairings
Details about the terroir
A list of restaurants the wine is available in
Technical notes
Grape varietals
Winemaking process
A list of accolades
A few other notable customer types used in this activity were a college student named Reece Witherspoon, a sommelier named Sandra Bullock, a health coach named George Lopez, an influencer named Kim Kardashian, and a wine journalist named Denzel Washington. This exercise was a fun way to spark ideas for expanding wine descriptions with relevant details. While the options are endless, the focus remains on content that resonates with our actual customers. This not only enriches their online buying experience but also assists wine journalists in gathering information for their next article.
These concepts may seem simple, but their impact is significant. Give this activity a try and apply these simple updates to your website to discover the difference it can make. And if you need additional help with your website, give me a call.