Challenge: Build Brand Awareness and Sales in a New Market
Tolosa Winery is located in the Edna Valley AVA within the San Luis Obispo Wine Country on the Central Coast of California. The region’s wine grapes benefit from the diverse ancient seabed soils, morning fog and cooling maritime influence to produce wines with great minerality, character and balance. Yet the region is largely unknown and is deserving of recognition. One of the key objectives for Tolosa in 2020 was to increase consumer traffic to the tasting room and launch a series of Tolosa Tasting Salons in Southern California. Covid-19 thwarted all 2020 plans, which caused us to review the winery’s marketing analytics for clues about what would help us continue to meet objectives.
Solution: Targeted Marketing Optimization from Google Analytics Insights
Tolosa Winery was one of the first in California to host weekly virtual wine tastings where guests could order wines in advance to taste along with the winemaking team. With health and wellness in mind, Woga (yoga in the vineyards) was launched. Due to the closure of tasting rooms, however, the team pivoted to focus on direct-to-consumer sales. A Tolosa Tonight program was launched which included a package containing three select wines, recipe, cooking and decorating video instructions along with a video of the winemaker introducing consumers to the wines.
Parker Sanpei supported Tolosa’s guerilla marketing with a highly-targeted digital marketing campaign launched on Google Ads in Southern California to increase brand awareness and drive consumers to the website to sign up for a high-touch email newsletter. After a comprehensive review of winery-wide marketing analytics and online behavioral insights from Google Analytics, we constructed desktop ads and mobile ads in varietally-specific campaigns to engage educated, high-income food and wine consumers, segmented by high-performing neighborhoods to optimize media exposure, maximize web site engagement and convert more ecommerce sales.
Results: Massive Web Traffic and Ecommerce Sales from Active Marketing Optimization
Through daily management of Google Ads and fresh behavioral insights from Google Analytics, the swift aid produced from digital marketing resulted in massive exposure to Southern California, welcoming more consumers and club members to the many winery activities. Within only four months we drove over four million impressions and 23 thousand new visitors to the web site at only 38 cents per click!
We continued to mine marketing analytics and optimize digital marketing with aggressive interest and in-market targeting from custom conversion reports in Google Analytics that produced stellar results. Our active marketing optimization increased time on site by 41%, decreased bounce rate to 40.8% (in the “excellent” range), increased direct website traffic from all integrated marketing channels by 14.5%, and a massive 235% increase in ecommerce conversion rate from direct visitors.