The artisan spirit industry has exploded in recent years. First, it was gin, but now rum and vodka have joined the trend of small-batch artisan alcohol brands. Artisan spirits can be an ideal farm diversification option for some family farms, but it is already a crowded market, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd.
To differentiate your artisan spirit from the competition, you need to have a clear ideal client (target market), and a strong brand. You can read more about finding your ideal client on this blog, or check out our e-book. The key is to talk to the clients who are already looking for your product. Maybe they are gin drinkers looking for a new option, or maybe they want to buy carbon-neutral
spirits. There are endless options out there.
Once you have a clear ideal client, the next stage of standing out from the crowd is visibility. In an online setting, this means having a strong search engine optimisation (SEO) and visibility strategy across all your digital marketing channels. You can find out more about the importance of this on this blog.
Why is blogging so useful for your artisan spirit farm diversification?
One of the best things you can do to improve the visibility of your website yourself is to create targeted blog content that is SEO friendly. To make blogs SEO friendly, you need to cover topics that resonate with your ideal client and match how they search for your solution or business online. You can use guesswork to do this, but we would always recommend having keyword analysis completed to have a clearer picture of the topics and phrases you should be focusing on. We recommend using our friends at SEO Angel for this service. You will also need to make sure you understand how to upload blogs to your website and check the SEO settings while doing this. For WordPress sites, Yoast is a very easy way to make sure you have checked off all the SEO tasks during the upload process.
Using frequently asked questions as blog content for your artisan spirit farm diversificationWe are often asked how to get new blog ideas and for an artisan spirit farm diversification, there are few key areas to draw on:
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) are a great source of new blog ideas as they help to educate customers and may either reduce any concerns over buying or manage their expectations so they enjoy their purchase as much as possible. FAQs are also often the topics people will use to search for answers on search engines, particularly if using voice search – where you talk to your device. This means they can be a great way to improve SEO ranking.
Three examples could be:
How do we ensure your [insert spirit] purchase arrives with you safely?
Or
A tasting guide to our [insert spirit] range! Find your perfect poison!
Or
10 things you probably didn’t know about our [insert artisan spirit]
If you are nervous about blogging, particularly if you struggle with writing content that asks for sales, then educational blogs are a good place to start. You will forever be shocked by how little the average person knows about farming, food production and alcohol production.
More and more consumers are becoming interested in understanding the story behind their food and drink. Blogs that educate your customers on how you make your product or why you use a specific process will always attract interest and often from highly engaged consumers who are likely to have the potential to become brand advocates.
Equally, blogs that explain the story of your farm brand and why you created your farm diversification are highly effective in engaging your audience and building an emotional connection to your
farm brand.
Examples of blogs like this could include:
How do we make [insert spirit]?
Or
Why do we use [insert unusual ingredient] to make our [insert spirit]?
Or
How we came up with the idea for [insert name of farm brand or first product]
Or
7 ways we are making our [insert spirit] carbon neutral!
You will notice some of the blog titles suggested in this blog and many on our website have numbers in them. This is for a good reason. Statistically, people are far more likely to click on a blog that is in a list format or has a number in the title. In fact, depending on your industry, it is up to 7 times more likely that someone will click on the blog if it has a number in the title.
The choice of number is also important. Human psychology means we are more likely to engage/notice some numbers over others. Prime numbers such as 3, 5, and 7 are top of this list but 10 also ranks well, as do odd multiples of 7, such as 21 and 35. For most blog content, I would try to stick to 3, 5, 7, or 10, as any more than that and it can become too long or the quality of the content will drop which has a negative impact on SEO ranking.
Using numbers can also be helpful if you are not a keen or confident blog writer, as it can help to focus your thoughts and encourage you to complete sections of the blog like a checklist, making the process less painful.
If you are a food or drink producer in any way, recipe blogs are a fantastic option. They are normally fairly easy to write, they have high click rates, and they allow you to upsell your products very easily. We often find that farmers, and often farmers’ wives, will have a store of fantastic seasonal recipes that they have used for many years. You can draw on these to create blog content. Recipes help to directly sell your produce by linking the recipe to a buy-ingredients option.
For artisan spirits, you can use the same principle but swap between food pairing recommendations, cocktail recipes and food recipes that use your products. For example:
Making the perfect bramble cocktail with our [insert brand name of product]
Or
5 cocktails to make our [insert spirit] shine!
Or
3 cheeses that pair perfectly with our [insert artisan spirit]
Or
Next level rum babas with our [insert brand name of product]
If you find sitting to write blogs hard, that is ok; not everyone is a natural wordsmith. But it does get easier the more you do it and the more you find your own voice. When we write blog content for clients, we normally write approximately 1000 words or a little more as we know this is an ideal length for customer engagement and keeping the search engines happy. But even a 500-word (about ¾ of a side of A4 in Word) blog that is quality content can help if you are new to blogging.
We offer a marketing coaching package where we can teach you to write blogs and help you come up with your content ideas, amongst other benefits; check it out here. Or we can even simply write blogs for you on a regular basis. Contact us for a quotation here.
