10 Marketing Ideas for Breweries

We’ve put together a list of marketing ideas that will help breweries get their beers in the hands of more people and more often.

There are dozens of activities you could be investing time in. When it comes to marketing your brewery make sure you do your best to determine the outcome you are looking to achieve and measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

Every brewery is unique and your audience size and target audience is going to look different, so use this list and get creative.

1. Build
   Pick a marketing idea and build a strategy and plan around it. Launch your campaign.
2. Measure
   If you are launching marketing campaigns and not measuring beer sales or some other important performance metric, then there’s no point in investing. Pick a quantitative or qualitative metric to measure to make sure your marketing strategy and campaign was effective.
3. Learn
   You might not get your marketing campaign right the first time. Just because it didn’t meet your expectations or goals, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep working at it. Sometimes it does, though.

Repeat the process.

Collaboration with Another Brewery

You’ve probably seen another brewery do this or maybe you’ve already done a collaboration beer with a local brewery.

Collaborations are great because they allow you to get your brewery’s name in front of another audience of beer drinkers that might not be aware of you.

Make sure to share each other’s social media posts about the collaboration beer.

Nonprofit Fundraiser

Pick your favorite local charity or nonprofit and work with them to raise money for them. Pick a beer and donate a dollar for each pour or some portion of sales over a set period of time.

Have the nonprofit promote the event or ongoing promotion. This can get you in front of a new audience that the nonprofit has that you might not have.

Beer Release Party

Build some hype around a seasonal beer and throw a release party. Or build some hype around an upcoming new release and have some fun with it.

Founders hosts an annual “Breakfast Stout Breakfast” for one of their flagship beers, Breakfast Stout. It is always high in demand and hard to get tickets for. If you create a release party that happens every year you can build some anticipation which will build demand for your beer.

Social Media Giveaways

A classic for craft breweries. Use social media platforms to reach hundreds or even thousands of others that don’t already follow you.

1. On your social media account, give away something awesome like a few 6-packs, some swag, a gift card, or maybe even a stay at a local nearby hotel.
2. Tell your audience to like and tag a friend in order to enter the contest.
3. This will give your post a lot of buzz and visibility on social media feeds.

Text Subscriptions

If it’s not obvious, we love this one. You can start a brewery text subscription with TextSpot.

With a text subscription, you can encourage your most loyal customers to subscribe to your text messages.

Collect phone numbers of loyal customers that want to stay as connected to your brewery as possible, then use a text subscription to:

• send out monthly updates about new beer.
• send out flash sales when you have a slow night at the pub.
• text pictures of new menu items.
• tell your audience about special events.
• add links to your website to encourage visits.

Tip: Don’t overwhelm your list and set the expectation when they subscribe and don’t abuse it. For example, tell them you’ll only send up to one message per week and then stick to that. SMS is great because over 90% of messages are opened within 3 minutes of being received (which means your marketing message will be seen), but you also don’t want to annoy your customers.

Email Subscriptions

Just like a text subscription, but via email. Email marketing is great and does give you the benefit of adding some design and branding elements to it. Email marketing is a little more time-consuming and not as effective, since people open emails a lot less than text messages.

Themed Nights

Host a trivia, bingo, or karaoke night weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. People are creatures of habit. If you can get a good crowd of people interested in an event and you fill up your brewery, you’ve hit the jackpot. The regulars will love it, too.

Other themed night ideas include:

• 80s nights
• 90s nights
• 2000s nights

Encourage everyone to wear something from the decade you pick and play music only from that decade. The nostalgic Millenials will love it!

Contests

Hold online or in-person contents. Give away some gift cards or other freebies for contest winners. You really could come up with just about anything for a brewery contest.

Post something on your social media account like, “first 5 people to post a picture with one of our beers on a boat get a $5 gift card.”

Have some fun with it. Not all contests need to be huge.

Loyalty Program

Start a loyalty program to build some additional loyalty in your brewery. Loyalty programs can offer discounts on food and beverage, access to early releases of beer, and much more.

Social Media Series

Start a regular social media series. People love the familiar and if they get hooked on your series they will get hooked on your social media and maybe even get hooked on your beer.

A social media series could simply be sharing posts that tell customers stories of what their favorite beers are and why. Human stories that connect emotion to the enjoyment of a cold one can have a positive effect on your brand and the feeling people have towards your brewery.