Engaging New Audiences and Turning Customers Into Fans
Actionable insights from digital strategist Justin Noland
How do you turn your customers into loyal fans?
The man to ask is Justin Noland, VP of Digital Experience at Treasury Americas:
an acknowledged expert in all things digital;
Treasury Wine Estates is a multi-national company headquartered in Australia, which has 20+ wine brands including the blockbuster 19 Crimes and ultra-premium Penfolds;
and now, Justin is a Drinks Insider podcast guest!
This post is about wine, but the insights are useful for digital marketing in general.
Justin Noland, VP of Digital Experiences, Treasury Americas
Here are 7 takeaways from the podcast:
1. Get excited about email
Email isn’t as flashy as augmented reality, nor as colorful as Instagram, but it gets the job done.
“Email is the number one way we still reach consumers today,” says Justin. “Every single day, you’re going into the inbox and you’re checking on an email and seeing what’s there.”
2. A good email strategy needs a system
Justin says Treasury’s digital team has created email pathways with many branches.
“We’ll send you an email and how you interact with that email will somewhat determine the next message you get,” he says. “Did you click through to the website to learn more about that subject? No? Okay, let’s try something else.”
3. Demographics aren’t always useful
How people behave online is more important than their age.
“I always joke that my mother-in-law and Oprah are roughly the same age demographic, but I imagine their lives are a little bit different, right?”
Instead, Justin thinks about how people want to engage online and then gives them options. If they’re not likely to sign up for an email, they might like a Reddit discussion.
A much-quoted Think With Google paper from 2015 found that “our research shows that marketers who try to reach their audience solely on demographics risk missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers. Why? Because demographics don't help us understand what we really need to know—consumer intent—what consumers are looking for in an exact moment or where they are looking to find it.”
4. Mass market brands are getting personal
Brands are now creating custom products specifically for brand aficionados — think sneakers.
Justin says there is a 19 Crimes Infamous Insiders program, “where you can earn points and you can create a custom label that includes your own picture that you can put on the bottle.”
Personalization can be something as simple as offering access to a product before it’s available in-store, so fans can be the first to see it, to offering them special or limited-edition versions that will never hit retail shelves. Justin says that people love getting to something first.
“It just gets people excited and more likely to be picking up a bottle of that favorite brand because we treated them with something new and fun.”
5. Geeks are few and far between
“I’ve learned that the majority of consumers, even within our luxury segments, are not as into the details of wine as we think they are,” says Justin.
Instead, the majority of people see wine “as an additive to whatever experience they are having in their own lives.”
Mostly, people just want to feel confident that they’re buying a good bottle of wine. “I think that people want to know that they’re getting value, that they’re getting something of meaning.”
6. Not all luxury consumers are rich
Justin says that many luxury consumers have the same digital profile as people buying other types of wine.
“And here’s something we need to think about — something like 40% to 45% of luxury consumers are just not in this upper-middle class, upper class,” bracket. “So if you’re only marketing to somebody making an annual income of $150,000 or more, you’re missing a large volume of the audience.”
Often, people are buying luxury products because they want to celebrate something. “You have to have an aspirational message. That it’s truly an above-and-beyond product.”
7. The wine trade needs better content*
“Content is not just creating beautiful photography that you can post on organic social media, that most people will never see,” says Justin.
Instead, think about how to distribute content across multiple platforms, “so you can start engaging people in the place that they want to be on — they want to learn about you on LinkedIn, on Reddit, or on your website.”
And don’t use AI to create the content, as it will be flat and dull. Use humans to create the content and use AI tools to repurpose and post it.
One simple strategy is to do a limited-series podcast. AI tools can cut the podcast into multiple segments, that can then be distributed across multiple platforms, in both 15-second video clips and text form.
“Engagement should be the number one thought process when it comes to posting anything in an organic way,” he adds.
*Need better content? You probably do! Fortunately, Drinks Insider can help with that. carter.felicity(a)gmail.com
Bonus Point: People do weird things for engagement
Justin says there was a recent trend in the influencer community to solicit negative feedback.
He says he watched influencers make spelling mistakes, or deliberately do something annoying or wrong.
“Lots of people would jump into the comments to correct them on their mistake,” he says. “All it did was drive up their engagement and make sure that their other posts were being seen by more people.”
(FC: I was tempted to add lots of spelling mistakes to this post to see if it works, but… once an editor, always an editor. Also, to be clear, he wasn’t suggesting that Treasury does this — it was a fun observation.)
The Big Idea
“You know, the more that we can build on those connections, the more that we can deepen that level of storytelling, and get that storytelling in front of them… I think there’s a lot of opportunity.”
Justin Noland, VP of Digital Experiences, Treasury America
The above are only a few of the insights that came out of a very lively conversation. To hear it, just click here. And don’t forget to rate it 5 stars!