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Direct-to-consumer shopping has condensed years of growth into 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with cases surging going into winter when Americans would normally hunker down, the e-commerce space is about to become more important than ever.
But the way you establish your presence in an online marketplace matters, and that doesn’t just mean simply setting up a store on your website. Expanding a sales strategy into social media—in particular Facebook and Instagram—is about more than posting pictures of your new releases. It can make a difference in your sales and how you connect to your fans.
“If you want it, click it,” is a mantra understood by Mike Cruz, president of Fresno, California’s Tioga-Sequoia Brewing Co.
Across the country, breweries are using marketplace and advertising options on Facebook and Instagram to boost sales. At Tioga-Sequoia, about half of their sales volume comes from promoting beers on social media, with Instagram the key platform. And it’s not just a matter of posting an image, but an integrated system of permanently leaving an online shop link in their bio information, posting images of new beers with reminders to visit the shop, and also using Instagram Shopping, a feature that allows businesses to create clickable links directly from posts to an online shop.
“If there’s something in the image you can buy, we’re linking it,” Cruz says. Sign up to read more.
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Words by Bryan Roth