“One video received more than 15 million views – one of the greatest small business success stories in YouTube history.”
Business situation
Our client was Mirabeau, a small family-owned winery started in Provence. After two years of operation, the company had a great product but needed marketing support to stand out in a very crowded industry. In fact, the little winery had more than 600 competitors in Provence alone, some of whom had been making wine for 200 years or more.
Approach
Our company started with a complete competitive assessment. Because the client had severe budget constraints we were able to use publically-available research at almost no cost to piece together a detailed view of the competition and possible areas open for maneuvering.
We also interviewed large wine retailers in the UK and United States to search for opportunities for the small business.
Strategy
We determined that an aggressive content marketing strategy would work in this market for several reasons:
The long-established competition in Provence had virtually no digital presence. In fact, the prevailing wine culture scoffed at social media as something frivolous. There was a wide open space for helpful, quality wine-related content
Interviews with wine retailers exposed a deep hunger, even an urgency, to connect through social media with wine customers. They expressed frustration that there seemed to be a wide marketing void in the industry.
The company’s owner was a talented storyteller and had the ability and resources to create compelling and effective content that would attract an audience.
Working closely with the customer, we developed a content strategy focused on the theme of the “magic of Provence” and set about creating visual, video, and written content about the region and Mirabeau wine. Over a two-year period, the company created more than 300 blog posts and 200 videos, thoroughly saturating this open niche and building a very engaged and passionate audience.
Results
Because of the company’s small budget, there were no other advertising or marketing programs in place so we can say with confidence these results were completely from the content marketing/social media effort.
The company’s social media following increased dramatically, as did subscriptions and engagement. Mirabeau was able to take specific social media trend data to wine retailers in the UK, USA, and Australia to show them how interest in their wine had increased in their region of the world. This data specifically drove the new orders.
The company at least tripled sales in each of the next three years allowing them to expand their operation, open their own retail outlet, and introduce several new products.
One video (number 222!) received more than 15 million views – one of the greatest small business success stories in YouTube history.
The company’s social media success attracted mainstream media coverage in newspapers around the world.
The combination of consistent content efforts and mainstream coverage placed the tiny Mirabeau winery atop the search results for many important key words.