Our Wine Questers direct marketing platform is a powerful tool for promoting tasting rooms and current specials on wines in tasting rooms but we suggest a few more basics. Before we get to the course below we want to sneak in a few more suggestions.

Suggestion 1: Setup Shop-the-Maps™ real time marketing

Use the free live direct marketing tools on WineQuesters.com to reach out to tasters as they plan their wine tasting road trips, or are already driving by your winery. Put your winery in our innovative Shop-the-Maps™ program - for free. We've provided a little course below to help you get started.

Suggestion 2: Develop a pitch

Developing an effective pitch is tough and a never-ending pursuit. It should be 25 words or less and give tasters a compelling reason to visit your tasting room. Identify a unique benefit or "value proposition" and develop the pitch for it. Think of what you do best that would give you a "sustainable competitive advantage". No, "The best wines!" isn't a good one. Do a Web search for more help on this popular topic.

Suggestion 3: Start a Facebook fan page

This is free and easy. Most people who visit your tasting room do not want another newsletter and won't join your wine club. However, they may be interested in a short bit of compelling news at times so dump this info on their Facebook Wall so they have a clue about your winery - and you.

Suggestion 4: Get into new wine media

List your wines with Snooth and the other sites that focus on wine. Yes, all this new wine media is a lot of work but also a lot of opportunities.

Suggestion 5: Fix your Web site

Almost every winery Web site has significant design and content problems that make it difficult for your customers to find information. Please let Mike Duffy do a diagnostic of your Web site.

Suggestion 6: Listen to the conversations

Monitor the Web with Google Alerts. It is a simple and free way to monitor what is being said about your winery on the Web. A more useful approach is to use Cruvee's services.

Suggestion 7: Label yourself

Tasters highly value pours from winemakers, winery owners, and the owner's family. Yet 99% of these people fail to identify themselves to tasters. A simple and cheap major marketing step: Put name badges and titles on anyone pouring for customers!

Shop-the-Maps™! Set up your WineQuesters.com profile for real time marketing

The first step is to log into your account (or set one up if we haven't already) and click on the Profile Edit in the 2nd level menu bar. Next you will see a series of tabs across the top. Each of those tabs contains checkboxes and text fields that organizes winery information so it can be easily searched, unlike your Web site or Google. If you look at our Trip Planner / Search feature you will see that tasters can select most of the criteria in your profile so they can narrow their selection to just those wineries that interest them the most.

Enter a short pitch. A pitch is a sentence or two that gives tasters a compelling reason to visit your winery.

Entries in the Current specials box can be any treat for tasters such as case discounts, waiving tasting fees until 2 PM, or a food pairing. Put a link to your Web store in a box just below this box. The pitch gets their attention and the current specials is your marketing hook to bring them in the door. Save this and you update the maps on the Web site and iPhone app when the taster refreshes their data - in real time.



You have complete control of your map marker. It can be moved, changed, edited, and additional tasting rooms can be added. At the bottom of the Winery Info tab lives a Google Map. If you have an existing marker then click on it to edit. Add additional tasting rooms by clicking the map and drag your new marker to your exact location (use hybrid view). Put a short version of your pitch in the Comments field. When a taster clicks a marker they see this message. Check your entries in our region maps and our iPhone app for readability.



Winery Quest iPhone app puts your winery info in the hands of tasters while they travel your region.

Changes to winery profiles show in real time in this app. Live real-time marketing is available now! Please see the Winery Quest app information page.

California Wine Travel Planner