Cheers to New Friends

Background.

Since 2013, Cadye Ellwanger and Clint Thomas, owners of Cellar Rat Wine Tours, have been serving up one of the most entertaining, relaxing, and just-good-old-fun wine tour experiences throughout Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. They’ve connected thousands of wine lovers, tourists, weekenders, and young people to personalized, custom-created itineraries with insightful tours from guides with actual wine industry experience, from sommelier to winemaker to cellar master.

It’s no surprise they’ve been creating lasting and memorable relationships between people and the world of Texas wine, and their passion and allure put Cellar Rat Wine Tours on the map with prominent features in Texas Monthly, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Houston Chronicle.

When Cellar Rat Wine Tours reached out to our advertising agency to digitally transform their brand and create a series of social-first digital experiences, we brought social APIs to automate their website with fresh content and drive new leads.

Challenge.

Over the past decade, the Texas Hill Country wine industry has bloomed with numerous wineries, breweries, distilleries, and restaurants popping up across the rolling hills of Central Texas. And with so many winery tours, tastings, and more, creating an idyllic experience often turned into packed scheduling and avoiding busy crowds on the weekends.

Cellar Rat Wine Tours provided an effortless, expert-based approach to experience this fascinating world, with custom-created itineraries considering the preferences and tastes of their tour groups. Our challenge was to hone in on this relationship strength between the brand and the consumer, turn it into a digital experience, and drive more business by highlighting the depth of the service and the expertise of the tour guides.

Keeping in line with the easy, relaxed air of the brand, we also set our sights on providing a digital process that brought this feeling to the scheduling and personalization of wine tours. We would provide the social-first digital experiences replicating the charm and expertise of the brand, leveraging brand loyalty and referred demand on a fluid, digital-first lead generation platform.

Campaign.

‘Cheers to New Friends’ was the unifying strategic vision behind the brand’s digital transformation of their web presence. We would allow the brand to breathe, to decant into the website with social integration, art direction, and sales copy expanding the brand’s reach and integrating Cellar Rat Wine Tours into the conversation surrounding Hill Country wine-making.

To capture the essence of each winery and wine tour stop, we diligently sourced ample amounts of original content, from professional photographs to written reviews to highlights about the quality of the tour, the views, the food, and, of course, the assortment of fine, local wines. This original content was shared on social media and integrated into the website, allowing for dynamic content updated in real-time.

We focused on previous customers, fans of wine and wine tours, and the younger, more search-savvy consumers, helping them research different venues, enjoy breathtaking pictures of nearby vineyards, and learn about the people and processes behind some of the wines.

The website was developed to make visitors feel thirsty, with the promise that the tours will make them feel like an aficionado.

Finally, we optimized the on-site content while executing an SEO and link-building campaign to solidify the brand’s presence on search engines, map services such as Google Maps, and more. We targeted the most prominent keywords to naturally connect with users looking for relevant information, and we continually optimized written and other original content with the goal of getting Cellar Rat Wine Tours in the #1 ranking for targeted keywords.

Results.

Cellar Rat Wine Tours had a vitalized, socially integrated presence online, one that extended into new demographics across Central and South Texas, from the younger, more tech-savvy audience to the wine aficionados looking to truly understand the nuances and subtleties of Texas wine.

In the first 30 days after launching the ‘Cheers to New Friends’ campaign, Cellar Rat Wine Tours saw a 32% increase in sales over the previous year and, following along with our strategy of building brand loyalty to earn referred demand, we increased revenue from returning patrons.

On Instagram, where we published originally sourced content with integration on the website, we grew our social followers by 300% while increasing post impressions by 79% and post shares by 150%.

FIVE

In order to target broader, more diverse audiences, the first step in the ‘Cheers to New Friends’ was to improve the sales copy and art direction and capture the essence of Texas wine country. The website served as a central, dynamic repository for this content as well as a consumer touchpoint, combining a smooth user experience with insightful, deep write-ups and images of the venues available.

SEO was crucial to the website development, and with on-site optimization, compelling copy, and an integrated, social-first platform with dynamic media pulled in real-time, we put Cellar Rat Wine Tours on the first page of Google during its first year.

ONE

The single, unifying strategy behind the campaign relied on the quality and relevance of our communications with the diverse audiences of wine aficionados, weekenders, tourists, couples, and especially the younger, more tech-savvy consumers across Texas. We improved the sales copy and created new artwork, supporting a targeted, continually relevant, and engaging platform with a vast venue library and strategically integrated social feeds.

TWO

By developing its online presence while translating the brand into digital brand experiences, we helped Cellar Rat Wine Tours grow its sales by 32% over the previous year. With the dynamic website and social integration attracting new and repeat visitors alike, we focused on building brand loyalty, leading to an increase in repeat customers and referred customers that reinforced the brand’s efforts with thousands of 5-star reviews.