The Sweet Escape is Over: Promoted Social Media for Liquor Brands in 2019

Once we start receiving something for free it’s pretty annoying to have to start paying for it again. Imagine being told you have to pay full price for every album you listen to on Spotify after listening for free for years.

As consumers we always seem to find a way to get what we want for free (think: Napster). As marketers of our businesses though, we have to pay the price to succeed and it’s becoming increasingly hard to find the free workarounds.

We’ve gone from paying for billboards and tangible ads—to free social media—to being told we have to pay again.

Why do we have to pay? Facebook cut organic reach as a way to make a buck off of businesses using their platform for marketing. Facebook wants to make money just like the rest of us.

The honeymoon is over. Paid social media will continue to be essential in 2019, and we have non-existent organic reach to thank. Don’t worry though, we’re not saying you should pay to blast your potential customers with booze ads, but you can promote well written and helpful content that will bring them to your website.

Organic Reach

Organic Reach is defined as the “total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.”

You’ve heard the warnings about the death of organic reach on Facebook, but how does it really affect the distribution of your content for the rest of 2018, and 2019, too?

Immensely.

“The average organic reach for posts from Facebook pages in March was 2.6 percent of a brand’s audience. This percentage dropped to 2.3 percent for pages with more than 1 million likes.”  –1to1Media

Most mid-size companies won’t have 1 million likes on Facebook. This means if you’re relying only on organic reach (posting on Facebook without paying to promote), your reach (depending on your # of followers) is very like well below 1%, unless of course you have a million followers and are granted 2.3% organically.

What About Twitter?

Don’t @ us.

What About Instagram?

With Facebook’s purchase of Instagram marketers now have the option of promoting a post on Instagram simultaneously to creating a promoted post on Facebook. Alternatively, posts can be promoted and targeted at users directly through the Instagram application.

Proof in Numbers

Taking into account a known decreased reach, we can look at data from posts to prove that paid social is essential.

Look at these two Facebook posts created and posted for a client. I see it happen with so many of my social media clients: the craft beverage brand clients who have a budget for paid promotion end up with the most engagement.

The first example is from a client with 2,000 Facebook fans. I did not promote this post. You can see the reach is only 441 users.

On the post below, I used paid promotion for the client. The post reach was far greater at nearly 7,000 people. Keep in mind depending on a company’s industry or market the total spend differs, and depending on the audience you’re hoping to reach spend amount can differ greatly, too.

As you can see, paying to promote your posts just as you’ve always paid for advertising is essential in 2019—not only to reach potential customers—but to reach more than a handful of potential customers.

Expand the reach and visibility of your craft distillery marketing efforts with an advertising budget to boost posts, and our help! Email us today to get started: highproofcreative@gmail.com.