Alcohol Marketing Strategies: A Guide to Promotions with Alcohol Marketing Examples

What are some relevant alcohol marketing strategies for 2023?

Alcohol marketing is the advertising and promotion of your company’s brand/portfolio with the goal of building awareness and increasing sales. With the shifts in drinking trends and habits across alcohol markets, including new generations coming into the market, post-pandemic shifts in drinking behavior, the rise of alcohol delivery, RTD market growth, specific spirits consumption trend shifts, and compliance considerations there’s a lot to consider for your alcohol marketing strategy. 

 Some key alcohol marketing strategies for 2023 and beyond can include: 

• Appeal To Gen Z’s Appetite for Authenticity & Responsibility 
• Create a Halo Effect From On-Premise Activations 
• Surprise & Delight to Encourage Social Media Shareability 
• Enable Virtual Experimentation 
• Promote Digital Initiatives via Packaging Innovations 
• Offer Cost-Conscious Consumers a Reason to Indulge
  

To get details about recent trends and the marketing strategies listed above (with alcohol marketing examples), see our 2023 Alcohol Industry Trends & Marketing Strategies Report

Click here to skip to the alcohol marketing examples.

What are alcohol promotions? 

Alcohol promotions are specific tactics that fit within an overall marketing strategy and are the building blocks that can help your company or brand build longer-term customer loyalty. Promotions come in the form of one-off or a series of campaigns that can include: 

• Sweepstakes  
• Instant-win  
• Gift with Purchase (GWP) 
• Text to Win 

You can start by running these one-off promotions and graduate to a continuity program that focuses on increasing purchase frequency and as well as customer lifetime value (CLTV). This can lead to a full customer loyalty program that focuses on ongoing engagement, deeper connections, the opportunity to build up to bigger rewards, and stronger loyalty with your brand. If you already have a continuity or loyalty program in place, promotions are a great way to keep up the engagement and bring back former members. 

What are the key phases of an alcohol promotion? 

It might seem like a complex process, but with careful planning and attention to the required details, you can ensure that your sweepstakes campaigns meet the necessary regulations. Use this checklist to avoid missing anything before releasing your sweepstakes to the public.

To help you with your alcohol marketing promotions checklist, here are the key phases of any campaign. 

• Alcohol promotion marketing strategy & goals 
• Validating legal and compliance: Are you complying with US national and state alcohol marketing laws (see our Sweepstakes Rules and Laws page for details on this)  
• Building the promotion components: 
  • What qualifying actions the consumer can take
  • Omnichannel activation (text, email, web, social, app) 
  • Age and state gating 
  • Promotion type (gift with purchase, Sweepstake, Rebate, Gamification, etc.) 
  • Purchase validation (e.g. receipt submission and validation) or non-purchase validation (image, social post, hashtag, etc.), register to enter 
  • Reward procurement and fulfillment (physical, digital, experiential, loyalty points)
    
• Amplifying your campaign 
• Measuring the results and adjusting current as well as future campaigns

What kind of data and insights can I get via promotions?

Promotions not only drive awareness, discovery, trials, and sales. They also allow your company to collect valuable data and to increase your marketable database. What can you learn from your promotions? 

With receipt validation (for purchase-related promotions), there’s a ton of insight you can get from your customer base. With basket analysis via scanned receipts, you can get insights on: 

• Average spend 
• Total basket spend 
• Location data 
• Preferred retailers 
• Time of day and day of week 
• Brand & category level shopping data 
• Competitors
• Retailer breakdown 
• Complementary products bought together 
  

 First & Zero-Party Data: You can collect more first and zero-party data to better understand your customers and to build up your CRM data (giving you a larger marketable database). The types of first or zero-party data can include contact information, location, household size, flavor or brand preferences, activity preferences (music, sports, recreational activities), purchase frequency and more.