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

What are some relevant alcohol marketing strategies for the future?

Alcohol marketing is the advertising and promotion of your company’s brand/portfolio with the goal of building awareness, increasing sales, and enhancing consumer engagement. It also plays a key role in strengthening retailer relationships. With the shifts in drinking trends and habits across alcohol markets, including new generations coming into the market, the rise of alcohol delivery, RTD market growth, specific spirits consumption trend shifts, and compliance with laws and regulations there’s a lot to consider for your alcohol marketing strategy.  

 Some key alcohol marketing strategies for the future can include: 

• Engage Gen Z with Authenticity and Responsibility 
• Leverage On-Premise Activations to Enhance Brand Perception
• Create Memorable Moments that Inspire Social Sharing 
• Offer Virtual Experiences to Encourage Consumer Interaction 
• Drive Digital Engagement Through Innovative Packaging 
• Encourage Cost Conscious Consumers to Indulge
  

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 engagement and 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 
• A combination of the above

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 long term engagement, deeper connections, the opportunity to build up to  stronger loyalty with your brand. If you already have a continuity or loyalty program in place, in-program promotions are a great way to keep up the engagement and bring back inactive 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 promotion or sweepstakes campaigns meet the necessary regulations and drive success. Use this checklist to avoid missing anything before releasing your campaign to the public. 

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

• Define your Alcohol promotion marketing strategy & goals 
• Ensure your program is compliant with national and local alcohol marketing laws (see our Sweepstakes Rules and Laws post for details on this)  
• Build 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 or AMOE
  • Reward procurement and fulfillment (physical, digital, experiential, loyalty points)
    
• Strategically select primary channels before amplification
• Amplify your campaign (paid, owned and earned media)
• Measure 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 consumer data and to increase your marketable database, and allow for further segmentation, personalization, and retargeting. What can you learn from your promotions? 

With receipt validation (for purchase-related promotions), there’s a ton of data and insights 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.