D/Marketing plan for new Wine retailers
Wine is NOT just an alcoholic drink made from fermented grapes. Wine is Culture, wine is social life and heritage of specific regions, you can remind and taste these ancient roots by drinking a glass of typical wine.
In these difficult times to travel and visit wineries could be complicated. That is why new opportunities are opened to those who believe and promote the compatibility between innovation and tradition.
This strategy plan will help new businesses to succeed and be an attractive online wine retailer in this competitive market.
A marketing strategy lays the foundation of all the right actions you need to effectively promote your new business; it comprises a set of elements to take you towards success.
Objectives are essential in a new business, so it is important to achieve them in order to get known by your audience and potential customers.
It is important to define main and supporting goals, which can be divided into short and long-term ones. Let’s focus on the local market first:
Main Goals:
- Identify the needs of your potential customers and the consumption of wine.
- Get partnership with producers of wine (local and national) and couriers.
- Be known in Social Medias.
Supportive goals:
- On Instagram, get as many followers as possible by creating inspirational posts.
- Establish good business relationships with local producers of wine and focus on promoting their products.
- In your website create a simple library of wines and promote their features including information about taste, wine story, right food abbination.
An online business does not have the same appeal of a physical store in terms of atmosphere and feelings.
It is possible to impress the customers if there are all possible details of products, wine images, information, prices and delivery services.
SWOT ANALYSIS
This report analyzes the possible strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a business, in this case it is possible to confirm them as per the sheet below:
As you can see, the benefits are quite good, of course the delivery service can be challenging especially at the beginning.
Local consumers and potential customers
Identifying which segments of the population your potential customers are to make your business grow is crucial.
Generally in Europe the wine consumption is not so high in northern regions, however in recent years there is an impressive increase of wine sellings in those areas.
There are no dead ends in this segment! if you find the right solution, you will have terrific sales.
Let’s see now some common criterias to classify customers through segmentation:
Demographics:
- Age (of course no alcohol to minors, check carefully legal aspects) – between 21-56
- Gender ( generally Men drink more red wine than women, but women drink more white wine) all
- Occupation (Wine is more expensive than other alcoholic products like beer) – employees
- Income level (as above, there are low level and high level of wine) – 1°mid class level
Attention: be careful also about the religion, in some cultures the consumption of alcohol is forbidden!
Geographic:
- Region or states (in Europe Southern countries drink more wine than Northern)
- Climate ( temperature influences the harvests of grapes)
- Dietary preferences (it is essential to find the right food and wine abbination)
There are of course other criterias to analyze your potential customers but the main ones are about their status and attitude.
Research Competitors

This analysis helps you understand your customers better and also provides you with ways to enhance the customer experience for long-term benefits.
Social Medias

Nowadays it is mandatory to have Social Media accounts and promote business on these platforms, especially because there is not a single target of users.
How to measures results
Generally it is possible to see many marketing strategies where you can find many good resolutions, however there are no solutions.
Basically there are some indicators to measure performance (KPI) and the following seven metrics serve as the best indicators of marketing success:
- Website/App traffic growth
- Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
- Sales-qualified leads generated
- Opportunities (or pipeline revenue) generated
- New customers generated
Conclusion
A new concept can be done pursuing tradition and culture, existing business and knowledge.
There could be many wine online retailers in the market.
The focus on the local products, the description of the wines and the right food abbination is the best mix to achieve the goals and be successful!
Written by: Francesco Fognani Fazio, expert in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and Sales Representative in B2B with a demonstrated history of working in the Food industry.