Marketing Velocity and Marketing Momentum

It is important for small medium sized wineries to focus on building marketing, momentum, not just velocity. Let me explain the distinction because it can have a huge difference on your business over the long term.

Velocity is a matter of speed. As an organization you can get quicker at putting together a campaign, segmenting your customer audience, generating creative content, and getting faster and faster at going from an insight to execution.  This is an incredibly valuable area to improve as an organization, but there is another factor you must keep an eye on: momentum.

So what is the difference between velocity and momentum? Again, velocity is the speed at which you move.  You can also think of it as efficiency.  The faster you move as an organization the more you can deliver in a week, a month, a year.  This clearly benefits your winery. Momentum, by a textbook physics definition, is velocity times mass. So if you can accumulate more mass and move at the same speed you will have more force.  Think of momentum as a velocity multiplier, and vice versa.  So what is “mass” in a marketing sense?.

The most basic, and arguably the most expensive, way to accumulate “mass” is to hire an additional person.  If you have a 1 person marketing team and hire a second person, you’ve doubled your “mass.”  Get the new hire up to speed and you have doubled your marketing momentum.

However, adding staff  is not often practical, especially for small and medium size wineries. For our niche, we must figure out ways to do more with the same staff. In this case you build momentum by doing things with sustained and unsupervised impact.  Look for actions that create a long running impact. This most often comes from automation but could also come from long running campaigns like a keyword campaign on Google. Outside digital, it could be a sponsorship with a long running placement.

So what is the difference between limited and sustained impact when it comes to marketing? Let’s look at two examples. A marketing initiative with limited impact would be sending an email announcing our new 2021 Sauvignon Blanc to all my customers with a preference for white wine. My team may be able to execute this very quickly because we've done similar emails in the past and we may even have a defined segment of white wine drinkers in our customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This type of campaign absolutely drives sales and the additional targeting of white wine drinkers will drive engagement and conversion, making it a successful campaign.  However, it is a “one off” campaign that gets executed on the launch of a new vintage.  Most importantly, staff has to work to execute it. They pull the audience segment, craft the email, and send it.  We can get better and better at doing this (increasing velocity) but we still have to do it each time.

So what type of marketing builds momentum?  How about a digital “welcome series” for new customers.  Working with the CRM and email automation, we can create a series of emails that get sent to new customers, to make them feel appreciated, enrich their knowledge of our winery, and amplify their enjoyment of our wines.  So how is this different from announcing the new Sauvignon Blanc?  Well, once I configure the series of emails, let’s say 3 emails over 2 ½ months, no more work is needed by me or my team.  The campaign runs indefinitely and my team recovers their time so they can work on other campaigns.  So we now sit +1 strategic email campaign and can immediately add more communication outreach.  In contrast, after announcing the new Sauvignon Blanc release, we were back to status quo for active campaigns (+0.)

So … what about the size of the audience, the timeliness of the message and all the other factors that contribute to the impact of the campaign? Yes, the Sauvignon Blanc announcement has a more concentrated impact, touching more customers in a shorter period of time. My warning to you would be don’t get overly focused on short term impact and cost yourself long term momentum. You can find more and more opportunities for marketing automation. As you build these campaigns, you’ll build momentum. The more sophisticated you get with it, the more targeted, personalized, and relevant.  That relevance translates into engagement and impact. Over a surprisingly short period of time this adds up to more marketing momentum and impact. Best of all you can do it without having to increase your marketing investment.