Appellation California is a wine tasting and vistor center located in the San Joaquin Valley. Because of where ApCal is located, they are a destination location, meaning most of their visitors plan to go there rather than just being “in the neighborhood”. As a result ApCal utilizes marketing strategies to draw in customers. Word-of-mouth has always been good to ApCal, once you have attended one of their events you are almost guaranteed to have fun and tell your friends about it. But what about people who would be interested in something like a Friday Night Live event at ApCal but does not know of anyone who has attended? How can they hear about how great it is? For this, ApCal has turned to social media.
YouTube
ApCal has been using short YouTube videos to add an extra level of engagement with customers. They are easy to embed on a website and help tell a story and demonstrate the fun environment to potential customers in a way that plain text and even images simply cannot. Since they are on YouTube they are very easy for people to share on other social networks, helping to spread the excitement and fun that is an ApCal event.
Facebook has been a great tool for ApCal and they are using it well. Check out the ApCal Facebook Page. Not only are they able to share their YouTube videos on Facebook they can also keep everyone updated with future events and products. ApCal does a fantastic job of posting regularly, keeping the level of interaction consistent, and using creative posts to engage their fans in unique ways (i.e. posting photos from events which people tag themselves in). Many people learn of ApCal’s Friday and Saturday night events by digital word-of-mouth and Facebook makes it easy for people to share their interest in future events or past ones. ApCal actively tries to seek new fans by running Facebook ads geared toward their page’s demographic. These Facebook efforts have made ApCal a model for other businesses on how to interact with current fans and attract new ones.
Do you know of any businesses in your area who are using social media to promote and grow their business? Have you been to ApCal? Share with us in the comments.
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