Zephyr Conferences

Effective Websites for Small Beer, Wine and Food Businesses

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Effective WebsitesIn week 1 of our 10-week Successful Marketing video series, Allan discusses effective websites.  He’ll guide you through the following topics:

  • Determining Your Audience
  • Website Design
  • Blog or News Page (Content Creation)
  • Search Engine Optimization

Effective Websites Key Points:

  • Determining Your Stakeholder – there are three:
    • Your Business: is this truly your most important stakeholder?
    • Your Audience/Customer: what do they want? who are they?
    • Google: writing with SEO in mind will point your customer to your website from Google or any search engine
  • Website Design
    • Less is more in terms of navigation and text
    • Calls to action is how you can connect with your customer
    • Keep your content up to date
    • Story Brand: your website needs to figure out why someone is visiting, what problem they have, and how you solve that problem
  • Blog / News Page (content creation):
    • Keep it fresh and frequent
    • Lower your bar – your post doesn’t have to be long
    • Know who you’re writing for
  • Search Engine Optimization
    • Have a specific Keyword Phrase that someone might be searching for and use it multiple times in your post/on your page
    • Make your pages and posts readable with bullet points and headers
    • Download the Yoast SEO plugin to guide your SEO effectiveness

Our Presenter

Allan Wright is founder and president of Zephyr Conferences. He has been organizing these conferences, determining content, and securing speakers for 13 years. Allan also has 24 years of experience running his own small company and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Successful Marketing for Small Food, Wine, and Beer Businesses

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Marketing is critical for small food, wine, and beer businesses. Indeed, it is critical for almost all businesses.

We at Zephyr Conferences have 12 years of experience organizing and listening to experts deliver content in the food, wine, and beer industries. Now we have decided to share this expertise with you via a new 10-week video series.

Successful Marketing for Food, Wine, and Beer Businesses

Since we can’t meet in-person and we’re all a little Zoomed-out, we’re going to produce a weekly video discussing a different marketing topic each week.  The topics, while useful for all industries, will be geared toward small businesses in the food, wine, and beer industries highlighting specific examples and identifying unique hurdles.

We can’t cover everything in 10 weeks, but plan to discuss the following topics:

  • Effective Websites
  • Conquering Your Local Area
  • Surveying Your Customers
  • Consumer Reviews
  • CRMs and Email Marketing
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Video Marketing
  • Public Relations
  • Influencer Marketing
  • Marketing Through Conferences

This list, however, is not set in stone.  As we progress through the series, if there’s a subject you’d like us to discuss, please email us.

Our Presenter

Allan Wright is founder and president of Zephyr Conferences. He has been organizing these conferences, determining content, and securing speakers for 13 years. Allan also has 24 years of experience running his own small company and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Want these free weekly marketing tips delivered to your inbox?  Sign up here.

Update on 2021 Conferences

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We were lucky enough to run two of our five conferences before the pandemic hit in March. We canceled the other three events scheduled in 2020.

For 2021, we have rescheduled the events so that all five conferences are on the calendar for August or later. We believe this will give the country more time to control COVID-19 and will place all events during a time period when we can spend more time outside.

In fact, we are currently looking at outside venues for three or four of our 2021 conferences. We also have a long list of safety precautions we will be taking when we next run a conference.

In short, we are planning for 2021 to be able to safely run conferences if COVID is still around and a problem. Given our smaller conference sizes and ability to be outdoors for much of the event, we do expect to be running most or all of our 2021 events.

Update on 2020 Conferences

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The COVID-19 virus has become a pandemic since we last posted in late February.

Plans for Upcoming Conferences

We will analyze each conference case-by-case to determine three things: 1) Will we be legally allowed to run the event based on state, county, and city regulations. 2) Do we believe we can run the conference safely. 3) Do our attendees, speakers, and sponsors wish to attend given the changed circumstances.

  • We were lucky to have been able to run two of our five annual conference before the pandemic hit. The Beer Marketing & Tourism Conference and the Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference are now planned for 2021.
  • The International Food Blogger Conference is scheduled for November. We are monitoring the situation weekly but the conference is still scheduled as planned.
  • The Beer Now Conference is still scheduled for August in Austin, Texas. It is likely that the state of Texas and city of Austin will allow us to run this event. In addition, we believe that with the smaller size of this conference, we can make adjustments to our plans to dramatically increase safety.
  • The Wine Media Conference is a different story. With a group size of approximately 220 attendees and with six multi-day excursions planned throughout Oregon, we did not believe we could run this event safely in 2020. The WMC has been postponed to August of 2021.

Safety Procedures

We expect the COVID-19 virus to be around and impacting society for long enough that we will be running conferences while still under the threat of the virus. As such, we have prepared a Safety Procedures page to explain how we plan to keep you safe during our events.

Conferences and the Coronavirus

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The COVID-19 coronavirus is serious and our hopes are for a quick disappearance of the virus and a return to normalcy for those areas afflicted.

It is a bit difficult to be planning conferences when fears of a worldwide pandemic are prevalent. No one wants to be sitting on an airplane or in a conference hall if they think they will catch a potentially fatal disease. Even worse, we at Zephyr Conferences are part of a small business that also runs tours around the world, including six tours this year in Italy. So we will be impacted.

For now, of course, all our conferences are full steam ahead. With one already done for this year, a second happening next week, and three others not scheduled until August or later we expect to be spared any disruption.

Having said that, we can understand you, our attendees, not wanting to book now for something in the future that might be uncertain.

To alleviate your concerns, we are waiving all cancellation penalties and providing full refunds to any of our upcoming conferences if you register between today and March 31.

So please make your plans with confidence you will not lose your registration fees.

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