Report on Digital Marketing

Content for Craftee Beers

Implementing Digital Media

B8IS112

Brendan Maguire

Julian Callan 10355481


Darren Doyle 10355468

Adrian Naughton 10355082

John Reidy 10355094


Monday, 30th January 2017


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !1

 Table of Contents

• Site Name and Target Market - Page 3

• Site Objectives - Goals - Page 3

• Site Objectives - Conversions - Page 4

• Mini Strategy - Page 4

• Competitor Analysis - Page 5

• Analytical Evaluation of Website Performance - Pages 6-10

• Appendices: Blog Posts and SEO Audits - Pages 11-36

• Blog Post and SEO Audit 1: Twitter - Adrian Naughton - Page 12

• Blog Post and SEO Audit 2: Instagram - Julian Callan - Page 17
• Blog Post and SEO Audit 3: LinkedIn - Darren Doyle - Page 23
• Blog Post and SEO Audit 4: Facebook - John Reidy - Page 28

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !2

Site Name and Target Market:

Craftee Beers (crafteebeers.weebly.com) is a digital marketing blog that helps craft beer
brewers or bars get the most out of digital marketing tools.

Our target market is the craft beer industry, including craft breweries or microbreweries,
craft beer bars and retailers, and craft beer distributors.

With a 29% increase of the number of Microbreweries in Ireland from 2015 to 2016 (the
number has quadrupled in the last 4 years)1, this booming market is the perfect place to
offer digital marketing advice.

Site Objectives - Goals:

The goals for our site were outlined under our SMART2 target platform:

Goal 1:

Increase Site Visits

The site will be updated monthly with relevant digital marketing material for small
craft brewer business owners.

Within the first 6 months we aim to increase visitors by 20% month on month.

We hope to drive these visitors to our second goal:

Goal 2:

Gain subscriptions to Newsletter

Using our lead-capture form discussed in our CTAs below, we aim to get visitors to
sign up to a newsletter from our site.

With enough signups, we can implement our third goal:

Goal 3:

Use Newsletter as advertising platform:

Once traffic is high enough (a minimum of 1000 subscribers), business owners will
be approached to generate revenue for the site. The newsletter will be sent each
month and will include linked advertisements.

1Craft Beer and Microbreweries in Ireland, 2016, A Report for the Independent Craft Brewers of Ireland and
Bord Bia Final Report, August 2016 http://tinyurl.com/zokdtpm
2 https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/smart-goals.php

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !3

Site Objectives - Calls to Action:

Traffic will be analysed and used to modify content in order maximise visitors and
conversions. Conversions result from three main Calls To Action:

CTA 1:

“Newsletter Sign Up” button:

The main objective of the site is to convert visitors to sign up to the newsletter.
Present on the homepage and is eye-catching enough to focus users straight to it.

In the future this allows us to have targeted email campaigns as well as an

advertisement-based newsletter.

CTA 2:

“Email Us” button:

This button allows for suggestions for improvement and detailed questions to the
owners of the content. This encourages content sharing and communication with
site organisers.

CTA 3:

Social Sharing:
Social sharing icons added and mapped to every blog page linking our four social
media sites. If content is deemed interesting enough this encourages the reader to
share on their own page further increasing our market reach.

Mini Strategy

Craftee Beers will implement a content marketing strategy using informative, SEO-
optimised blog posts, as well as posts across social media platforms, aimed at our target
market to drive traffic to our website and ultimately to our lead capture form.

Step 1: Website created & initial blog posts written. Content aimed at four main social
media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn).

Step 2: Four social media platforms set up and linked to website to drive traffic and allow
content share. Posts shared daily on all sites and linked between sites to encourage traffic
to website. Social media content management platform to be used.

Step 3: Traffic converted on website using form subscription CTA which will lead to
advertisement platform for revenue generation.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !4

Step 4: Business owners to be charged for advertisement on website and external bloggers
to be allowed access to post own content.

Competitor Analysis

Craft Digital was established in 2015 and claims to be Ireland’s “first and only digital
marketing agency focused on the craft beer and artisan food”3 sector. As well as providing
a social media and content marketing management service, they specialise in creating and
launching brands, as well as rebranding existing companies. Their clients include
restaurants such as Box Burger and Platform, The Harbour Bar and O Brother Brewing.

The site has a lead capture form at the bottom of the home page, though it requires a lot of
scrolling to reach. The form asks only for a name and email address, and also has an option
to add a message. Its basic design and lack of complexity suggests abandonment rates
would be low, though the invitation to sign up is not incentivised.

An SEO Audit on the most recent blog post, featuring a story about Rascals Brewing and
their giveaway of free cases of beer to students at their brewery, returns a 76%-page grade
on MySiteAuditor using the keyword phrase ‘craft beer’.

The Craft Digital website averages three blog posts per month. The posts are generally
short, averaging about 300-400 words. They contain hyperlinks to their clients’ websites
and various breweries and distilleries and usually contain attractive, high quality
photographs. The posts often focus on new product launches, new business openings and
beer festivals, but do not offer any digital marketing advice or guidance.

Craft Digital operates a Twitter account with 1,080 followers and a Facebook account with
500 followers, and both accounts average approximately a post per day. The posts are
most often beer- and food-related and are targeted specifically at a craft beer and food
audience.

Craft Digital occupy the number one position for ‘craft beer digital marketing’ Google
searches currently.

3 http://www.craftdigital.ie

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !5

Analytical Report of Website Performance

Using Google Analytics, the following report was produced to analyse the Website
Performance of crafteebeers.weebly.com

The site was was created using Weebly and was marketed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
and LinkedIn.

The main goal of the site was to get visitors to sign up to the Craftee Beers mailing list.

All data was gathered between January 1st 2017 and January 29th 2017.

Unique Visitors and Page Views

crafteebeers.weebly.com reported 184 Unique Visitors, resulting in 251 sessions and 1,248
page views.

New / Returning Visitors

Of those 251 sessions, 182 (72.5%) were from new visitors and 69
(27.5%) were from returning visitors.

Overall, return rates were quite low. One possible reason for this
could be the lack of site updates during the time period of our
study.

Another possible reason could be a lack of responses to the email

sign-up responses. Although users were directed to sign up to a
mailing list, during our analytics period, no Newsletters were sent
out.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !6

One possible solution to these low return rates is as follows:
Having gathered some email addresses from our sign-up form, we could begin to market our
blog to users who have expressed interest by entering their email addresses.
Conversions

The primary conversion goal of the Craftee Beers page was to get visitors to sign up to our
mailing list:

Using a Hidden page on

our site, thankyou.html,
we were able to track
the amount of visitors
who signed up to the
mailing list:

Overall, 19 people signed up, a conversion rate of 7.57%

One possible reason why our conversion rate was so low could be due to the lack of mail
signup fields on all blog posts.
We decided to include our sign-up form on the homepage only, something that definitely
could have accounted to low conversion rates.
Considering the Twitter blog alone was responsible for 20% of the site’s overall page-views,
adding Signup forms to every page is something we will definitely look at in the future.


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !7

Bounce Rates and Acquisition Trends

The overall Bounce Rate for crafteebeers.weebly.com reported at

52.73%
The Facebook blog post had the highest bounce rate, at 75%,
while the LinkedIn blog post had the lowest bounce rate, at only
20%.

One possible reason for this high bounce-rate on the Facebook blog could be that readers
are specifically looking for information regarding marketing their craft beer on Facebook and
don’t believe they need any further information on marketing on other social media sites.

Facebook also accounted for the majority of channel acquisition:

As we can see here, Social channels accounted for

60% of our acquisition rates.
Of that 60%, a massive 98% of that was through
Facebook.

The lack of acquisition from Instagram could be related

to the platform’s lack of clickable links. Although URLs
can be added to posts, these are not directly clickable,
requiring users to copy/paste these links into a web
browser.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !8

Demographics 1: Location of Visitors

Visitors to crafteebeers.com primarily came

from Ireland, with 189 of the overall 251
sessions originating from there.
As we marketed our page heavily on Irish
Facebook pages, this could account for the
high visitor rates from there.

The second highest number of visitors

came from the United States, with 47
sessions originating from there, followed in
third place by the United Kingdom with 10
number of sessions.

Demographics 2: Age and Gender of Visitors

Visitors to the site were mainly aged between 25-44 with a male/female ratio very close to a
50/50 split.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !9

Devices and Technology

Visits were almost evenly split between mobile and desktop, with mobile very slightly edging
ahead in terms of Sessions.


We felt that it was important that our site was optimised for mobile and desktop users, in
order to maximise
page views.

Given that Instagram

(an almost-exclusively
Mobile platform) was
one of the platforms
we were
recommending for
marketing Craft Beer, it
was essential that our
site was optimised for
mobile performance.

Using Google’s Test my Site tools, we were able to determine that

our site was very well optimised for mobile usage.

Of those mobile
devices, there was
an almost-even split
between iOS and
Android users.

Windows phone
users accounted for
a very low
percentage of
visitors, less than
15% overall.

As Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram
and LinkedIn, the 4 main areas our blog posts focus on, are all available on iOS and
Android, this even split between the mobile operating systems is good to see.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !10

Appendices: Blog Posts and SEO Audits

• Blog Post and SEO Audit 1: Twitter - Adrian Naughton - Page 12

• Blog Post and SEO Audit 2: Instagram - Julian Callan - Page 17
• Blog Post and SEO Audit 3: LinkedIn - Darren Doyle - Page 23
• Blog Post and SEO Audit 4: Facebook - John Reidy - Page 28


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !11

 Twitter Blog Post and SEO Audit

Adrian Naughton
• Blog Post - Page 13

• SEO Audit - Page 15


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !12

Great tips for using Twitter to drive traffic to your craft beer business site -
Adrian Naughton

Twitter can be used by businesses to undertake research, to generate leads and to

network.  Twitter provides a way to maintain contact with customers and to communicate,
and to promote offers and new purchase opportunities.  It is also used to manage business
reputation and public relations.   Despite it 140 character limit for each tweet, Twitter can
undoubtedly be successfully deployed as part of a content marketing strategy for craft beer
businesses.



Twitter enables you to connect to your customers.  You can invite customers to be your co-
creators, demonstrating that their opinion is valued and helping them feel involved and
closer to your brand.  This makes customers feel involved and informed, not just marketed
to.  ‘Interruption marketing’ has largely been replaced by ‘permission marketing’.  As such
you could use Twitter to invite your followers, and others via hashtags, to make recipe
suggestions online; for example, you could conduct polls to allow customers to decide
what hops your microbrewery or craft brewery should use in your next IPA. As with all
content marketing, it is important to create compelling content, for example, educational or
entertaining, in order to drive traffic and encourage sharing.  Millennials, the primary
consumers of craft beer, value openness and disclosure.  Millennials are becoming more
interested in understanding what exactly they’re eating and drinking. They are beginning to
pay more attention to product sourcing and product manufacture. They are keen to make
more informed choices and are looking for the workings of the food and drink industry to be
demystified.  Therefore, you might want to consider transparency in your tweets in terms of
ingredients, giving details of the different types of hops, malt and yeast your various craft
microbrewery beers contain.

 

A successful content marketing strategy requires compelling content and Twitter hashtags
provide an in-built and very useful tool to leverage this content.   Hashtags are a way for
Twitter users to label, tag, categorise, link and search for tweets and social media updates. 
They make it possible and easier for people to search for other tweets about a certain topic.
Hashtags have spread from Twitter to Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook and form a kind of
summary of a tweet, a kind of parenthetical commentary or meta-commentary on the
content of a tweet.   Hashtags help to create communities of people interested in the same
things, and craft beer is very much an industry focused on the local and the communal.
 Well designed, creative, well-researched hashtags can substantially increase your online
follnowing, drive customer engagement and help to make your business stand out in a
crowded marketplace.   Furthermore, as well as generating your own hashtags, it is
possible and potentially profitable to design your craft beer business account tweets based
on existing trending hashtags in order to gain traction and visibility from Twitter users
already searching that trend. This blog post will focus on ways to maximise hashtags as
part of a craft beer digital marketing strategy.  While I have Twitter in mind in this post, since
most social media platforms have integrated hashtags into their functionality, the advice
here is relevant to social media digital marketing more generally. 

 

Search Engine Optimisation is a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy.  When using a
hashtag, which is by now very much the counterpart of the search bar, it is also extremely
important to optimise those hashtags that are relevant to your craft beer audience and
customers in order to address your target audience appropriately.    



Dave Chaffey’s SmartInsights website suggests a number of extremely useful analytical
tools for optimising hashtags, such as Hashtags.org, WhatThe Trend, Hootesuite and
Trendsmap.  Hashtag analytics services, such as Hashtags.org allows you to identify
hashtag trends and access 24 hour hashtag trend graphs.  The paid service also enables

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !13

you to store and monitor hashtags overtime.  WhatTheTrend provides Twitter related
statistics and information.  It allows users to identify global trends, but also country and
specific city trends and data, which will be particularly useful if you are a craft beer
producer who has moved to export internationally.  Unlike Hashtags.org, it provides daily
and monthly options, and provides a wealth of ideas for business tweets based on currently
trending topics and opportunities to piggyback existing trends.  Trendsmap visualises the
use of hashtags on a local level and shows them on a world map, which Smart Insights
describes as a practical too if local trends are important to your business.4 

 

Some other very useful Twitter hashtag services available include SmallTweet.com and
SoPopularity.com, and of course, TweetDeck and Google Keyword Planner.  Instead of
simply displaying the currently trending hashtags on Twitter, it also serves to shorten your
tweets and recommends hashtags that are relevant to what you want to post.   Similarly,
SoPopularity.com is a simple app which recommends the best hashtags for a specific
tweet.  Finally, while hashtags are platform specific, TagBoard.com is a very useful tool
which enables users to view hashtags usage across social media platforms.  While
hashtags as tagging, categorising, online community-building and meta-commentary tools
enable businesses to leverage their Twitter content marketing strategies, these hashtag
services provide ways to optimise the deployment of hashtags via keyword research and
hashtag tracking.



I mentioned above how hashtags are now the counterparts of search bars.  This means that
by utilising hashtags you make your craft beer business more discoverable, resulting in
higher traffic to you own Twitter account and also to your website.  While piggybacking
existing trends is a useful approach, it is important to also create your own hashtags, using
keywords related to your own craft beer industry.  Your own hashtags should be relevant to
the subject of your tweet and should use popular keywords.  The timing of your tweets is
significant, and utilising hashtags that coincide with major local, national or international
events an excellent strategy to maximise exposure to your content.  For example, it is
extremely useful to create and use hashtags during large sporting or cultural events. 
Sporting events, large festivals and cultural events are beacons for customers.  A simple
but effective example would be to encourage your followers and others via hashtags to
enjoy a cold bottle of your microbrewery’s latest fresh IPA or pilsner during the All-Ireland
hurling or football final.  Hashtags are conversation drivers on Twitter and business Twitter
uses should use hashtags as opportunities to engage potential customers.  Creating a
hashtag that brings together a group or community of local craft beer drinkers in a city is
particularly useful.  A hashtag like 'craftbeernearme' or 'pouringindublin' followed by the
name of a particular beer and/or bar where it is available provides communities of local
craft beer drinkers with new purchase opportunities. 

 

4 http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/twitter-marketing/how-to-find-the-best-hashtags-
to-use-in-twitter/

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !14

SEO Audit of crafteebeers.weebly.com/twitter/craft-beer-and-twitter
- Adrian Naughton

Without paid access to Google Adwords or other paid keyword planner websites, I
attempted somewhat limited keyword research on the focus keyword phrases ‘craft beer’
and ‘craft beer and Twitter’ using SEOChat.com and other free SEO planner tools, in
particular seeking related keywords to aggregate a list of related keyword phrases to try to
ascertain the kinds of synonyms and variations of words and phrases that would have the
most relevance for those with an interest in my blog’s content. Related keywords - for
example, using ‘microbrewery’, more common in the US, rather than ‘craft brewery’, more
common in Europe - enabled me to widen the scope of my content coverage so as to
capture traffic from searches possibly using less popular variations of my keywords.

A MySiteAuditor SEO individual page audit returns a 76% page grade for my blog entry.

MySiteAuditor identifies 36 good signals but also 22 issues with the page, though a number
of these issues are ones that are contested elsewhere in digital marketing theory and best
practice, such a bolding, italicising or underlining an exact keyword. MySiteAuditor also
penalises the fact that my blog post does not have 2,000 words on the page, but the
assignment word count is 800-1,000. See screenshot below:

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !15

Before publishing my blog post I added an SEO Post Title and an SEO Post Description
with an ‘Learn More’ comment in Weebly to optimise my post. I included a H1 tag too with
the exact keyword.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !16

 Instagram Blog Post and SEO Audit

Julian Callan
• Blog Post - Page 18

• SEO Audit - Page 21


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !17

Instagram for Craft Beer Brewers - Julian Callan

Instagram is a mobile-based social-network app that allows users to share photos and
videos with friends, family and fans. With a user base of over 500 million5, marketing on
Instagram gives craft beer brewers access to a massive mobile ad platform.

Purchased by Facebook for $1b in 2012, Instagram ads can be created using Facebook’s
Advert Manager suite of tools. These tools are available to use by brewers and breweries of
any size and budget.

With such a huge potential reach, it is crucial that brewers are prepared for the advertising
platform that Instagram provides. The Instagram advertising platform is built primarily on
visual storytelling. It supports objective-based advertising campaigns such as Clicks to
Website, Conversions, Mobile App Installs and App engagement, among others.

It’s important to consider three factors before developing a marketing strategy on

Instagram:

1. Who is our audience?

2. What is our visual style going to be?

3. What topics / content will we post about?

1. Audience
Determining the audience that we wish to market our beers to can be made easier by
looking at some of the statistics about Instagram’s user base:

Using data collected in 2014, 90% of Instagram users were determined to be under the age
of 35.6

According to Pew Research, only 4% of adults in the U.S. are using Instagram7 .

If we determine that the audience we wish to market our beer or brewery to falls into the
21-35 demographic, we can come to the conclusion that marketing this age group will have
a much higher reach than marketing to an older age group on Instagram.

In terms of drinkers, Mintel's Craft Beer Survey of November 20128 reports that 32% of the
overall male drinkers fall into the 21-35 year group (compared to 44% falling between 36-55
and the remainder of males age 55+)

Interestingly, a whopping 44% of female drinkers fall into the 21-35 year group. With
females accounting for 68% of Instagram’s user base9, it would be incredibly short-sighted
not to consider Instagram as an advertising platform.

You don’t need to be American brewery either! More than 80% of Instagram users are
outside of the United States10. This positions Instagram as a global advertising platform.

5 https://business.instagram.com/advertising
6 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150616155028.htm
7http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/mobile-messaging-and-social-
media-2015/2015-08-19_social-media-update_09/
8 http://store.mintel.com/craft-beer-us-november-2012
9 BI Intelligence: The Social Media Demographics Report, June 2015
10 http://blog.instagram.com/post/146255204757/160621-news

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !18

2. Visual Style
Instagram advertising is divided into three main formats:

1. Photo Ads

2. Video Ads

3. Carousel Ads

Photo ads are self-explanatory: an image that advertises your beers. Video ads, again, are
fairly straightforward: a video of up to 60 seconds containing images, sounds and motion.

Carousel ads are a continuation of photo ads: they allow users to swipe through additional
images within the one Instagram post. A call to action button can be added to this
advertisement to take users to your brewery’s website.

From looking at the various ad formats offered by Instagram, it is evident that the visual
aspect of our advertisements is a key factor in what will drive users to react to our ads.
Strong visual ads on Instagram allow a brewery to develop a signature look that reflects
their beers. Instagram users such as @brewbokeh and @thebottletrade have immediately
obvious visual styles.

Since Instagram is a visually-driven platform, it’s important to make sure our images are of
a high quality, no matter which way we choose to advertise them. Our photos have to have
some sort of aesthetic appeal to them. Featuring your brewery’s artwork and bottles in a
real-world environment is a great way to showcase your beer.

One of Instagram’s key features aimed at developing a signature look is the inclusion of
filters. These are presets that alter the colour, sharpness and other aspects of a photo. A
study by WebDAM found that 60% of the top brands on Instagram use a consistent
filter11. Using filters is an incredibly easy way to help create a visual consistency between
the images you post.

3. Topics and Content

We use Instagram to tell a visual story about our craft bee to an audience. In terms of
topics, we are limited only by our imagination and the visual content we can create,
although keeping it relevant to your beer can prevent brand dilution.

We need to create a plan to help us curate our content. This should be content that
showcases our beer creatively and also ensure that users can find this content. This will
help us develop content that makes our followers engage with our brewery positively.

Using hashtags, we can tag all of our posts with general tags that will drive users toward
our posts. If we’re trying to market our beer, tagging our content with #craftbeer will drive
all users searching for craft beer related imagery to our posts.

With 95 million daily posts12 , it’s important to recognise that user-generated content can
also potentially play a big part in our brewery’s marketing strategy. Since Instagram allows
every user to tag content using hashtags, we could develop brand-specific hashtags to
use with our posts. This would allow users to tag their own photos with our hashtag and
connect with not only our brewery but also other customers.

11 https://webdam.com/blog/brand-marketing-infographic
12 https://business.instagram.com

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !19

By encouraging followers to implement our hashtags, we can, in effect, turn our followers
into brand ambassadors for our beer.

Conclusions
With over 500 million active monthly users, 400 million of those outside of the United
States, Instagram is truly a global advertising platform for Craft Breweries. It has the
potential reach of a young, beer-drinking audience that make over 95 million posts a day.
Using strong visual storytelling, consistent visual design and curated hashtags, craft
breweries and beer makers have a great resource at their disposal.


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !20

SEO Audit of crafteebeers.weebly.com/instagram-craft-beers
- Julian Callan

Using MySiteAuditor.com, I ran an SEO audit of my blog post entitled Instagram for Your
Craft Beer. The focus keyword I decided to use was “Instagram for Craft Beer”

This resulted in a 73% page rank using MySiteAuditor.com:

After initial results came back with low scores, I made sure to fill in
all the SEO areas of the weebly site.

I also modified the URL of the page to optimise SEO.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !21

I also rewrote the article and changed the HTML code of the page to ensure SEO
optimisation, in particular the Heading tags:

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !22

 LinkedIn Blog Post and SEO Audit

Darren Doyle
• Blog Post - Page 24

• SEO Audit - Page 26


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !23

How to effectively use LinkedIn as a Marketing Tool for a Craft Brewing
Company - Darren Doyle

As we all know LinkedIn is a business and employment orientated social network. It is

mainly used for professional networking as employers post job advertisements requesting
CV’s from potential employees. It’s estimated that it has over 240 million users worldwide.
As a marketer it’s a great tool to help you engage with decision makers within your industry
who may be in need of your products/services. I will discuss some ways to use LinkedIn as
an effective marketing tool for a Craft Beer Company. It can also be helpful when attracting
new business for your company. I will look at how you can use it to promote and expand
your Craft Beer Company.

Giving you exposure to the people hunting for Craft Beer products is a passive way of
marketing on LinkedIn. Getting introductions to connections on LinkedIn is vital to getting
your brand/company established.

The Craft Beer industry has been one of the quickest growing in the last 5 years. But as the
industry grows making your brand/company stand out is a vital part of accumulating sales
and share of the marketplace. According to the Craft Brewers of Ireland the number of
Microbreweries in Ireland has grown from 23 in 2013 to 62 in 2016. That’s a substantial
increase in products on the market vying for sales in a marketplace already saturated by
Diageo, Smithwicks and Heineken. Making these products stand out and attracting a
customer base is vital by creating awareness on social media. Microbrewery production
134`000 HL (hectolitres) in 2015 represented a 1.8% market share and it was set to rise to
2.5% in 2016. With all the microbreweries having some form of social media it opens many
channels for exposure and expansion.

Always keep your profile up to date as it’s the first point of contact with other LinkedIn
users. Use clear and precise wording mentioning Craft Beer and what you produce etc.
Mentioning upcoming events or promotions on your home page will give your brand
excellent exposure once you start to build up relationships with other breweries on
LinkedIn. Building relationships with other people that are as passionate as you are about
Craft Beer products are is good for busy. Reach out to these other profiles on LinkedIn and
show off your company. You can also post links to all the employees’ profiles as this will
increase your follower numbers. This is an inexpensive way of raising the profile of your
Craft Beer Company before you go down the route of LinkedIn ad`s which will specifically
target other potential customers or companies.

LinkedIn is also a great way of recruiting new specialised staff. Brewing is now becoming
more and more popular with IT Carlow now offering an honours degree in Master Brewing.
This opens up a new eager batch of qualified craft beer brewers to job possibilities in the
industry. They will of course be searching for jobs on LinkedIn so may sure to keep an eye
on college pages for graduation dates.

Craft Beer Brewing has a real presence on social media so taking advantage of this is vital
to increasing your exposure and getting the brand noticed. LinkedIn offers a more
professional approach to the social media aspect of craft beer promotion. Don’t be afraid to
invite other companies to view your page and share opinions. This feedback will be
priceless and you can do so for them too. The InMail option on LinkedIn is useful for
contacting others as this will inform you when it`s been received and read. Getting your
company on consumer’s radars is the name of the game so post all relevant content on

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !24

your page; keep it up to date with news and products. LinkedIn ad’s is an advertisement
option that includes pay by clicks and focus on attracting people with specific titles or
industries to help build relationships. There is a massive emphasis on community in the
craft beer scene. All brewers are willing to help out each and share knowledge of the whole
brewing process. There is a camaraderie involved as the best way to brew good beer is
through collaboration. They want to join up and take on the bigger more established
brewers/companies. So with the number of brewers growing annually then this community
will only continue to thrive.

This will ensure your Craft Beer Company will command attention for potential customers.

LinkedIn is an excellent way of creating awareness of your Brewing Company or Craft Beer
so use it wisely.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !25

SEO Audit of crafteebeers.weebly.com/linkedin-craft-beer
- Darren Doyle

I didn’t use any paid word access to keyword planner websites. I used MySiteAuditor to
rate my blog post

A MySiteAuditor SEO page audit came back at 65% page grade for my blog entry

MySiteAuditor identified 32 good signals but also found 26 issues. Most of these issues are
bolding, italicising or underlining an exact keyword.

MySiteAuditor also penalised me for not having 2000 words and I forgot to add the H1 tags
to my blog. That was a major slip on my behalf but I didn’t want to change it as my work
because my work had been submitted.

Find below 2 more screenshots showing good and bad feedback from MySiteAuditor
website.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !26

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !27
 Facebook Blog Post and SEO Audit

John Reidy
• Blog Post - Page 29

• SEO Audit - Page 31


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Craft Beer & Facebook - John Reidy

The micro business of the homebrewer, the feeling of hard work and pride, the effort of
early mornings and late nights tinkering building boiling roasting soldering and bodging, this
is the world of the small craft brewer. The difference between today and 100 years ago is
simple, the population of Earth tripled and yet instantaneous communication through a
thousand mediums is now possible. The World of the home brewer and wider planet now
intermingle through a variety of social media, The partnership of craft beer & Facebook
is huge, for example over 50% of the visitors to this site come via Facebook. Ever wonder
how FB business pages can help you grow your craft beer business?

Facebook can be used for a variety of campaigns, traffic drivers and even a purchasing
platform itself. However, there are some notable rules to be aware of for any small brewery
owner regarding the implementation of a craft beer Facebook page.

1) Overview
The page should be a designated Facebook business page for craft beer, primarily for its
ability to be used through a paid advertising platform but also for its SEO optimization over
standard pages, this means when you search for your company a top SEO optimized result
may be your Facebook business page even though your company website page doesn’t
rank that high. Only 7% of organic material reaches your target audience, to boost this paid
services must be availed of. It is a common misconception that everything posted to a page
is viewed. The Facebook algorithm maps the likes and habits of all Facebook users and
sends designated traffic their way. Therefore, your posts must be attractive to a wider
variety than you initially intended and this means a greater chance of likes and shares and a
greater viewing opportunity for your selected material when you choose to post the really
good stuff. Only 0.3% of liked pages receive a second visit from a user, therefore the
primary goal of a Facebook business page is to send traffic to a company’s website page.
Facebook paid services can be set up in a variety of ways and you can set a daily budget
so as not to overspend. A simple way to get the most is to pay only for a conversion to your
website from the page. Your webpage is where you will keep your readers and hopefully
convert them into customers.  

2) What do I need to set up a Facebook Page?

You must have and use your own personal Facebook page to create a business page, no
one can see you are the Admin user and you can assign different profile users to your page
with different levels of access to edit review and delete data and posts, this will also
encourage individuals to share the page and content across multiple social media platforms
such as LinkedIn. When setting the Business page up there are several types to choose
from – online business, charity, entertainment etc. Be careful to choose correctly as it
affects the overriding algorithms ability to funnel your content correctly.  

3) The Look
Upload a cover photo that is clear and recognizable and make sure it is the same as on any
other website or social media outlet. Make use of your brand logo and brand the
page. Share for the best craft beer pictures to encourage readers to engage with your
content.

4) How do I analyze the impact of the page on my business?

Facebook provides a platform for reviewing and analyzing the data in detail called
Facebook insights (minimum 30 likes before any data available). The more traffic through
the page the more information you can use as a lot of the features may have a
predetermined limit in order to access the levels of data due in part to the EU regulation
data protection. Through insights you can review the “weight” that your actions have on
your page. You can review data on likes and post content as well as the aggregate of how
many people your posts reach in a data range. The engagement levels are ranked as

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !29

follows 1) Share, 2) Comment, 3) Reach & 4) Click. If all these actions are done separately it
all feeds towards the success of your page.

5) How do I advance the performance of my craft beer FB business page?

Non-paid method:

Structured posts that are relevant, short visual with optimized content for your target
audience is the best course of action for non-paid promotion. There needs to be a certain
frequency to your posting. Facebook insights can be monitored in order to figure out the
best time of day with highest hit content and amount of posts needed per day.

Paid method –

Paid advertising can be used to target specifically based on demographic, location,

interests, relationship status and retarget previous visitors to your site. You can use three
types.

Boost - You can pay to boost your posts i.e. it will reach a greater amount of potential
customers than the organic non-paid feed. You can also use the paid advertising option
and advert manager. Standard – Objective driven based on conversions of a pre-
determined action. You only pay for your conversions not visits. Advanced – bulk
advertising rates as well as the use of Power editor. Power editor is a tool that helps
business manage a multitude of different campaigns at once.  


CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !30

SEO Audit of crafteebeers.weebly.com/httpswwwfacebookcomcrafteebeers
- John Reidy

Background:
Using Google analytics and Facebook insights I have outlined a review of the website
pages’ performance. The main goal of the website is to share digital marketing content of
high enough quality as to encourage the reader to sign up to the newsletter and the main
goal of the social media site is to funnel traffic to the site itself.
From Google analytics: We can see that 53% of the visitor’s from to the website were
funnelled through social media. We have four social media platforms in operation to the
site, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. For the 1-month date range selected
since the website was created we can see that of the 53% of feeds sent to the site that the
Facebook business page accounts for 98.01% of this.

Also Facebook was responsible for 100% of the social media conversions to the site
newsletter

In total we can see that of the 1242 views for the month that 44.7% of these came from
Facebook. So the profile has had the desired effect, thanks in a large part to the
Instagram linked photos that post regularly. Over the course of the post reviews we have

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !31

seen that the visual subject medium is more relevant particularity since the site content is
relating to the food and drink industry.

Facebook insights: We can see that the content on the Facebook page itself can be greatly
improved to funnel more traffic, the page received a very small number of likes so the
organic content reach has not grown with the desired intention.

This has been largely due to the lack of videos and regularly blog posts that the industry
finds appealing. This would be the first step to improvement as we know the reach has
been on average 40 people per week yet no information has been shared and the like
count is very small. No website content data has been shared through any social platform
either, this has been rectified by the addition to social media icons to every blog page on
the website.

The website page itself needs improvement, we know that most of the social media traffic
was funnelled through Facebook, however the blog post on Facebook on the website
received the fewest amount of visitors at 4.5%. Even more worrying is the very high
bounce rate at 75%. Therefore, an SEO audit was performed to see how the site could be

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !32

optimised as well as the content being reviewed on a content review platform -
hemmingway.com.

SEO Audit from My site auditor:

Based on the review from Google analytics and Insights I performed a SEO audit using
mysiteauditor.com. The original score was 53. Therefore, some immediate actions were
needed to boost this score. The page now sits at 72 with key action listed below for
further improvement.
Without access to google AdWords or other paid sites to analyse the best keywords to use a
process of trial and error to optimise the site was used including google searches to see
what relevant results were returned. The key word finalised is “craft beer &
Facebook”

After the best keyword was identified it was added to the SEO stream on the weebly
website and the title tag and Meta description were altered accordingly to bring this
inline. As well as H1, H2 & H3 tags added to the site with the same keywords.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !33

To improve the content analysis, the exact keyword was added to the first 100 words and
its use restricted to 2-4 times throughout the blog, the length of the blog is only 900
words. Future blogs will be up to 2000 and will have the snippet posted with a “read
more” button as CTA in order to further optimise content and see what is the most
popular.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !34

To allow further content sharing by the reader’s social media icons were added for all
social media sites that we have set up. This will allow our market reach to grow even

further.

Improvements to come:
Priority will be given to the further improvements under our control, HTML links and
keyword specifics under the domain and URL are not feasible under the unpaid weebly
platform.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !35

More images with specific file names will be added, description tags will be amended to
include exact keyword tag and will be less than 160 words.

The length of further blogs will be extend to 2000 words with the read more CTA attached.
The blog posts will be opened to content readers to encourage sharing through the site on
social media and will boost our reach.

The content of the site itself will be optimsied to be less detailed in a hope to decrease
the bounce rate.

CRAFTEE BEERS REPORT !36