Research and Planning
DeCrescente is a multi-million dollar beer and new age beverage distributor located in the heart of New York’s Capital Region. They service 11 counties throughout New York, but most of their business comes from Albany, Schenectady, Troy and Saratoga Springs. DeCrescente is a family- owned business of four generations. As the younger DeCrescente sons took over the company’s marketing, they approached Overit Media to reinvigorate GotBeer.com – an outdated website they owned the rights to and wanted to build a better back-end to a new corporate site for more efficient operations and develop a integrated PR plan to begin more of a proactive media and social media campaign on news stemming from the company.
While the heart of the business is local, their success as a beer distributor is national, especially when it comes to their corporate success story and carbon footprint reductions. Over the course of the past year, GotBeer.com and DeCrescente.com have been re-developed with new branding, new functionality and are meeting today’s technological preferences of a younger generation with micro-sites on the iPad and iPhone.
The integrated campaign developed six primary projects:
1. New corporate site with a backend that streamlines sales and ordering – reduces account managers time and paperwork by 60 percent.
2. Designed a new GotBeer.com – establishing up to date event calendaring, trivia section, contests, sign ups for mailing and newsletters, and the Beer Finder tool to help identify where users can find their local beers.
3. Also proposed and executed, and approved by Apple, is the Beer Finder – a mobile app that does the same thing the online GotBeer.com site does.
4. Launch Event geared towards GotBeer.com going live – included live music, radio promotion trip giveaways and VIP attendees.
5. Media relations campaign – yielded 25 feature stories and hundreds of syndications tied to DeCrescente’s new partnerships, carbon footprint and Earth Day, etc.
6. Social media campaign – driven by weekly trivia, Facebook surveys to pick the winners, contests encouraging participations on behalf of GotBeer users and notifying users of events coming up on the weekend.
Execution
The integrated campaign had three primary goals:
1. To establish GotBeer.com as a go-to resource for events, pictures of people after the events, new marketing opportunities for beer and beverage brands and the ability to connect most of the Capital Region’s beer distribution with DeCrescente. The former outdated site was not receiving really any hits and had no real strategy to keep users coming back.
2. As DeCrescente acquires more business and takes over new distribution contracts for major brands, they wanted to establish DeCrescente as a solid place to work, hoping to increase the quality of resumes and personnel coming into the company.
3. Finally, it was to bring key local media into the fold highlighting major news announcements including the:
a. Launch of GotBeer.com b. New logo and branding c. Events tied to timely holidays like St. Patrick’s Day d. Launch party for GotBeer.com with radio promotions and trip giveaways e. Acquisition of Stewart’s brand f. New expansion of DeCrescente’s building g. Green and clean tech methods undertaken by the company to decrease carbon footprint.
A PR plan was developed that tied DeCrescente to timely events such as Earth Day, and celebrated major million dollar acquisition’s like the one in May where DeCrescente won Snapple and Stewart’s contracts. We took advantage of every holiday beer related including St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco De Mayo and Father’s Day, tying promotions to these events and getting local media to cover. The timely and routine social media campaigns helped not only drive traffic to the website, but increased participation from its users.
The PR plan that Overit Media devised not only increased web analytics by 1200 percent for GotBeer.com, but increased Facebook following by 500 percent and a Twitter following by 400 percent. Overit Media devised contests around giveaways such as “Naming your Own Stakes Race” for the Saratoga horse racing season and a trip to Vegas at the Launch Party. This particular tactic helps drive thousands to the site, and increases participation with GotBeer.com’s audiences.
Creativity
Integrating the traditional PR and social media campaigns has helped establish DeCrescente’s brand alongside GotBeer.com. Creativity was embraced in the brand development and execution of the sites’ layout which help users navigate between finding events they can attend sponsored by their favorite beer brands to using contests and weekly trivia to earn valuable prizes.
Establishing the strategy on a mobile platform really took the campaign to a new level. Overit Media developed a “Beer Finder” App that lists all of the brews DeCrescente distributes and corresponds to those with locations where they are sold locally. So…you want DogFish? Great, the application helps you find the most common brands like Coors Light to the best of microbrews. You can also determine whether it’s on tap or for sale by traditional purchase.
The mobile app helps people connect DeCrescente to being the local beer expert and gives users an “on the go” event guide. Once the mobile app was approved by Apple in August 2011, a new PR campaign will commence to let users know that it can be downloaded for free.
Results and Evaluation
In the last six months alone, DeCrescente has had 25 features in local publications and hundreds of syndications. The website analytics demonstrate that the old site received roughly 1,000 unique hits a month, which has now increased to 10,000. Event attendance is up by 200 percent, the PR campaigns have yielded a list of thousands of email addresses ensuring better 1:1 communication with our newsletters, contests and weekly trivia campaigns.
