Brewery Event Ideas: Successfully Marketing Your Brewery

For anyone looking to rocket their breweries to success, live events are the perfect way of attracting your target audience. Live event marketing is one of the best ways to sell products. It allows you to introduce your values and product quality, plus entice potential future customers over the threshold. Sometimes, all you need is that initial boost of foot traffic; live events are a great way to attract customers. Once attendees arrive at your event, you are responsible for converting them into long-term, loyal customers. Let’s backtrack slightly, though. What are the best brewery event ideas? What special events can you run to attract attendees in the first place?

Book food trucks and host parties in a fairy-lit beer garden area. You could stream sporting events or even host tasting sessions and expert seminars. Live events are brilliant whether you are running craft breweries, microbreweries, or huge brewery businesses. The key is finding what events best appeal to your target audience. From there, you can narrow things down and get planning.

This guide will introduce you to the best event ideas for breweries. There are many choices when it comes to events, so you must understand the process and primary goals. This way, you can guarantee results from your event marketing.

Why You Should Find Unique Brewery Event Ideas

So, firstly, why should you find unique brewery event ideas? It’s common knowledge that event marketing is a leading product marketing technique. You are competing for attention when it comes to inviting influencers to attend and collaborate with your brand.

Therefore, it’s super important that you have unique ideas that stand out and attract instant attention. This way, you’ll easily stand out from the masses.

Aside from this initial benefit, though, there are many different reasons you should make your events as unique as possible. Check out the main three:

• Unique ideas enforce your brand awareness better.

Unique ideas catch attention - something we have already established. But by doing so, it also increases and enforces your brand awareness. This is great from a marketing perspective. Brand awareness is simply how many potential customers are familiar with your brand and products. The larger the awareness, the more sales you can convert. With unique events, there’s more likelihood of it spreading via word of mouth and actually being retained in people’s memories.

• Unique ideas reinforce your brand values.

Not only do unique ideas increase brand awareness more effectively, but they also reinforce your brand values. Brand values are just things that you prioritize and care about as a brewery business. Unique ideas are brilliant at showcasing your values making potential customers feel more positively towards your business.

• Better connections with your target audience.

Finally, unique ideas facilitate a better connection with your target audience. Your target audience loves specific things - anything from carbon-neutral brewing to beer tasting on school nights. Creating unique events with your target audience in mind makes them feel heard and understood. This creates a better connection that you can use to drive sales and customer loyalty.

Top 6 Event Ideas for Breweries

Are you ready for some practical insights and brilliant event ideas for breweries? In this section, we’ll provide the ultimate inspiration to create incredible events that harness spectacular results. The whole point of event marketing is to connect and target your ideal customer base. And with these top six ideas, you’ll see fast results.

1. Game Nights

Game nights might seem unusual, but remember the importance of unique events for your brewery. You could use any game - from chess to jenga or twister. Or perhaps a murder mystery or Xbox games. You know your target audience best. What would they like? What do they find fun?

Game nights provide the occasion and reason to visit your brewery, and then you can supply drinks all night.

2. Seasonal Beer Tasting and Holiday Events

Seasonal beers are a hit, just like that irresistible seasonal coffee: the iconic pumpkin spice latte. Play on seasons by using seasonal marketing and products to inspire your events. This could be autumn-inspired, with pumpkin and spices. Or it could be winter-inspired, with more chocolates, or spring, with locally sourced ingredients.

You can change your venue to suit the season and upcoming holidays if you don’t have seasonally-inspired products. For instance, you are offering hot tubs and beer gardens in summer. And you can always combine seasons with holiday themes and events, like Christmas decorations and snow machines.

3. Stream Sporting Events

Sports fans will love you for this one. Streaming sporting events is a brilliant way to create a feeling of comradeship and community amongst potential customers. Streaming sporting events gives you the chance to attract fans and gives them a reason to visit. And everyone knows what people enjoy when watching sports - good old beer. You’ll have plenty of sales and get all the benefits of event marketing.

4. Behind the Scenes Tours

Who doesn’t love that sneaky, exclusive feel of a behind-the-scenes tour? With a behind-the-scenes brewery tour, you can offer attendees an informative and exclusive-feeling experience. Everyone loves to feel like they are indulging and unique. Just look at the psychology behind why people love behind-the-scenes tours. You can play on that indulgence and sense of mystery and build foundations for lasting customer relationships.

5. Expert Talks and Classes

Another brilliant way to market your brewery is through expert talks and classes. Chances are you have some beer enthusiasts in your target audience’s midst, so use education to appeal to them. By offering expert talks and classes, you appeal to enthusiasts and present yourself as an industry leader. You can sell tickets to lectures on breaking news techniques or lessons on how-to-do-it-yourself-type experiences.

With the classes especially, you could attract couples and friends looking for unique experiences together. And who knows, if any go on to start microbreweries, you are ready-made collaborators. It pays to have connections. Expert talks and classes connect you with people who are - at least a little serious - about the brewery industry.

6. Beer Festival

Finally, there’s the most popular idea - the ambitious beer festival. There are many ways that you could play this event idea. You could host lots of other breweries using stands and individual tasting experiences. The benefit of this is building partnerships, networking, and establishing yourself as an industry leader. Or you could run it using just your products, the advantage being you purely spotlight your beer. Either way, you’ll be attracting local beer enthusiasts and creating an event with annual potential and significant event profit potential.

How To Organize Brewery Taproom Event Ideas

First, what is a taproom? A taproom is just the space where the brewery serves beer to customers. It is usually adjoining to the actual brewing space and is a valuable piece of brewery terminology to understand. When considering organizing events in this specific space, there are a few special considerations:

• If your taproom is usually open to the public

Will you close your taproom to the public on the day of the event? If so, how will you let people know in advance? How about just partitioning some of the taproom off? Or could you open outside your usual hours or opening days to minimize the impact on standard admission?

• If your taproom isn’t open to the public

If you only ever use the taproom for private events, this will require less planning. Ensure you are up-to-date on safety procedures and that everything works smoothly and looks good. Brewery taproom event ideas are similar to other ideas for your brewery. However, you need to consider the potential impacts and logistics of using this space.

Stages of Planning a Brewery Event

So, what are the stages of planning a brewery event? How do you actually go about this - what can feel like a mammoth - mission? Simply put, you follow these five steps:

1. Define your target audience. Firstly, you need to get crystal clear on your target audience. You need to know who you are attracting and what they like. If you don’t know these details, you have less chance of creating an event attracting new customer loyalty. This stage may involve collecting customer data if you still need this information.

2. Brainstorm and then pick your event (s). Next is the fun part. You brainstorm and pick your brewery event or events, keeping your target audience in mind. You will need to get creative here, and it’s worth staggering this part over a few days.

3. Break down your event necessities and form a realistic budget. This is the part where you make your event a reality. You’ll need to break down all the necessities that go into your event, and then you form a budget. You should have an ongoing marketing budget that you can chip into. These costs are all part of starting and running a brewery.

4. Set a date and roll out event marketing. Choosing a date is like setting the timer running. Now is make or break time. This is when you send out influencer invites and invest in social media marketing and flyers.

5. Run the event, invest in retention, and analyze your performance. The job doesn’t just finish on the day. You’re running the event, investing in retention, and converting attendees into customers. After the event ends, you should analyze your performance and take notes on improvement for the next event.

Final Thoughts: Budgeting for Brewery Events

Budgeting for brewery events can be stressful if you feel the squeeze of the cost-of-living crisis or general business life. But even the smallest breweries can find ways of minimizing budgeting requirements for event marketing. Some things, like tasting events, only require extra paid staffing hours. You can do things like marketing your event to get attendees for ‘free’ using your own time instead of outsourcing. You could even pick up some fantastic skills in the process. You don’t have to have a massive budget for brewery events, so get creative.

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