A Maryland-based rum distillery focused on creating a renaissance of flavor built on tradition, agriculture, ingenuity, and a drive for excellence.
.jpg)
Initial Challenges and Goals
Lost Ark Distillery is a Maryland-based rum distillery offering tour bookings, tasting room visits, and live events such as trivia nights, live music, and drag brunches. While they had seen some initial success, they were beginning to see a plateau in tasting room revenue. Before working with Harbor Marketing Agency, their marketing strategy just consisted of posting on Instagram and relying on word of mouth. This was proving to be ineffective and was resulting in inconsistent tasting room revenue, which put a lot of stress on the business. They knew they needed a different approach to turn things around.
Lost Ark game to us with the following goals:
- Increase Tour Bookings
- Increase Event Attendance
- Generate More Walk-ins
To accomplish these goals, we put together Meta Advertising and Email Marketing strategies designed to get the brand in front of new customers on a regular basis, as well as stay top of mind with existing customers.
Facebook & Instagram Advertising Strategy
We started by targeting audiences within a 20-mile radius of the distillery who were interested in rum, live music, cocktails, and other relevant interests. Once we defined our target audience, we designed three different types of ads:
Tour Booking Ads: promote Lost Ark's tour experience. These ads drove traffic directly to the tour booking page on Lost Ark's website so customers could easily book their tour online.
Event Attendance Ads: we regularly created new ads for the different events Lost Ark would host at the distillery on a weekly basis. These event ads ranged from live music promotions, to drag brunch promotions, to karaoke night promotions.
Walk-In Ads: we designed ads to position Lost Ark as a fun weekend hang-out spot for local customers. These ads were effective to bring in regular customers who would make a habit of visiting the tasting room.
Finally, we set up Retargeting Campaigns to get ads in front of people who had already visited the website or engaged on social media. Our retargeting campaign ensured potential customers would see Lost Ark's ads multiple times and become familiar enough with the brand to get them to the point where they were ready to visit.
Email Marketing & SMS Strategy
.png)
To build a successful Email & SMS strategy for Lost Ark, we focused on two main things: continually growing their contact lists and sending regular campaigns to stay top of mind with their customers.
Growing the lists: to grow their contact lists, we installed a pop-up on their website that captured potential customer's email and phone number data in exchange for enticing offers such as free flights or discounts off of tours. As more people were visiting the website from our Meta Advertising strategy, more people saw pop-up and Lost Ark's email and SMS lists began to grow.
Regular Campaigns: we sent out weekly email and SMS campaigns to Lost Ark's database. The messages in these campaigns ranged from events happening that week, to tour promotions, to educational content. This proved effective as Lost Ark became more top-of-mind due to regular communication with their customers. They saw new customers begin to visit and more frequent visitations from previous customers.
Results
Lost Ark saw over 40% revenue growth year over year. We were able to 4x their tour bookings in less than two months time, their cocktail and bottle sales have increased, and they have even had to hire more staff members to keep up with demand.
We knew getting behind a great marketing agency would be huge for us and it's exactly what happened. Once we brought Harbor on, we fill every tour slot every weekend. I've had to add more slots and more days. That has driven cocktail sales, bottle sales, and we're seeing better pull-through in our distribution and liquor stores.
Brad, CEO of Lost Ark Distillery
