Case Study: Santa Fe Brewing Company

What’s better than having a beer with the bros? Being able to make money off that drink. The beer industry has been evolving with the increasing popularity in micro-breweries, craft beer, and craft beer drinks. The Santa Fe Brewing Company established in 1988 is New Mexico's oldest brewery, and a great business to analyze in terms of internet marketing strategies.

This company is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and distributes its products to New Mexico and 9 other surrounding states (so it’s only a regional business). This company focuses on brewing excellent quality beers and many of their products have gone to win national beer competitions and awards for the past decade. Their website (www.santafebrewing.com), visible on different platforms, is very interactive with fun graphics and direct links to a list of the beers they brew, where to find these beers, how to contact the company and kinks to their social media pages. They have an Instagram account with 16,000 followers and 1,008 posts, a Twitter account with 6,050 followers and 3,600 tweets, a Facebook account with 13,000 followers, and no interactive app made so far. 

These statistics are fine for a regional business, but implementing successful business strategies to their marketing plan could help increase those statistics in the future. They have only tweeted 29 times in the past 9 months whereas Marble Brewing Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico tweets every 2-3 hours and also retweets fan pictures of their products and regional news (Santa Fe Brewing Co. does have a total of 3,600 tweets so at some point in time they were very active with the account but have failed to keep up with a very beneficial tool). They are very active on their Facebook and Instagram accounts which is a great strategy to interact with their customers and fans.

Using these different social media accounts is a great advantage for Santa Fe Brewing Company because they are in a very competitive industry where differentiation from is key. Using social media accounts helps them get exposure to fans of craft beer that will ultimately decide to buy the beer. One of their strategies is to market their beer as a high-quality beer because they have won many awards, so for example, they would post a picture of their beer next to a trophy that it won. I personally have seen their beers available in stores and bars in most of New Mexico but once I get into Texas or Colorado I see the beer less in stores and only in craft beer bars. Another marketing strategy that they use is marketing their location (Santa Fe, mountainous) in advertisements by posting pictures of the beer next to mountains. This is a design tool that gets people’s attraction and since the beer is in the Southwest region, it’s affiliation with mountains is very, very smart.

The Santa Fe Brewing Company does a good job of using internet marketing strategies, especially for being a regional business. They do well in reaching their regional audience with social media because they aren’t a giant national brand like Bud Light that invests in million-dollar ad campaigns. They don’t have any celebrity endorsements except for the award-winning beer itself. Even though they do well in their approach, I still believe that there is always room for improvement  and that they can find even more successful strategies to attract more customers and possibly expanding the business even more. I am personally a big fan of this company and its beer and I see it at all the stores and bars that I go to. Not only do I tell people about it by word of mouth but I could even be motivated to make a post on social media about my experience. If Santa Fe Brewing Company continues to use customer feedback and implement it into their marketing strategies, then their business could thrive even more.