When Fritz Klug got the job offer to be Bell’s Brewery’s Digital Content Specialist, he took one sip of Two Hearted Ale and knew he’d found the right opportunity. Since then, he’s captured the spirit of Bell’s Brewery through authentic photos and videos.
In our new on-demand webinar, Fritz walks us through how he ramped up the craft brewery’s marketing and digital content as they grew from a local Michigan favorite to a national brand.
Watch now to find out:
- How they create authentic visual content to engage followers on social media
- Why they take inspiration from their beer in their visual storytelling
- How they use photography in every aspect of the business, from marketing and PR to sales
On-Demand Webinar: The Strategy Behind Bell’s Brewery’s Authentic Visual Storytelling
All Your Questions Answered
Thank you to everyone for submitting questions before the webinar and during the Q&A! Read through Fritz’s answers below, and tweet any lingering questions @psforbrands.
How do you measure the success of your marketing?
I look at two things, as a lot of folks do, when it comes to measuring success on social media. Part of it is metrics and how well something performed, that’s half of it.
But, the other part is kind of like a gut check, as well. So when I was in journalism, you would always have metrics of how stories are doing, right? You know, how many page views or whatever. And let’s say a story got a thousand page views, which maybe didn’t meet the goals that we wanted, but I thought, well, what is it? It’s a story about public policy. What if 200 of those people, 200 of the thousand people who read it, are influential people who make decisions and something good comes out of it?
So there’s a lot of gut check involved with it, as well, where we post something and maybe doesn’t perform as well on the metric side as we want. But if you see people posting comments with photos and really engaging with it, those likes and those comments to me mean a lot more than just the aggregate number. So it’s a balance of looking both at the actual numbers, but then also what those numbers are, what the response is, if it’s positive or negative and the buzz that’s around that.
How do you create or source compelling but low cost content?
I’m a huge fan of using the iPhone as a camera. I have a blog about it. I’m a huge proponent of it – I always tell people that with the power that mobile phone cameras have now, you can do almost everything with it. What really stands out with compelling content is capturing those moments, and it’s as cheap as having a cell phone or having a thousand dollars for whatever the new iPhone is if you don’t have something like that. And then being able to use that to capture the moments, identify the moments. And I also think in terms of creating content at low costs, the more the merrier. And it’s great on social media, being able to post, and post, and post, and post, and try new things out and if something doesn’t resonate, move on and try something different.
Can you talk about how you work with influencers and followers who send you UGC?
Something that I like to do is when folks, for example, send us user generated content, fan photos, I always like to send a little thank you package. I kind of recognize that, I’ll say as a thank you because oftentimes there are such amazing photos. For the longest time, our marketing has been engaging with our fans and empowering them to tell our story.
How did you decide where to start with DAM? Any tips that you can share for scaling among multiple locations and organizing the content?
When we started with PhotoShelter Brands (formerly Libris) about two years ago, it was kind of like from day one, everything going forward, we’re going to put in it. If I go out, for example, and do a photo shoot and I take 200 photos, I import those and maybe I’ll have like 20 selects that I’m going to edit and kind of look at after that. All of those select photos, like those 20 out of the 200 will go into PhotoShelter.
And those other 200 raw images will just go into the server, kind of cold storage in case we ever need them. The 20 selects go into PhotoShelter tagged, which allows folks who are looking for photos to have some more variety. If they want to do something different, they have multiple different photos.
I always kind of make sure to not totally crop it. Because if it’s a really good photo, I might crop it a certain way for social media, but our design team might want to have more space for text or whatever.
And then there are some other key photos that I put in there. I think I went back a few months and kind of added stuff in, but I haven’t gone back all the way for the three years kind of before we had PhotoShelter. So something that I do is let people know, “Hey, if you’re looking for a photo, it’s in PhotoShelter. If there’s something that you’re looking for that’s not in PhotoShelter, just let me know.” And oftentimes that’s some content that happened before day one of PhotoShelter, so I’ll upload that content. If one person’s looking for it, I’m sure other people are looking for it, as well.
It also helped that when we got PhotoShelter, it was shortly after we relaunched our logo and kind of had a brand redesign.
Who accesses content through your PhotoShelter Brands Portal?
Right now, we have it hooked up with our colleagues here at Bell’s – our sales team, folks in our HR department, leadership, etc. They all have access to the Portal. We use password protected links for different galleries. For example, if we’re going to do a press release or send out a press release, we’ll include a link to a PhotoShelter gallery and a password.
We’re also expanding some of our business partners and we have assets that they would use. So we’re seeing what that would look like to have PhotoShelter kind of be the one stop shop for all of that.
When most senior management folks care about profits and sales, how do you get them to recognize your visual storytelling and creative efforts?
For us here, visual storytelling has been part of all of this from the beginning. Larry, back in the beginning of the brewery, would hire local artists to commission pieces of artwork to go on the labels. So that’s always kind of been core of who we are, the arts and expressing ourselves in that way.
I think for a lot of folks that I talked to, we face those challenges. You’ve got companies that are just like, why are we going to spend five thousand dollars on a camera when you have an iPhone, right? What I think is important, what I recommend for them to do, is to break down how many times those photos are viewed and what those photos are used for. It’s really not that expensive when you think about what those photos will be used for. Today, in terms of marketing, everything’s visual and everything’s online. So I think it’s really important to be there in that space and have content that reflects your company.
What’s your biggest lesson learned so far working in such a competitive craft beer market in Michigan?
Have fun. Try not to overthink too much. Be authentic and just have fun making content and hopefully that will flow over to other folks who are viewing it, and if you have a crazy idea, roll with it.
How do you achieve authenticity?
I come from a photojournalism background. The thought of using a flash scares me still. So the thought of staging stuff is kind of foreign to me because I kind of came up and learned about photography and videography from a photojournalism background. So the majority of the stuff that I do is that, just based on kind of how I was raised, I guess, how I learned to take pictures and capture moments.
What I always tell people is if I’m doing something, act like I’m not here and just talk. And I don’t tell people, “move a little bit to the left, move a little bit to the right!” I move.
I think the holidays are a great time to practice taking pictures of people and taking candid pictures of people doing stuff. When you’re hanging out with your family, you can take pictures of your family when they’re cooking dinner or hanging out or whatever. I think it’s a great testing ground because if you can’t do it with your family, you really can’t do with strangers. Bring your camera home for the holidays or anytime with your family and get candid shots.
Want to get the answers to all of the questions from the Q&A? Watch the on-demand webinar!
