Wine, on a historic windjammer, off the coast of Maine.
It’s what people want out of Maine.
Sailboats, coastal vistas, seal pups popping their heads out of the surf, cottages dotting the coastlines of islands, teens swan diving off piers, cozy fisherman’s sweaters, the tanned windjammer team running rigging above you, oysters being shucked and served on the half-shell, summer sunsets, and rounds of rounds of high-quality wine and education from CWP and WSET Advanced wine lover. What else could you want out of a weekend in Portland, Maine? I was the lead writer and marketing strategist for this project.
The Local Scoop
Portland, Maine is a place that every travel magazine worth their salt has rushed to write up since Bon Appetit named it Best Food City of the Year in 2019. Wine Wise has always been a trusted resource for the insider scoop, having secret handshakes with the best + newcoming restaurants in the city for over a decade, but now they have a campaign to show for it.
The Local Scoop campaign was their own version of the New York Times or Bon Appetit travel guide, but hyper-localized, weaving in insider tips that folks “from away” (as Mainer’s like to call them) will not be able to find anywhere else. These appeared on Instagram and Facebook as stories and reels, and online as blogs.
Telling the Wine Sail Story
With over 130 Wine Sail events to sell out, the marketing efforts were intense. In this role, I wore many different hats across creative and strategy work — I shot and edited reels for Instagram and Facebook, designed social posts and ads using Canva, wrote stylized prompts for ChatGPT to streamline the process of copywriting, analyzed social media insights to fine tune our marketing approach, and dipped my toes into event planning, planning and assisting on the Wine Sails events. Lighthearted and authentic, spur-of-the-moment feeling posts and reels mixed with more direct marketing tactics using shareable graphics and call to actions worked well to engage Wine Wise’s target audiences.
Newsletters with a 47% open rate sold out the boat with a little help from a renewed Meta campaign.
As the in-house copywriter, I wrote bi-weekly newsletters that appealed to the current, target audience for Wine Wise: middle- and upper-class women aged 45-60+. As social media strategist, I identified that our Instagram following skewed much younger, with 65% of followers under age 35. My work in conceptualizing and executing a social media campaign to improve Wine Wise’s online presence by changing the creative direction to target the younger audience increased the website visits to Wine Wise (where events are bookable) by 300% and organic impressions across both channels increased by 320k in one quarter.
