The Online Battle of the Mico-Brews

Micro-brews are taking over America. In the past decade the beer competition has become crowded. With the three major beer companies (Budweiser, Miller, and Coors) owning 96% of the market in beer sales, it’s harder for smaller breweries to compete. Micro-breweries are not afraid though. They have started to take the market share by delivering a variety of exquisite brews to people that are sick of the bland corporate beer. Micro-breweries have chosen a different path to connect with customers then spend millions of dollars (which they don’t have) on advertising. They heavily rely on making amazing beers and try to connect and communicate with the customers as much as they can. Online marketing is probably the only way micro-brews market their product and today we are going to find out who is dominating the online battle between Dogfish Head and Stone Brewery.

Social Media Impact

Dogfish Head has 214,608 “likes” on Facebook and 3,949 people talking about them. Stone Brewery has 133,815 “likes” on Facebook and 3,573 people talking about them. Dogfish Head has 80,282 followers on Twitter and 20,634 tweets, whereas Stone has 47,426 followers on Twitter and 3,265 tweets. Looking at Facebook and Twitter, we can clearly see Dogfish Head as having a bigger impact. They obviously tweet a lot more than Stone, which creates more people that want to follow them. They interact on Facebook very often and have the updated timeline page, where Stone still has the old format. Where Dogfish Head really excels in the social media, is YouTube. They have 2,617 subscribers and 722,457 views on YouTube, whereas Stone has only 1,031 subscribers and 176,221 views on YouTube. Dogfish Head does a really good job of utilizing YouTube. They create segments of every one of the different beers they make and tell a little about it. Customers love the interaction that Dogfish Head gives on YouTube.They also post all these videos on their website.

Winner: Dogfish Head

SEO and Inbound Links

Next we are going to look at the SEO and Inbound Links. I used Marketing Grader to compare the two websites. This shows how they rank in search engines. This can help them have their links show up higher when people search for them on Google. Dogfish Head has 4,990 pages indexed on search engines and has 3,861 inbound links. Stone has 8,960 pages indexed on search engines and 2,865 inbound links. Clearly Stone Brewery has done a better job at search engine optimization. They link to more sites which helps the climb to the top of results and have more indexed pages which shows they are creating new stuff more often.

Winner: Stone Brewery

Engagement

Engagement in these sites are both really high. They both have an average of 1.5 visits a month per person, length of stay per visit is greater than three minutes, and the people average 2-6 page views per visit. They both have very interactive websites including blogs, bios, videos, picture galleries, social media, and directories. These sites do everything and allow people to really get engaged. To break the tie I will have to give Dogfish Head the upper hand. They have created bios for every beer, but have also included video with most of them. This allows visitors to really get engaged with the product and allows interaction.

Winner: Dogfish Head

Google Search and Marketing Grader

The final comparison of the two Micro-Brews will be how they rank on Google search and Marketing Grader. I typed “beer” into Google Search and found that Dogfish Head was ranked really high. They came up as the second brewery right behind Sam Adams. They were ahead of everyone including Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. Stone wasn’t even on the first five pages. Next I looked at Marketing Grader. Dogfish Head received an overall score of a 69 on their total online marketing efforts. Stone received an overall score of 48 on their total online marketing efforts. Dogfish Head uses online marketing better and more efficiently.

Winner: Dogfish Head

Summary

After comparing these two websites it seems that Dogfish Head has done a better job at online marketing. The race was closer than it seemed though.  Micro-Brews really need to utilize online marketing to differentiate themselves from their competitors. They  can’t compete money-wise with the big time players. Dogfish Head won because they used more media on their website which encourage more engagement for visitors. Stone Brewery has a great website, but they could take a page out of Dogfish Heads book and create more media to connect with customers.