Ep. 898 Mike Madaio | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

Thanks for tuning into my new show, get US market ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray, author of the book how to get US market ready. And in my previous podcast, I shared some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business helping brands enter and grow in the US market. This series will be dedicated to the personalities who have been working in the Italian wine sector in the US, their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. I'll uncover the roads that they walked shedding light on current trends, business strategies, and their unique brands. So thanks for listening in. And let's get to the interview. Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray. And this week, I'm pleased to have as a guest, Mike Madio. Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. It's good to be here. Tell us a little bit about you and what your role is in the the wine industry. I know it's not your primary business. It's a avocation, but you're kind of fundamental to it. So where where do you fit in the emails? Yeah. We all find our little our little piece. So I, yeah, I I started out blogging about food many years ago. I just liked writing and I liked food even though it was my day job, which is in I'll get to in a second, but, and then I caught the wine bug, like, like, so many of us have. I, you know, I'm Italian American, so Italy has always had a soft spot for me growing up with with the foods of of my ancestors and such. And so I started digging into Italian wine and and love the fact that it, you know, was so diverse and there was always so much to learn. And so long story short, I ended up going for the Italian wine Ambassador program through Van Italy and and getting that. And so that kind of launched me a little more into the world of Italian wine. And then I have my day job is is user experience research for web, mostly focused on e commerce. And so, you know, when, I met Steve Buchanan, when we started talking, there was service overlap of the Italian wine, knowledge, and the digital piece. And, you know, we had a lot of common there, and I, started getting involved in wine to wine and presented a few times there and, and things like that. Okay. So and e commerce actually is gonna be the focus of what we're gonna be talking about today. One of the things you did was to give a presentation at line to line. I think this year or most in October was remotely, but on, user experience, making it better for every year any mind or spirit related website. Can you give us the top lines on that? Cause what's gonna happen is the the the thing that I'm most interested in is talking about how to optimize brands presence online. I know it's a something that came out as a critical thing in your presentation. And there have been some other webinars I've heard just in the last two, three days talking about this. So definitely, it's a cost of lab for today. So tell us kind of the headlines of what you were communicating at point of wine. Yeah. And I mean, it was was mostly focused on winery websites per se, but, you know, I think these things can apply across the board. I would say three kind of overarching themes. There were there were eight. And I don't know if we can share that or it it will be shared? Yeah. All, the, actually, all the presentations will be shared. So overall, I would say simplicity. You know, a lot of times, people think that they need to be flashier complicated, but for the most part, people using the site want it to be simple to just find a piece of information or learn about something or buy something. And so so really doing that and leveraging you know, what bigger companies do to make this work. Right? I mean, Amazon is kind of its own beast, but, you know, you have all these big companies. They're spending a lot of time and money to figure out the best way to do it. So coming up with something different than them in most cases when you're a smaller company is is is not gonna be that useful for you. Interesting point. I like that. Yeah. There there's a saying that we say is that people spend most of their time on websites other than yours. So you wanna leverage that fact and use, you know, sort of common patterns and things like that. And that leads into the the second thing which is kind of just having a customer mindset. I mean, so often you see people focusing on what they want And the classic example, and I talked about this in the presentation is, and this is something you see a lot on on winery websites. They group the wines into, like, some sort of internal grouping that makes sense to the people who work there, but not to consumers. So, like, you know, you you might have your supermarket level wines and then your premium level wines and then your special collections, but, like, they'll have three names that have no meaning to anybody unless you work there. And as a consumer, when you go into that, you really have no idea what you're looking at, and and you sort of end up guessing which one you want if you're looking for a bottle of Barbara or whatever the case may be. Right? So, again, that's a winery site example, but I think that concept applies. It's like what is the what's important to the consumer? Now what's important to the marketer or the company that's trying to sell it and really prioritizing that? And then the third thing I talked about was just thorough testing. There's a lot of tools out there that you can use Google, you know, Google has a number of site performance tools, just the internet itself going out there and testing and looking at the experience in a lot of different ways. And that's something that that we can do for free, basically, to just at least understand what people who are looking for information on our business are experiencing. Great. Okay. Three, pretty compelling ideas, which is just do it the smart way. I think is the way to say it. Don't try and be different just to be different. But one of the issues that you talked about was the importance of having accurate information and, particularly visuals and graphics that are current. Do you wanna just touch on that? We talked a little bit about tech sheets and just having one of the things I noticed, and I I can't remember if if this ended up making up into the presentation or not, but we talked I I was something that I was thinking about a lot going in was having older vintage information on the site and how, you know, people are sometimes looking for that, especially if you're a winery that, you know, makes wines that that are gonna age well, making sure that if I go in and you only tell me about what you did in twenty twenty one harvest, and that's totally different from, you know, twenty fifteen, and that's the bottom I'm drinking, that that's that's gonna be a bad experience for the consumer. But I think also I was thinking about your presentation where you started to talk about having those visual assets out there, right, so that, any sort of aggregators or sites that we're using them, right, would also have access to that. Like mind searcher or Yeah. Perfect example. I I saw this, after after we talked to kind of prepare for this conversation, I saw this tweet from Holly Hammond, who I, you know, does another, another one complaining about wineries having, like, tiny, tiny bottle shots and not having a nice big shot of the of the bottle that could be used in a in a variety of different ways. Like, if you make it really small, it can only be used in a space where there's a small, you know, a small image. But if you make it big, you can use it, you can make it small or you can use it big. And so that's just a good example. And I was thinking too, like, nowadays with the phones we have, even if you're just shooting it with an iPhone, it's gonna be big by default. So someone had to work to make it that small. Alright? And difficult to see. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So a lot of our listeners are imported wine reason or deal with imported wine reason. Do you think the rules are any different for imported brands versus domestic brands? I would say probably not. You know, one thing that as someone who researches user experience, I've researched in in the US, of course, but but all in a lot of places in Europe as well, and usability is basically usability. So these things don't really change as you go across. I mean, you know, there are cultural differences, obviously, and and what's important. But in terms of using a website, usability tends to be usability. So have have an English version. I guess that would maybe be the basics. And, obviously, that as well. And and I think that going back to what I was saying before, with the thorough doing the testing, like, one of the keys that I talked about this in my wind to wind thing is make sure that you're testing people using your site starting at Google in the language that you're supporting. So if it's English and Italian or if it's English Italian and, you know, German or, you know, it doesn't, whatever, but you wanna start at Google in that language, right, because there are actually differences, and I found websites where They have an English in an Italian version, but for some reason the English version isn't indexing in Google, and I'm thinking maybe the people in Italy who are testing it or just testing it on the Italian version of Google on their cell are indexing great. But if you go to the English version of Google, you're not indexing great. And all of a sudden, then you realize you have a problem. Then you have to figure out how to fix the problem, but, you know, knowing the problem is obviously a good starting point. Okay. So let's let's take this back, a couple of screens. Scroll back so to speak. And I think that the fundamental issue that's on my mind, and I I was just listening to a, interview of BoredCard Nesen, who is the analysts for Rainbow Bank by Jeff Carol of Avilera talking about selling brands on through e commerce online. They made the same point that I made in my presentation at wine to wine is that the most important thing that wineries have to do must do is to make sure that their their, content is optimized online. And and what I mean by that is there's a lot of a you call them aggregators solidators, whatever you wanna call them, Vavino wine searcher. In fact, in in the list, I gave the top seven. Most winery spent a ton of time and a fair amount of money designing labels because that's the one thing that's going to differentiate how their brand is perceived by consumers at the point of purchase. The reality is we live in a digital world and quite often the first thing that they, potential consumer might see is not the physical bottle in the store, but a representation of that bottle on some source. So it could be Vivino, background, wine pair, it could be reserve bar for spirits, it could be wine searcher for, I think, most categories. And you wanna make sure that you know, the pictures are current, accurate. They are high resolution. They are available in multiple formats. So someone who needs to play with it can vertical, as well as horizontal aspect ratios, that if you've got logos and bottles that you have it both available and black background and a white background. So once again, that somebody can play with it. And then also have all the information that you need, like current scores, as well as vintage scores for older older, skews, tasting notes, critics reviews, pairing, information, that kind of stuff, a comprehensive suite of information that's easily accessible so that it's it it resides in drizzly, the Vino, or wine searcher, and then all of these other sites, whether it's an individual retailer's e commerce site can scrape that content and then use so you're in control of this. It doesn't cost a lot of money. It is not technically difficult to put all this together into a file that you can upload to by just reaching out to Vivino or wine searcher, send him an email, tell him who you are, that you got this file of updated, graphic assets. Can you comment on that? Yeah. So two thoughts. I mean, one is that thinking about, again, going back to this consumer mindset, right? I'm a consumer. I go to a website, whether it's Vavino or wine searcher or, you know, Joe's wineshack, and I see a wine that maybe has some interest to me, and there's a really poor bottle shot or label shot. It's looks really grainy or bad, or there's no, like, description at all of the wine. There's no ratings. There's, you know, I'm not gonna buy that wine. Right? And so Like, we if you're the owner of of that information, you can't say, well, it's Joe's Wireshacks problem. Right? Because you you can go out and get that. You can get Joe Wireshacks that information. And so the other thought I had is that You know, it may seem daunting if you're in a lot of countries. Right? I mean, if if you're in Italy and you're selling all over Europe and and in the United States and maybe in Russia and other places, like, there's a lot of places that you can look at. But think of in the old days, if you had to travel to every wine shop to see what your wine look like on the shelf, like, that would cost you millions of dollars or euros or whatever I should say. And but now you can do that all from Abrutso or wherever you are. Right? And so, yes, I mean, there's some time and effort involved in going out and looking and and looking at all your at your experience. And this goes back to what I was saying before about testing, using the tools that are free out there. Google, me, and googling yourself, looking at obviously all the main ones, which we talked about, and then using a wine searcher or a mixer of, you know, to get to some of the smaller shops. But, like, really being aware of how your brand is being perceived, and then to your point, In a lot of the cases, it's not gonna be that difficult for you to just reach out and be like, hey, we have a better updated picture description, whatever, here at our website, come and grab it, you know. And I think you had a good anecdote of of people at wine stores are saying, we we love it when will do that. Right? Right. Damn. I've done Kavanaugh in in, last week's edition from from when we're recording that that they do things by hand, and he welcomes. And you can look at the contact page for all these websites, and they are going to be receptive to it too. Many used to have a do it yourself upload thing. That really didn't work very well for a variety of reasons, and I think having some kind of personal connection. So starting with an email is is a great way to do it. I think the other piece of it is. Yeah. So the burden falls on on the winery. Or the Spirit producer. But I think importers and distributors in the United States play a role and have a responsibility to make sure that if they're carrying those brands and those brands are not represented correctly on e commerce sites, that are that they're through their the system that they're selling to bring it to the attention of the brand to fix it. It's not the importer's well, maybe it is the importer's job depending if they're a, you know, agency brand importer, but it's definitely not the distributor's job, and they're not gonna assign their personnel to do it. It's the winery owner's job to make sure that information is accurate, high resolution, pulled together, easily accessible, and then communicated to or shared with these sites. As I said, it it yeah. You're right. It does take time, but, you know, it could be an intern project. And the first thing I think that everybody has to do is do an audit. So go to these, top seven sites and see how your brands are presented online. And if you see things that are wrong there, then pull together a whole asset file of things that are right, and then you can then make that available to them. And these are the sites. Wine hyphen searcher dot com, v vino, drizzly city hive dot net, all one word city hive, vine pair, pix dot wine, and also for the trade, a seventh seven fifty dot com, s e v e n f I f t y dot com. You spend so much time developing labels and communicate we're hoping to communicate to consumers when the actual way they're going to interact with your wine these days is through a cell phone first. It's that simple. It's no longer gonna be on the shelf. Recently, I've noticed a fair amount is that, you know, wineries are updating their labels. Right? Doing some sort of rebrand modernizing their labels a bit, which is great. But then you go onto these other sites and it still shows this old outdated kind of not that nice looking label. And it's like if you're gonna spend, I'm sure they're spending time and money to make those new labels and kinda have that rebrand look beautiful. Right? Make sure that someone who finds your wine on a different site is going to experience that that new brand that you put so much time and effort into. Here's the question I have. I mean, I've been on this podium, and I've been, you know, shouting this from the rooftops. Other people are saying the same thing. The sites themselves want better content. They know that too. Why don't Italian wineries do this. If I have the answer to that, I feel like I I could but, I mean, again, I think I think it if I were to guess, I feel like I would say it's because they feel like maybe they don't have control over those things. Right? I think what we're saying here is that you don't necessarily have control over what some other website does with your information. Right? But at the very least, you can make sure that you're a aware of how your brand is being presented across all these times and taking the time to do that. And, again, I mean, it does take time. Right? To your point, maybe it's hire a young kid from the area who can help out and and is really savvy with this kind of stuff. Or something to to help. Yeah. I'd say just walk out to the road and and and grab the first eighteen year old that you see and ask them if they want a job to do this. You know? And, you know, so so being aware of it and then, you know, reaching out and try to change it where you see sort of these bad examples of things happening. And and, you know, you're not, like we said, wine searcher, they said they're really over to this stuff. There are probably websites out there where you would reach out and say, hey, can you update this picture and they would just ignore you. Right? That's gonna happen. There's nothing we can do about that. But in most in most cases, people want their website to look nice so that they're gonna they're gonna update it. They want they wanna sell the wine so they're gonna update it. Right? But you won't know it's happening unless you do an audit first. Exactly. Exactly. And a follow-up evaluation to see if it has been changed. And then maybe you take, a second course in terms of how to get that entity to include the right information. You know, I one of the excuses I see a lot is, you know, the big wine companies like Gallom and Constellation here in the United States, you know, they got a lot of have a lot of in house tech resources. And what we're really focusing on here is the smaller and mid sized businesses who do not And it seems to be a lot of them just thought their hands say, hey, I'm I'm too busy making wine. I'm too busy doing this. Well, if you're too busy to proactively market and sell your wines, why are you in this business? Because at the end of the day, if it doesn't sell, no one's gonna be making any money, and the control of sales is not the burden of the importer and the distributor, but it's a shared burden of the three of you together each contributing their part. So I think it's it's really critical that individual wineries take on this responsibility and not use the excuse. Oh, we don't have the time. We don't have the resources because there are creative ways that you can to gather this information and then share it. Yeah. I mean, I go back to what I said earlier, which is at that point of decision where someone's saying, do I add this wine to my cart or not on whatever site they're on? Having that information versus not is going to make an effect. Now if you're some cult winery who sells out at crazy prices all the time, maybe you don't worry about that. But if you're not, then you do need to think about those things. And and it does make a difference to the bottom of it. I think it's more than just think about it. This this becomes a primary tactic for your marketing strategies in the United States. If you aren't optimized online, you're given up You're saying, okay. I don't wanna work that hard. I don't wanna try and sell my wines, and I got nobody else to blame but me. So the burden falls on the producer to monitor and make sure that it happens. And if anybody needs any help in figuring out what that is, Give me a call or you can send me an email. I'm old fashioned steve at pebology inc dot com. Mike, if somebody wanted to reach out to you and ask questions about usability or explanations that may be a little bit more concrete or expanded than what you gave would you be willing to share your email, with people so they could reach out to you? Yeah. I mean, you can, just go to my website, life at table life at table dot com. And, there's a contact form on there. It's mostly my writing stuff, but, you know, we can you can contact me through that as well. Alright. So not not to to beat a dead horse on this, but, you know, I'm gonna well, here's the here's the point. The interview I saw the other day with this Borecard Nesen from Rainbow Bank, Did the quantitative analysis. He said ninety five percent of the wineries that either he's aware of or that he works with do not do an adequate job of optimizing how their brand appears online. And I turn that around from a marketing perspective. If you had an employee that ninety five percent of the time didn't do the right thing, what would you do about it? And saying, oh, I don't know how to talk to him is not a valid answer. Right? Fix it. Don't fire him. Fix it. So, I I I don't wanna sound too aggressive on this. I know it's Erica's way tend to be, but, you know, you you can con you You can't control it, but you can't influence it, and you do have the resources to do it. And no is not an adequate answer. Yeah. I mean, like we said, you might not be able to control every piece of it, but if you do the audit, you're gonna get a list of things. You can prioritize and then you can start knocking them off, you know, and and you may not ever get to every single piece. Right? But you're going to make an impact. Like you said, you're going to influence it. You're going to in in general improve the ability, you know, the ability for wise to be purchased. So this has been a subject I've been interested in for many many years, but certainly for several years. And in fact, I included a section of it in my book how to get US market ready, which is available at amazon dot IT in both PDF as well as print fashions on page two fifty nine through two sixty three are detailed instructions on what kind of assets and what format they need to be that wine searcher provided that they would like to have. If you take that information, put it all into a zip file and send it to them and make sure that you know that that they got it, they will update their information. And once you're updated in wine searches, there's a pretty good chance you're gonna get updated in all of the other e commerce sites that are happening across the US eight. So you don't have to go and call on what was it, Frank's, Joe Weinstein to get him to make the change because they're all pulling from a couple of different central sources. So it makes it easier to do it. So now there's no excuse for this, and and, I'm gonna make it a point that when I ask people, the the first question is tell me about yourself and, invariably, I get I make really good wine. Right? That's not the answer I'm looking for. The same thing is true here is have you optimized your brand's presence online and no is not an acceptable amount. Could you sum it up from a usability point of view. You know, I was saying that I liked in my conversation or my interviews with the the big takeaway and we've only had one subject here, so the one subject is a big takeaway. But can you say it in maybe a less offensive way that I just did demanding it for people? As a user, as a u UX guide. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just it's it's about taking ownership of the experience. Right? And so there's so much of it. I think that we're or establish here. There's so much that you can actually control and influence. Even though, even on sites sorry. There there goes my dog. Even on sites that you don't own. I mean, obviously, there are site there's your own website that you own and and you should watch my presentation on. Yeah. I mean, so I think it's it's two things. So one is, obviously, again, having that consumer mindset always and thinking like, what is the consumer assuming? What does the consumer need to to understand and know. Right? And then really saying that, yes, there are gonna be some things that are out of our control. There are lots of different websites that might sell our wine or whatever, but there's so much that you can control, and it's really just effort. Right? It's not there's not a big financial investment. There's not a big technological investment. Like, you don't need to be super tech savvy. You just need to go and look and identify that this is not representing my brand properly. Right. And don't blame the importer. Take the responsibility and fix it yourself. You know, I mean, I think you had a good point earlier about the importers. You know, there are there are importers who have great sites that have a lot of information. Sometimes when I'm looking for a wine, I end up on the importer site and not the winery site, And that's awesome. If your importer does that, if they don't, you know, maybe it's a question about why they might be super small, but, I mean, I do think the importer should also be playing a role on this for sure. But the ultimate responsibility falls on the winery themselves. Of course. Yeah. But, I mean, everyone who wants to sell the wine can, you know, can do this. Right? And Let's not get in our own way. Right. It's actually. Okay. So, a big shout out to, Mike Madio for joining us today and and sharing in this passion I have for optimizing a brand's presence online. And, Mike, thank you for sharing your time with us today. It's a pleasure as always, Steve. And hopefully we'll see you in Italy sometime soon on, as as things begin to open. So I recommend you listen to Mike presentation from wine to wine in verona, about eight practical ways to improve your winery website for consumers. You can get there by just typing in your search bar Italian wine podcast episode eight eight three. It'll take you right there. This is Steve Ray. Thank you again for listening to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. And join us next week, and we'll have another interesting fascinating guest on another subject that I'm passionate about. Look forward to you listening in then. Thank you. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening on behalf of the Italian wine podcast. Hi, guys. I'm Joy Livingston, and I am the producer of the Italian wine podcast. Thank you for listening. We are the only wine podcast that been doing a daily show since the pandemic began. This is a labor of love and we are committed to bringing you free content every day. Of course, this takes time and effort not to mention the cost of equipment, production, and editing. We would be grateful for your donations, suggestions, requests, and ideas. For more information on how to get in touch, go to Italian wine podcast dot com.