VANESSA BRAXTON PROFILE
The first African American woman Master Distiller in the state of New York (and probably the country), Vanessa Braxton spoke to me about her experiences in the spirits world for a blog profile on Women in Distilling.
I regularly interview women in the industry about what drew them into their role and what challenges they’ve had to overcome. Vanessa was filled with stories from her time owning a distillery as well as experiences she had as a civil engineer, another male-dominated space.
LARGE-FORMAT BOTTLES TO CANS
For Vinepair, I explored the trend of sour beer packaging shifting from larger bottles meant to be shared with groups to smaller cans to address change in consumption.
As part of this piece, I interviewed a series of experts and investigated the packaging landscape for beer which had changed quite a bit over the previous years, especially during the COVID pandemic.
Photography by Delaney Brown.
MOMS IN THE BEER WORLD
Over the years, the beer world has slowly become more of a welcoming industry to people who don’t fit the traditional mold — particularly moms.
As a woman who worked in beer and was the first person to use maternity leave at the brewery where I’d worked, I was interested in other mother’s experiences. So I interviewed several for this piece that originally appeared on the now-defunct publication, October. Bottom line: there’s still work to be done. (Illustration by Sunny Eckerle.)
MEASURING DIGITAL MARKETING ROI
As part of a strategy to craft SEO-rich blog posts that appealed to business owners in the distilling industry, I worked with High-Proof Creative’s lead to build out B2B blog posts. This one addresses the challenges of measuring ROI in digital marketing for a group that typically questions the value of marketing their business beyond a Yelp page.
To draft this piece, I drew insights from our team, researched additional resources, and considered the audience and how questions they often ask about this type of marketing.
CRAFT BREWERIES IN RECESSION
In the summer of 2020, most businesses were still bracing for an expected recession. Smaller businesses, particularly craft breweries, would certainly feel an impact from the COVID pandemic. Many were asking which craft breweries would survive?
For VinePair, I explored the question of how breweries could survive a pandemic and which ones might be the most successful. The long-form piece gave me the chance to interview a number of brewery owners and share their stories on the publication.
COMMISSION SPREADSHEETS
Recognizing that “commission spreadsheets” tended to be a Google search term that often brought visitors to the Core Commissions website, I realized it would be smart to create content that helped bolster ranking.
With help from the technical experts on the Core Commissions team, I built out a guide to commission spreadsheets but also crafted messaging that would lead a new visitor to explore the possibility of using the company’s software solutions to simplify the whole process.
COMPETITIVE MARKETING STRATEGY
Many of High-Proof Creative’s clients knew who their competitors were in the space but that didn’t have a quantitative or qualitative way of gauging how they were performing in comparison.
To help answer this question — and also draw in traffic from this common search term — I developed a blog post that got into the nitty gritty of identifying and tracking competitor performance in marketing.