Digital Transformation
We changed how Spanish sherry wines are perceived both at home and around the world, in a measurable way. How? Through a coherent brand story and a cohesive digital strategy.
It has been eight years since the D.O. Jerez-Xeres-Sherry and Manzanilla chose Chelsea & Co. as the agency to oversee its digital transformation, a choice that, nonetheless, goes much further than online.
Since 2014, when we launched the first International Sherry Week, our team has worked closely with D.O. Sherry to design and roll out a 360º digital strategy that encompasses the website and the global social media strategy alike, a digital ecosystem that currently has more than 100,000 active users.
Over the last 7 years we have published roughly 9,000 pages written in five languages (Spanish, English, Japanese, Dutch and German) that have attracted more than 2,222,859 visitors and generated more than 5,789,294 page views.
From the outset, three pillars were set out as the basis of our strategy. Firstly, a future-proof website was designed that focused on improving visits from portable devices and high-value content around the user’s interests. On the other hand, the meticulous design of sherry.wine sought to provide the best experience on any device. What’s more, the project also focused on high-value content, dreamt up by the Chelsea & Co. team and drawn up by a team of experts from the world of wine and gastronomy.
Since 2014, we have worked with the Regulatory Board to deliver a profoundly rich digital user experience. In 2022 we redesigned and migrated the existing website to a new content rich and even easier user experience.
Among the improvements made by our team to sherry.wine include the implementation of a new CMS based on Wagtail (the go-to by institutions such as Google, NASA and BMW, among others); setting up a website with mobile users in mind; an improved search system by integrating Elastic Search, a search engine that provides more relevant results; SEO-centred and high-value content for a wide range of users, segmented into sommeliers, bartenders, press, wine buyers, educators, students and wine and food lovers in general; the use of images with Artificial Intelligence so that photographs are always displayed in a relevant way, regardless of the device used and, last but not least, developing an optimised multi-language experience.
We were determined to deliver a truly integrated communications strategy. So we designed a complementary social media content strategy to support our business objectives, focused on an intensive #sherrylover influencer campaign working with the professional community. By engaging and empowering food and wine professionals (wine buyers, restaurant and bar owners, wine educators, chefs, sommeliers and mixologists) with the tools and content they needed, we were able to reach a new demographic of sherry consumers and stimulate conversations – and sales.
Social media refers an average of 20% of traffic to sherry.wine month on month – connections which simply didn’t exist before our team went to work.
Our mission to continually amplify that Sherry is a food wine can be witnessed in our series of foodie Reels. We first developed original recipes to pair with different styles of Sherry to be published on their website and in the process we produced delicious Reels to demonstrate the process.
