On today’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, Darren is speaking to Martin Haley, otherwise known as “Rocker’s Beer Review”.
Since setting up his channel in the wake of Covid, Martin’s audience has been steadily climbing, with hundreds of followers now tuning in to watch him drink and review beer on YouTube – to some, the dream! Here, Darren finds out how it all started, and what it has to do with marketing.
Darren: So, Martin – let’s start with the most important thing – you have set up a YouTube channel dedicated to videos of you drinking and talking about beer. Other than obviously the drinking of the beer, what was the reason for you doing that?
Martin: Yeah, it’s a tough gig! I mean, it’s a bit of a cliché, but it all sort of started at the first lockdown. It was a case of I was at home, wanting to do something different, and I sort of just discovered craft beer at that point. I started looking on the internet for other people talking about beer, and I thought – I could do that. I’m really into rock music as well, so I wanted to bring that element into it – hence the name Rocker’s Beer Review. In terms of the demographic, there’s a lot of people that like craft beer that also like rock music, so it went together pretty well.
Darren: Makes sense – there’s a lot of a lot of crossover there.
Martin: There is a big crossover. I had no real sort of plan as such – I just thought, if I drink beer anyway, I might as well do it on the internet – and if I’m lucky, I might get sent some beer for free!
Darren: I have to ask – have you had beer for free?
Martin: I thought you’d ask – I really would like to tell you that I’ve had breweries knocking on my door, but so far, I’ve only had one case of beer sent to me from a brewery wanting me to review it, and it was non-alcoholic beer.
Darren: Oh jeez.
Martin: I mean, I wouldn’t call myself an influencer, but you get a lot of influencers contacting breweries and saying, “oh, send me 10 of your best beers and I’ll do a good review for you”, but a lot of breweries aren’t going to want that. The independent breweries that I review are struggling probably now more than ever, so they need that support, and I’m happy to do it, because I’m going to drink the beer anyway. I don’t really go out of my way to drink beer that I know I’m not going to like, so most of my reviews are pretty positive, unless I’m reviewing beers that are maybe supermarket stuff that I can be a little bit snobbish about.
Darren: What you’ve mentioned there about influencers contacting breweries – they do that in all industries, don’t they. You’re one of those people that’s happy to pay for your own beer, and that’s beautiful – but you mentioned the supermarket stuff, you’re not that keen on? Although Polly’s Brew beer is your favourite, and that can be found in supermarkets, can’t it?
Martin: It can, and I have raved recently about their latest supermarket beer, because the problem with supermarkets is that they’re squeezing these breweries in terms of their margin, so they can’t make beer of the same quality. When you’re buying something for a couple of quid, you know there’s going to be some sort of compromise, and usually it’s that the beers aren’t so good. When it’s a good beer, or there isn’t a compromise, then you know then it works well, and I think Polly’s have got a secret thing going on. What I think they do is, they have a limited run in the supermarkets. People enjoy their beer, go back to the supermarket, and then of course you can’t get it anymore – so you go looking for their website. Before you know it, you’re a massive fan and you’ve got a whole bookcase full of their empty beer bottles! But I think a lot of the breweries are all about making beer for supermarkets, so their quality is lower.
Darren: I’ve never really considered what you’re saying there – that there’s a massive difference between beer you buy in the supermarket, and the beer you’d get on draft if you went to the brewery. How much of a difference is there?
Martin: Well, a lot of the time, it’s brewed on mass, so it’s pretty much the same beer. But a lot of breweries may have runs of beer they’ll bring out for a limited time that you can’t get in the supermarkets, which are better quality and probably more expensive to make. Obviously, you and I both work in marketing, so you’ve got to appreciate the marketing these businesses go into, but it’s sometimes more about the marketing and less about the quality of the product. The marketing can be really spot on, but as soon as you drink their beer, and then you drink other beer, you realise that the quality is not quite as good. It’s all a bit style over substance, and as someone who drinks a lot of craft beer, you can quite clearly taste the difference between a beer from those sort of breweries, and a beer from a very small brewery that makes a limited run of beer.
Darren: I can see how the quality would be affected – it’s the same in any business. The more you scale up, the more difficult it is to maintain the quality of what you’re doing. Whereas, if you’re a craftsman doing something yourself, then obviously you’re in control of it – it’s your passion. When you get other people involved, it can be very difficult to maintain that. So, with your YouTube channel – you’re basically drinking beer and reviewing it while also talking about rock music: how do you maintain the consistency of creating videos day after day, week after week, and are you worried that you’re going to run out of beer?
Martin: Obviously everyone knows that when it comes to social media, it’s all about consistency. So, your channel won’t grow if you post one video a week, or every couple of weeks. When I first started, I was posting every day – some beer YouTubers post two or three reviews on a day, so they’re posting a lot – probably every beer they drink, they do a review on. It gets to a point where you have to sort of hold back a little bit. I might drink two or three beers on a Friday or a Saturday, but I record those and then put them out over the course of the next week, so there’s a nice consistent level of posting new videos. At the end of the day, I’m not drinking huge amounts of beer – and I don’t think in terms of running out of beer, that’s a thing. If anything, there’s too much beer and not enough money to be able to buy it all, and not enough time to drink it!
Darren: And what’s your reach with this – what are your plans going forward? Where do you hope to take the channel?
Can drinking beer become a full time job?
Martin: The long-term plan is that I hope to drink beer on the internet full-time, and earn enough money to do so. I think it’ll be difficult – my channel has grown quite steadily, but it seems that the money you can make through monetising these videos has come right down. It does depend on what you’re doing – so if you’re talking about business, it’s going to serve better quality ads, and the cost per views is probably going to be higher. Because I’m drinking beer on the internet, the sort of ads they put on there are probably not bidding for quite as much. But I’ve always wanted to do something revolving around beer and music, and a lot of the reviews about bands I’ve done are actually my biggest views, so I should probably be doing more of that sort of stuff than drinking beer – but my viewership splits, and I get people that are just into beer, and others who are just into the music side.
Darren: Have you looked at any affiliate potential with your beer reviews? Because if you’ve got all of that content already, you could easily create a website specifically for beer reviews with your videos all embedded within it, each one with a buy link to go into whichever supplier is willing to pay affiliate commissions for purchases.
Martin: Yeah, I mean I’ve done some affiliate stuff with online bottle shops. A lot of the breweries don’t generally do them, because they want to get as much money as they can really – but I think it’s definitely an option.
Darren: You should set up your own bottle shop! Now, outside of beer – you’re also a marketer, or a marketeer! How did you get started in that?
Martin: I’ve done marketing literally since I left university. I didn’t do a degree in it, but I’ve worked in marketing since ’95, when I worked at NatWest as a marketing graduate. Then I did my CIM diploma in 1998, when digital marketing wasn’t even a thing. The internet was sort of around, but the diploma was all about marketing communication, so it was all direct mail or the radio, that sort of stuff. I’ve also built marketing focus apps for restaurants and small businesses in the Chester area.
Darren: I think that’s when we met isn’t it, when you were doing the apps.
Martin: Yes, that’s right. I did a number of apps, and now I’m working as head of marketing for a company called CapNet, and we do marketing for our IT clients. We manage quite a number of social media accounts, we do email marketing management, SEO, pay-per-click – all that sort of thing. We sort of go into businesses and become their outsourced marketing department, as opposed to doing it on a project-by-project basis. There’s a lot of businesses we found that did marketing, and then when Covid hit, they suddenly didn’t do any marketing again.
Darren: It’s interesting that a lot of companies were stopping their marketing during covid. It’s a common thing, isn’t it – you need to make cost savings and reductions somewhere … what should we cut costs on? Marketing? Yeah, let’s cut costs on the thing that’s going to help us survive and grow! How have you found those discussions?
Martin: I think a lot of businesses are very open to it, but in the industry we’re in, there’s a lot of marketing agents and web designers out there, and some people have had a bad experience with them. For me, it always starts with understanding the business and who their customers are, and who they want to attract – just because your mate’s promoting his business on Instagram, it doesn’t mean you should, because your customers might spend more time on LinkedIn. There’s a lot of education involved, and spending time finding out how you can make marketing work for them, instead of throwing money at different types of marketing techniques and channels, and not really getting anything out of them.
Darren: That’s a really common thing I see with businesses that come to us and ask for Facebook ads, for example. First of all, we need to see whether that’s actually going to work for them before we say yes. The same marketing strategy that works well for one client may not apply. But for now – we’re out of time, and I think you’ve got some beer that needs drinking!
Martin: There’s beer in my fridge that needs drinking and talking about on the internet as we speak!
Darren: I have no doubt! So, if someone is listening to this and is thinking “this guy sounds brilliant, I want to watch him get drunk on the internet, or I want to work with him from a marketing perspective – how can people get in touch with you?
Martin: The YouTube channel is Rocker’s Beer Review, which you just need to type into YouTube or even Google, and I’ll come up and you’ll see my smiley face. In terms of marketing, the business is called CapNet Marketing, and we’re based in Birkenhead on the Wirral.
Darren: Fantastic. It has been a pleasure speaking to you – although I am getting very thirsty for some reason.
Martin: Thanks, Darren – it’s been great.
About Martin:
When he’s not successfully heading the marketing department at CapNet, Martin is setting up his camera and combining his passions by reviewing craft beers and discussing rock music online. He has amassed over a thousand subscribers, and his channel only continues to grow – proving that when you’re passionate about something, you’ll always find yourself a willing audience.
You can connect with Martin here:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinhaleyuk/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RockersBeerReview
CapNet marketing: https://www.capnet.co.uk/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
