Brand in the Spotlight: Brockmans Gin

At one time, a G&T was classed as the drink of choice for ladies of a certain age. However, in the last 10 to 15 years or so, gin has had a ridiculously huge resurgence – with new distilleries and gin bars popping up in every town. So how do you stand out in such a crowded market? 

Today, I’m focusing on Brockmans Gin. 

They’re doing some great things from a product perspective (it’s a personal favourite of mine), but what else is going well? And where could they be doing better? Let’s take a look.

What is Brockmans Gin doing well?

The Brockmans Gin Brand

If there’s one thing that stands out, it’s the Brockmans Gin luxury branding. From the signature all-black bottle with cut-glass diamond-textured body, to their ‘Properly Improper Gin’ tagline and the vintage styling of their website, this is definitely one of their highlights. 

The sleek black theme featuring white text and small red highlights from their bottle design continues across their online presence, including their website and social media pages. The images appearing on their Facebook and Instagram accounts all concur with their brand identity – with the black and white focus featuring tiny pops of colour, the red line diagonally crossing through the image, and the same patterned background applied that can be found on the website. 

The language used across their site and social media posts fits perfectly with their vintage styling. They use an early 20th century upper class vocabulary that gives a luxurious but playful feel to the brand, and wouldn’t look out of place in the script for the next Downton Abbey film. 

For example, the creative menu headings used on their website include ‘Whispers & Rumours’ instead of the usual Blogs or News tab, ‘Procure’ instead of ‘Shop’ or ‘Buy’, and ‘Purveyors’ rather than the bog-standard ‘Stockists’ option. 

All of these elements help the Brockmans Gin brand feel expensive and ooze luxury – a great example of costly signalling which will help them reach their target market. 

Brockmans Gin in supermarkets

For many years, Brockmans Gin was only available to buy online in the UK. You would only find it on the menu at a limited range of bars and restaurants at one time, but it’s recently become more widely available in the hospitality industry.

And over the last few years, Brockmans Gin has hit the supermarket shelves. This has opened them up to a much wider audience, as stocking in huge retail outlets like Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons gives a whole new level of visibility that many brand’s can only dream of.

What could Brockmans Gin do better?

Get more traffic to the website

So we’ve established that Brockmans Gin has a top brand identity and a visually great website. But all that won’t matter if they’re not getting the visitors they’re looking for!

Using ahrefs, we can see the traffic to the Brockmans Gin website spiked around Christmas time (below), which is as you’d expect when buyers are on the lookout for gifts and heading to parties. However, following the festive season, their organic traffic pretty much halved overnight and has remained consistently at that level ever since. 

The majority of organic traffic heads for their homepage (5,757), with a much smaller number heading for one of the few products that can now be purchased from their website (185), and the remaining low numbers hitting their cocktail pages or blog posts. 

The Brockmans Gin website has also seen a decline in the keywords they’re ranking for – they had more than double the number of keywords at the start of 2022 than they have now. They’ve lost a huge number of keywords on their homepage, as well as their ‘/shop’ URL, which is no longer linked to in their navigation menus, so this would appear to be a conscious change. 

They seem to have replaced this with a different URL – ‘/the-shop’ – which points customers to various other stockists and only showcases two products that can be purchased directly from Brockmans Gin themselves. 

So how could they tackle this drop in traffic?

Well, there are a few content-based areas they could focus on to improve their keyword rankings. The homepage is very light on content, so essentially they could add to it, targeting their relevant keywords to help improve this. Their blog (or should I say Whispers & Rumours) is rarely updated with new content, so adding new relevant posts regularly could bag them those all important keywords and help keep gin-enthusiasts and Google in the know about their brand.

Whilst their cocktail recipe pages are fun and on-brand, they could add more engaging content to those pages to help drive traffic their way, as they are purely simple recipe pages at the moment and gain very few visitors. 

Boost their social media presence

Brockmans Gin has a steady presence on social media currently, posting two to three times a week on their Facebook and Instagram accounts in recent months. The posts don’t seem to focus on interaction with the audience as such – they use simple yet opulent images with an elegant caption. The posts have a very luxury ‘feel’ but don’t encourage the viewer to share or comment particularly, which would help them grow their following. 

The Brockmans Gin follower counts are currently sitting at around 165k for Facebook and just under 39k for Instagram, so pretty decent followings. They don’t currently have a TikTok account, as alcohol brands aren’t allowed as such, but they could be upping their game with ‘drinks influencers’ – a search shows a few mentioning Brockmans Gin in their posts recently – as TikTok is the place to be for any brand in this day and age. 

Let’s sum up

Overall, Brockmans Gin is doing an incredible job with its brand profile; it has a very strong brand identity that flows beautifully throughout the website and social media pages. The gin is now stocked in a range of UK supermarkets, which helped them sell over 1 million bottles in 2021 across their key global markets, so it’s safe to say they’re doing pretty well!

By implementing some additional optimised content on their website, they could be driving their organic traffic back up to where it was last year and beyond. Increasing their use of ‘drinks influencers’ on the TikTok platform could help them reach the younger (age appropriate, obviously) audience, which has the potential to increase brand awareness and boost those sales even further!