How Cult Wines improved quality of coverage and share of voice using Signal AI Dashboards

Helping answer the questions that matter

Cult Wines is forging the future foundations of the fine wine market with digital platforms, innovative technology and a globalized infrastructure to re-define how consumers buy, sell, invest and collect fine wines.

The company wanted to scale with a goal to significantly increase their assets under management in the next five years and to establish their managed investment platform – Cult Wine Investment – as the leader in the fine wine investment category. To do so, they decided to invest heavily in their marketing and communications function to build brand awareness and grow the asset category.

The Marketing team is responsible for distinguishing and measuring the perception of the three separate brands within the Cult Wines umbrella – Cult Wines, Cult Wine Investment and CultX – each having their own unique user proposition benefits and business goals. In order to improve on this perception, the team needed quantifiable data on its reputation against the competition.

“A disjointed experience incongruent with our approach”

Before using Signal AI, Cult Wine’s PR was ad hoc, working with various agencies with different tools for reporting. Sian Parry, Global Head of PR & Social Media, said: “This created a disjointed experience incongruent with our data-driven approach to investment.”

Sian knew the team needed one tool to understand, adjust and report on how their new communications strategy was landing across different key markets and verticals.

Leveraging External Intelligence to answer crucial questions

Sian worked with our dedicated concept training team to have our AI trained to understand the company — as well as a few peers that they wanted to benchmark against — as an entity. The process took less than a week, meaning Sian and team no longer need to rely on tedious and inaccurate keyword-based search, and could hit the ground running.

By leveraging the Signal AI External Intelligence Graph the PR team at Cult Wines were able to access analytics and data that proved its impact and enabled a more strategic approach. For the first time, they could provide answers to the questions that actually tell a story about what they’ve been doing, where they’ve been succeeding and where they haven’t — such as how coverage and sentiment was changing over time in relation to specific topics and how their key messages were being perceived.

“By utilizing Signal AI Dashboards, we were able to measure quality and identify missed opportunities. This enabled us to make a step change in the quality of coverage achieved, and we saw a 24% y-o-y increase in quality of coverage.”

Proving – and improving – the ROI of communications

By harnessing Signal AI’s External Intelligence platform, Sian and her team are able to prove the ROI of the investment in the marketing and communications function, and importantly to provide insights that enable them to augment their decisions around their reputation strategy. Including:

• Which pillar of my narrative needs the most attention?
• How can I replicate narrative strategies that are working?
• What competitor strategies do I need to respond to?
• How do I maintain my reputation as category leader against the topics I care about?

In one quarter — leveraging Signal’s AI-powered Dashboards — the team was able to prove that the Cult Wines brands collectively held an impressive share of voice against competitors in the topics they care most with 35% share of voice in their target media – a whopping 17 percentage points higher than the next most successful brand.

“We’ve also been able to prove our industry leading reputation in wine investment against four key messaging pillars down to the exact percentage, proving the effectiveness of our initiatives so far this year when reporting to leadership and other areas of the business.”

By closely monitoring Cult Wines’ — and their peers’ — perception around the topics and key messages underpinning brand positioning, the PR team are also able to pinpoint the areas that will need the most attention in coming months and where they may need to adjust the narrative. This helps support digital marketing strategies and its social content strategy by shaping messaging.

Utilizing External Intelligence across the business

Not only has this data meant a greater understanding of the drivers of Cult Wines’ reputation and improved cut through for its communications, but it’s also being utilized by the rest of the business.

The PR team can harness all of this data and insight on their external environment to inform the C-suite and other stakeholders – such as fine wine buyers, investment management team and relationship management team. This means they can share coverage with leads and clients to influence business growth and identify opportunities for the rest of the business to pursue.