The Times Online has an interesting story today about Scottish beer maker Brewdog, looking at how it used blogging to market their beers.

Brewdog’s approach was smart and incredibly cheap – give bloggers free beer.

Brewdog was struggling to sell its product until its co-founders hit on the idea of using the internet to market their distinctive beers.

“It was a hard sell locally at first,” said co-founder James Watt. “People had grown up with lager, and a lot of the pubs in Scotland are tied. So we decided to see if we could interest overseas beer enthusiasts online. We could see an opportunity in places like Sweden and America where specialist beers are popular,” he said.

Watt found the most popular bloggers in each country and sent free samples to them. Having built a following, they convinced local importers to sell their beer and international orders took off. Today exports account for 80% of sales.

Brewdog also made smart use of Internet media:

“If you are competing against big companies, you have to use every means at your disposal to get your message out there and tell people why you’re different.”

Brewdog uses video to talk to customers. It recently gave them the chance to create a new beer by posting clips of its staff arguing about the virtues of different types of beer and letting them vote on how the final product would taste.

“We called it Beer Rocks and it was the first ever democratically designed beer. It generated a lot of interest and all it cost us was a couple of hours’ filming and the price of a video camera,” said Watt.

Marketers can get a lot of bang for their buck by focusing on getting information about their product to bloggers, podcasters and other active new media content producers.

Unfortunately, though, companies like Brewdog are still the exception.