Marketing is at the heart of every business. Whether you are running an eCommerce site, a physical store that sells items, or a virtual store of another kind, you need to provide the correct marketing support for this business. When you operate a coffee shop, you need to be able to provide robust marketing support for your company as well.
Marketing is about more than just creating some ads that will run online or be shown on billboards or signs. Marketing encompasses the creation of the vision of your brand, its voice, the way it is styled and presented, and also the materials and means that are used for advertising it. If you are not sure about the details that are behind the marketing that you are providing, your marketing strategy will likely fail.
If you are ready to learn more about the coffee shop marketing objectives that you should have in mind for your business, you need to read on!
Create Your Branding
The very first thing that must be done to market your coffee shop with authority and success is the creation of your branding. You will need to know what your company stands for, what its voice is, and what ethics and values it should present to the people who interact with it. You will also need a logo and some brand colors in mind if you have not decided on these details either.
Your branding involves the creation of a company mission as well as a company identity. Is your mission to provide sustainable coffee that everyone can afford? Maybe your brand’s goal is to offer delicious coffee that is made with unique blends of beans. Whatever the goal of your coffee shop, it needs to be built into the branding that you create.
When you build a brand, you also link your brand to things that will create an emotional bond with consumers. It is not enough to just create a catchy name and a cute logo. You need to make it clear that your company stands for something. If you give away part of the cost of certain beverages to a charity, make sure that is clear in your marketing and your branding. If you are committed to delivering support to your local community, you need to make this clear as well.
Whatever emotional bonds that you are trying to craft between you and your consumer need to be clear and immediate when people interact with ads, billboards, and other marketing materials, the more people can tell about your company’s personality, the more likely they will be to connect with it in a positive way.
Make sure that you have a well-established branding concept and that you know what you want your company to stand for before you start contemplating any other part of your marketing strategy. There is no way to target ads, create the right messaging, or handle the many other details related to your brand correctly without a proper branding message and branding voice.
Always Remember to Think Local
Even if it is your goal to become a huge company like Starbucks, you will start out just like they did. Your first and most important goal to reach is the connection with the local community that turns into conversion to lots of sales. You will need to be a leader in your local area before you can be a national leader.
Coffee shops and other food industry businesses require the passion and love of the community before they can move on to national or even regional sales of any kind. You will need to remember that your local community is the lifeblood of your coffee shop, particularly in the beginning.
If you are thinking about your local area, you will already be aware of what coffee options there are in the vicinity of your shop. You will need to figure out how to stand out from them and offer value in ways that other shops cannot. When you define your place in the local fabric of the community, you will see that emotional connection that you have been wanting to create starting to form.
This is a great way to save some money in the beginning as well since you can target your ads locally and make sure that your efforts do not extend past a regional area at most. This is a great way to get a loyal brand following built up who will help tell others about your shop or shops when you graduate away from just selling in your local area.
Manage Your Website Correctly
You need a website that will pack a punch, and that will tell people your story correctly. When you do not have a website, people might not think that you are a legitimate company, or they might consider you just a local shop without any plans to grow. A website can tell people so much about your company and what it can offer them.
Make sure that your website is easy to navigate, works well on mobile, and that it is optimized to be seen by Google in local searches. These are the fundamentals that will help people who are visiting the area on a road trip or from out of town to find your business and patronize it. When you make sure that your website offers valuable content, you can help to bolster your brand and make it have the presence in the local area that you have been looking for.
As your brand grows, you can scale your website to meet the new and changing needs of your business. Make sure that your first focus is the local area and what you can offer to it. This will make sure that you are not struggling to find the business that you need to get the conversions rolling. A well-managed website cements the legitimacy of your business and helps people to connect with it.
The main goal of your marketing and your business communication is to help people to learn about your business and what it stands for so they can bond with it on a deeper level. When you are able to deliver this kind of connection at first glance through ads and the styling of your website, you will be sure to grow your business rapidly. There are many food industry businesses that do not take the time to connect with consumers in this personal manner, and it can lead to the ultimate failure of the business.
Advertising for a Coffee Shop
There are many ways that you can advertise your business. You will have a wide variety of options to utilize, and this can seem daunting at first. Don’t panic, though! There are some easy ways to make sure that you are not going to be throwing money away at ads that will not deliver results for your brand. You will need to try out various kinds of advertising as well as various ad styles while you build your business. The more you can target and optimize your outreach, the more likely you will be to connect with the right consumers and save money on your advertising efforts.
1. Social Media
This is the biggest and most effective bet that you can place on your coffee shop in the beginning. Social media ads are relatively affordable, and they can offer you big results, particularly locally when you are starting out. These ads are very simple to target and can offer you access to a clientele that you might have been unable to reach otherwise. Facebook gives you built-in functionality for A/B testing, data collection about who is looking at your ads, and even more nice features within their business suite.
When you generate social media ads, you need to remember that people will be scrolling by them quickly in their newsfeeds. Make sure that your tagline and headers are snappy and that you have the right language in the first few sentences of the ad. You should also consider the images that you use for these ads very carefully. This is the first impression of your shop and your brand, and it needs to pack a punch.
Think about the kinds of images or videos that evoke a response in you. You will need to craft ads that say exactly what your company stands for and can offer to consumers at a glance. This means that your advertising materials and content need to be noticeable and have the right ethos built into them for this kind of quick contact.
If your business is sustainability-focused, make this a big part of your ad. You will want people to be able to see instantly that you are giving back to the community or a big cause that you are invested in. If your business is interested in offering unique flavors and blends, make it clear right off that this is the goal of your shop.
You will need people seeing your ads to be positive that your shop will meet their needs and interested enough to go there to try out the coffee as soon as possible. Social media can deliver this immediacy to consumers with ease, and you can make the most of these ads in many ways.
2. Promote Reviews
You will want to have lots of reviews for your business online. It does not matter whether these reviews are posted on social media on your business page or whether they are delivered on Yelp or other review sites. You will need to solicit this information to make sure that people will take your business seriously.
You can ask consumers to review your business by offering something in exchange for reviews. You can also just hand people business cards with their order or ask them verbally at the cash register or drive-up window to please take a moment and review your shop. When you use a permanent reminder like a business card, you can deliver the information for your various social media sites and your website, as well as give them a reminder for your business’ name and location.
Reviews are also based on great service and a good experience. If you are not focused on providing these things to your customers, you will have trouble seeking these positive reviews. The best way to promote reviews is really just to provide great service and good food. If you can do that for your consumers, they will be very likely to tell people about you through reviews.
Many businesses neglect this part of the business marketing plan that they have in place because they do not realize how important it is for the overall health of their marketing plan. This is a critical part of the building process to support a marketing plan for all food-industry businesses. You will need to get reviews posted about your business as soon as you can before you can move on to other parts of your marketing plans.
3. Choose Your Larger Marketing Plans
If you are at the point where you are thinking about moving onto bigger advertising, you will need to think about the cost of this advertising when compared to the expected results that you will gain from its use. If you want to add a billboard or some other form of larger advertising to your plans, you need to think about your location and what this expense can do for your business.
Part of the trouble with local businesses that are advertised in this way is that there is seldom a huge benefit for this kind of spend. If you are located near a freeway, or you are at a location where traffic and other concerns might lead people to drive by without seeing your business, this can be a big help. However, if you are in the middle of town and you are only going to be capturing traffic from people walking by or people who saw your shop online, you should probably think about the expense of something like a billboard carefully.
Larger marketing ideas that tend to be more effective for food-related businesses are awareness-boosting campaigns that can be conducted through social media or through connections with local events. If you can sponsor a local event of some kind or have your company included in the swag that is offered to people participating in a 5K, for example, you will reach more people than you would with a large and expensive billboard.
This kind of business is often a grassroots kind of business at the beginning, and you will get a lot more from your marketing plans if they promote word of mouth and are not aimed at large-scale plans. This is a great kind of business to start if you are not comfortable spending money on things like billboards and TV ads, and you will get great results for your local advertising efforts when compared to these bigger and more extravagant kinds of ads.
4. Tell Staff Your Marketing Goals
One of the best ways that you can promote your business goals is to make sure that your staff knows what they are. You will want your team to work hard to promote the values that matter to you and to make it clear to your consumers what your business stands for. The people who interact with your consumers are the first impression that your business leaves.
Without staff that is involved in the marketing process, it can be much harder to meet marketing goals. Beyond informing your staff about your plans for your business and the goals that they need to help you meet, when you create a positive work environment, your employees will promote your business for you. Happy employees will tell everyone about where they work, and they will deliver your brand’s message for you.
You can also make sure that your team wears clothing that shows your business logo. This way, when they leave work for lunch or when they are done for the day, they will be wearing items that state the name of your shop. People they meet might ask where they work or ask about your shop because they see their gear.
When you make sure that your team stands for your business and stands behind your business, you will be promoting your shop with each interaction that consumers enjoy when they visit it. This is a critical part of promoting a local business that many companies neglect.
5. Be Present at The Shop
Another factor that can sometimes get lost in the shuffle is that you, as the business owner, need to be at the shop all the time. In the beginning, you are the voice, the face, and the marketing push behind your coffee shop. Since this is a local business, people will respond favorably to being able to chat with the actual owner when they get their coffee.
Being on-site also ensures that you know what is going on with your fledgling business. You will also be able to stay on top of any issues or struggles that are impacting daily processes at your store. When you know what is going on every day, you can attend to the issues that crop up right away.
Your presence will also ensure that your staff will stay on task and stick to the plan that you have laid out. When you have staff defining your business on their own, the course of your company might deviate from what you were planning. It can take a few years to establish the coffee shop of your dreams, and you will need to be involved with its daily operation in the beginning.
6. Decide What Kinds of Communication Work Best
There are many kinds of communication that you can use to tell people about your brand these days. You will want to find the right combination of communication styles to suit the area that your shop is in and the crowd that your shop is intended to connect with.
Communication via social media and word of mouth can do wonders for this kind of business. You will need to figure out the right kinds of ads that you can use with A/B testing, and you will need to try out different forms of local connection-making. These kinds of trial-and-error communication attempts can tell you a lot about the best ways to connect with your consumers.
When you test out different forms of communication, you often find that you are actually targeting a different group of the population in your local area than you might have expected. You can choose to continue on this course and embrace this as your target audience, or you can adjust your outreach to try to encompass a larger segment of the population.
Communication styles can vary depending on the kind of demographic that you are getting most of your business from, but you can also elect to reach out to different groups in their own unique ways. When you reach out to consumers in ways that speak to them, you can connect with them on a deeper level. If you have the time to create a couple of different advertising formats for different groups of consumers who might be interested in your shop, you will find that you can often attract a wide range of people to your business.
7. Consider Getting the Help of an Expert
If you have found that you are not ready for the process of building a marketing strategy and branding campaign, don’t worry! There is a lot that goes into this process! You will find that many people in the position of owning a business choose to work with an expert who is good at managing social media, or they will elect to hire a company that can manage the marketing plan creation and branding strategy that you end up using for your company.
If you have the cash upfront to get this kind of expert help, it can make a big difference in your success in creating a branding plan and in developing your marketing strategy overall. There are many things that are time-consuming about planning out all of the marketing opportunities for your business, and you might not even have the bandwidth to attend to them without some help.
When you work with a social media manager or someone who can create your overall marketing strategy, you will tap into skills that you might not have. This can be a big benefit for any kind of business, and if this is within your budget, it can be worth the investment.
Everything from the models that need to be chosen for ads to the video and text that are delivered in your Facebook ads can be handled with ease by a marketing expert. You will be able to just sit back and go to meetings where future marketing plans are decided upon. This can help you to be free to manage your shop and run your business without having to worry about the nuts and bolts of your marketing plans.
If you are able to hire a marketing manager, this can also attend to this need for your business. In this scenario, this marketing manager will handle all of your shop’s marketing needs, and they will run your social media page. This is a slightly different process than hiring a marketing company to manage all of your advertising, and it can be a happy medium between spending the money to contract with a marketing company and managing your marketing efforts on your own.
Marketing a Coffee Shop Can be Easy!
If you use the right tools and tips, and tricks to manage your coffee shop, you can get your marketing plans off on the right foot. Marketing involves generating a brand for your business and taking care of the outreach on social media and in your community to get people invested in your business. When you do this process correctly, you will be able to leverage access to the right consumers, and you will develop an identity for your business within your local community.
Developing the marketing plan for a coffee shop is a unique experience that is often based first on the locality that you opened your shop in. When you are working on this kind of food-based shop’s marketing, you will have to know the area that you are developing the shop in very well to get the most from your marketing efforts. There are many reasons why coffee shops can be advantageous to own, and this part of the marketing process can be easier to navigate than other kinds of marketing for different business types.
If you have just opened up your coffee shop or are just planning out the shop that you want to invest in, you will need to use this guide to get your coffee shop marketing plans on track from the start!
