Opened a new café? Congratulations. But did you work on its digital marketing strategies for cafe? If not, then this article is all for you where we are going to talk about the best digital marketing strategies for a coffee shop. Here, we are going to cover everything that is necessary to promote your business and have a maximum reach to that. And before that, you need to understand the target audience for the same.
So for any cafeteria, who is going to be your customer? Of course it could be anyone and everyone. but what will be the majority? Your main customer will be the youngsters, the college or school going people and the working professionals. Why? Because they are the one who is going to visit your café the most. We can assume that the ratio for them vs everyone else would be around 7:3 and thus, you need to follow these strategies by taking care of your targeted audience.
So without wasting time, let us give it a look ahead-
Google my business
Earlier, people used to follow offline strategies for their marketing. Recommendation used to be a crucial step as a marketing strategy. However now, since the time has changed, and the dependency of Google has increased. For anything and everything, people prefer searching on Google and thus, it is vital for any coffee shop to have their local business verified on Google My Business. Here, you will be asked to give proper details such as your coffee shop address, website, contact details, opening and closing hours, mode of payments accepted, budget for two people and the menus.
Please know that the more information you provide, the easier it will become for a customer to reach out to you. If you list it in Google maps too, reaching to you will become very easy for anyone. Also, since most of the people rely on Google maps to find a new place, they can discover you and this way, you can also get some new customers too. It is surely going to aid in boosting your organic ranking. Additionally, list yourself on Sulekha and JustDial too so that people can also reach out to you from there.
Visual branding
If you’re unsure with this term, let us explain it in easy words. 70% of youngsters prefer finding a café or a coffee shop via their social media handles. Thus, having a visual or we could say social media marketing plays a vital role.
When you’re making a page on various social media platforms, you need to ensure that you use the uniformity in terms of design and palate. Use a unified theme all over your pages and have a logo on every picture is going to help you a lot.
It makes the users know about your brand and plays a role in brand awareness. And also, you need to make it look very aesthetically appealing at the same time. Your page look will reflect your taste in designs and interior.
Social media contests
Social media as said above plays an important role in a digital marketing of your coffee shop. And to drive the audience to your page and make your page active, you need to have some timely social media contests.
These contests should go along with your theme, cuisine, taste and aesthetics. Contests such as giveaways, best picture inside the coffee shop, or more would work. Here, you must award the winner with some freebies that would encourage them to participate. As a winning hamper, it would be a great idea if you can offer some free coupons or a free meal of your coffee shop.
Audience engagement
As long as your targeted audience is giving you enough engagement, you’re going good. However, it is not going to happen in a single night. It requires time, efforts and engaging social media posts. You need to make sure that your followers are engaging with you on your post. For that, you need to reply to their comments, not too often though.
Along with that, with your posts, try to ask questions, play quiz and more to have an interaction. Your social media posts shouldn’t all be about your food, interior and information. Having few witty posts is a must.
Social media advertising
No matter how engaging posts you have, you might not get a response until you have a good reach to the page. And for that, you need to gain followers. Any fresh page would surely not have enough followers to gain attention.
And that’s where social media advertising comes into the play. Having an organic traffic is vital and for that, you need to run ads by targeting your audience, age, group, city and more such filters. Although running ads is easy, you can hire a specialist for the best results.
Influencer marketing
How does that work? Let me explain this. Influencer marketing is basically getting your business promoted by the influencers of social media. It can be done two ways, by barter collaboration or the paid ones.
It depends on your mutual consent on how you want to get this done. If the influencer has less followers, the chances are high that you can do a barter collaboration easily with them. However, if not, you can still try with a convincing pitch and maybe you get it right. However, before you pitch any influencer, you also need to know that there are variety of influencers available. There’s a category for them and you need to make sure that you’re pitching the right relevant category for your café.
The one indulge in food are the correct ones for you. Also, to check if they are having organic reach or not, you must check the likes and views of their content and evaluate it with the number of followers they have. In the coffee shops/café cases, you need to target the influencers living in the same city so that they can personally visit your café, promote it.
Inviting food bloggers/vloggers
For any café, the best way to get organic traffic is by inviting the food bloggers to their restaurants. You must make sure that you invite those who have got good amount of traffic to their blogs, YouTube channels. The more reach they have, the more outreach you’re going to get. Invite them, offer them free food, they will make their own videos and will give their reviews. It is going to be a workable strategy.
And while they’re making a video, you can request them to cover as much as possible. Talk to the vlogger politely and state how did it start. You must provide enough information to them so that the vlog should have some good content other than the food. Also, make sure that you’re showing them how hygienic the place is. It will really convince people to visit your café more and more.
Online food delivery apps
Since the pandemic has happened, most of the people prefer ordering food instead. And if you’re only relying on people visiting your café, you’re going to let a large number of customers ignored. Thus, you need to cater both, online and offline customers and for online customers, you can build your own application where you let people order food for them.
However, making an app and promoting it requires a good budget and if you’re just a new café in the town, then you can start with registering on online food delivery applications as well. You can register there and take orders. To attract the customers, you must make sure that you provide valuable service to them along with some tempting offers. And you also must take care of your ratings on such applications. The ratings matter a lot. If your rating is high, your order rate is going to be higher than the others.
Thus, you must make sure that your customers give you a good rating. And do not rely on one or two apps. Try to cover up as many apps as you can and get recognized by more and more people easily.
Go live often
If your café is happening, people are going to get attracted naturally. But how to aware them about it? the best way is to by going live often from your Facebook or Instagram account. Keep going live when there’s an event or a special occasion at the café and let people know about it. Also, along with that, you need to keep the stories of those live session with you on your page. Upload them so that people will know about it.
Email marketing
If your repeated customer rate is slightly less than it should be, then you must do a good email marketing. For that, you must take an email address of the people visiting your café and shoot them an email regarding how happening your café is and how much are you missing them.
Have you seen Zomato and Swiggy one liners? You can take an inspiration from them and convince the customer to visit back your café. If they’re not yet convinced, you can provide them offers and some promotional deals as well that could make them visit your café.
Wrapping up,
So these are the best digital marketing strategies that you need to have for running a coffee shop or a cafeteria. All these strategies aren’t very difficult and is approachable by everyone. Thus, we highly recommend you to follow these.
If you need any guidance or an elaboration of any point given above, you can reach out to us and I will help you with the same.
