At a time when high streets are packed full of identikit chain shops, your storefront is an increasingly valuable marketing tool. Let’s go through some coffee shop marketing ideas that can help your business.
Making sure you have a welcoming shopfront is vital in converting pedestrians into customers.
You need to work out how best to maximise your potential.
It doesn’t matter whether you do this through investing in attractive signage, displays, and furnishings to lure in thirsty customers, or paring down to get your coffee into the customers’ hands as quickly as possible. Either way, curb appeal matters.
That’s true no matter what kind of look and atmosphere you’re going for, no matter if you want to create a warm, cozy neighbourhood cafe or a cutting-edge Third-Wave coffee boutique.
Managing to convert pavement traffic to footfall is vital for businesses like coffee shops and cafes. So you shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to make your storefront as inviting as possible — your storefront is your best advertising tool, after all.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Make it count.
Social media for coffee shops
Having a welcoming physical presence is one thing. But you also need to make sure that your virtual storefront is kept as approachable as possible.
That’s why the next one of the key coffee shop marketing ideas is social media.
A lot of independent cafes and coffee shops don’t do this, because they feel it takes up too much time. But with a little forward-thinking, and a solid social media plan, it is quick and simple to build a dedicated group of followers who will come back time and time again.
No matter what platform (or platforms) you go for, it is important to think about who your customers are.
What do they value, and how do they choose to spend their time?
Choosing the right platform for your business is important.
Facebook is far and away the most popular social platform with nearly 1.6 billion users to date. And it is invaluable for anyone looking to organise events, but it may not be the best way to reach your audience.
Twitter provides an easy way to reach an audience of thousands and cultivate a distinctive voice, but the 280-character snippets of text are low-value on their own.
By contrast, creating the perfect Instagram post takes a lot of effort, but a snap of the perfect #flatwhite with your name attached can really entice customers.
Once you’ve identified this, you can put it to good use, and tailor your social media offering to fit your customers’ needs.
Good social media should create value for your followers, no matter whether it’s a 500-word blog post, a 50-character Tweet, or an Instagram that says a thousand words.
Check out other ways to market your business without spending a lot.
Keep in touch
Another way to keep customers engaged is through email marketing.
Collecting customers’ emails is easier than it used to be.
Not too long ago, this used to be a tedious business. You’d have to ask people to write their email address down, or collect a business card, and copy them into an Excel spreadsheet. This was pretty time-consuming, and it was easy to make mistakes copying the addresses.
But now you can collect customers’ email addresses as you process transactions using your EPOS system. Most modern EPOS systems can send email receipts, and that’s how you get your emails.
From there, you simply import them into MailChimp or your chosen mail client, and you’re ready to roll.
Email marketing software maker Mailerlite has come up with a list of great email marketing strategies devoted to coffee shops and cafes.
They suggest ideas like offering guests a voucher or a coupon. These can be tied to events like Christmas or Valentine’s Day or you can sync these promotional offers up to send automatically on customers’ birthdays.
Everyone loves a freebie, and a personalised freebie is even better, so that’s another one of the top coffee shop marketing ideas.
Alternatively, if you serve food, you could offer content related to food such as recipes or kitchen tips from your chefs.
This gets readers thinking about your offer — the idea is to get them salivating, and draw them in that way.
It’s about working out what makes you special and working with it.