Strategy For Coffee Shops - International Institute Of Digital Marketing™

Maybe, coffee is the answer!

But First, Coffee.

For many people, coffee is the first beverage consumed in the morning and can be relied upon for energy to help them get through the day. For some, the smell and taste of coffee are comforting. If you are deprived of sleep, having a cup of your favorite brew can help you feel more relaxed and ready to be productive. If you live in a cold climate, having a hot cup of coffee can be the ultimate remedy to warm the soul. If you live in a hot climate, you have the option of having your favorite coffee drink iced. Since there are a vast variety of coffee flavors, roasts, and add-ins available on the market, many people can customize their drink to match their exact preferences.

Every successful coffee shop requires a great digital marketing strategy plan!

If you are a start-up coffee shop business, keep reading to find out how your business can improve itself through a solid digital marketing strategy.

Crucial Requirements to Success for Coffee Shops

Photo by Cafe Nero on Instagram

1. Measure your current success

Creating digital marketing is extremely important as it helps you set the direction you want your firm to lead in the future. It involves a series of actions that the firms need to take and consider which channels the company should use to achieve its strategy; however, before a digital marketing strategy is set, the firm needs to analyze its current business success.

For instance, if your firm solely depends on social media, there are a couple of tools that you can utilize to check how you are currently doing like:

If you use Instagram, then a convenient tool would be Instagram Insights because it allows you to analyze your content, activity in terms of engagement, and audience, which is the demographics that engage in your content.
If you use Facebook, then a convenient tool would be Facebook Analytics because it also allows you to track your audience, see engagement with your Facebook page and track your performance.
If you are a small Coffee shop that utilizes more than two social media accounts, please check out this blog!

2. Identify your Goals

Now that you have evaluated your business analytics, you need to set your goals. Goals need to be extremely specific as they will help you decide what explicit action plans you have to achieve your goals.

Goals can either be short-term (ranging between 0-6 months), or you can have a long-term goal (6 months +).

For instance, if you just started an at-home bakery where you sell donuts, cakes and cake pops from the comfort of your home, here is an example of what your goals may look like: (*disclaimer* this is purely and example for explanation purposes)

Short- Term Goals:

Within three months, I want to sell 100 coffee orders per day.
Within four months, I want to have at least 500 followers on Instagram.

Long-Term Goals

Within 7 months, I want to have 160 coffee orders per day.
Within 8 months, I want to have at least 1500 followers on Instagram and 1500 followers on Facebook.

3. Create a Digital Fingerprint

When you have an online business, no matter the size, the main goal is the get sales, right? The problem is that you are not the only one doing it. GOOGLE, the giant of web hosting platforms, says that last year, just between February to April, they increased 48% on new users making their websites. More competition no matter what product you are trying to sell, and that is why having a digital fingerprint is so essential, and the best way you can do it is by making a Webpage.

4. Focus on your Unique Selling Position

Some to narrow down your unique selling point are:

Narrow down your target audience: this will help you focus all your efforts on a particular audience that would be interested in purchasing your product. Additionally, when the target audience’s characteristics have been defined, it will become easier for you to connect with the audience that they best understand and provide your product in a way that benefits them.
Explain what problem you solve: As a coffee shops, you are fulfilling socia needs! With coffees, people can connect from distances. Additionally, if you offer delivery services, you have even solved transportation for those that find it difficult.
List what is something unique that you offer that no one does: There are many small coffee shops in the market, so you have to make sure that your business stands out from the rest.

5. Research your competition

When you are starting your online business, you need to keep in mind that, most likely, a lot of people followed the same steps before you.

Once you have your product/service defined, you can google and search for other businesses selling the same thing.

First, check locally; Are you selling cakes in Toronto, so long-distance deliveries are not an option? If you type “buy coffee,” Google My Business will automatically show you all the businesses doing it around your location. For more detail, you can also click on the map and check exactly a specific area.

Check the webpages of the first results on Google.

Is the webpage loading fast? A fast loading speed will rank your SEO higher. Meanwhile, a slow loading speed will make almost every possible buyer leave your webpage.

Do you find that the user experience (UX) is acceptable? To know if their (UX) is good, you need to check the webpage as if you were a regular visitor and see if it is easy to navigate. See if it’s visually appealing, and all the pictures and information on that webpage make you trust the product and want to buy it.

Check their social networks

We will talk in more detail about social networks later on but is one of the best ways to also gain trust from potential customers by bringing engaging and valuable content to the table that helps to build your organic traffic and the branding of your business.

With this said, it’s important that you check the type of content that they are creating for their social networks, so you can see what is actually more engaging for their type of audience that most likely will be similar to yours.

How to improve your SEO score:

Start your own blog: Having a blog is one of the most efficient ways to improve your SEO, and it’s totally free. It helps Google to see that your webpage is active, it retains people on your webpage for a longer time and if you post relevant content that follows the user intent, like for example, if you post a guide called “how to make the best cupcake ever in 20 minutes”, it will pair with the user intent of “how to make a cupcake”. Keep in mind that people use Google for pretty much everything, and that is query-based, so it’s important to pair what people search with what you want them to find!

Improve your webpage loading speed: We mentioned before that having a slow loading speed (or just not loading at all), would discourage most, if not all, of the viewers that reach your webpage, but it will also give you a pretty bad SEO score from Google since they aim for a better user experience using their search engine.

Make sure that your webpage is well optimized for mobile phone users: Around 54.46% of the users of Google search stuff through their phone
Optimize your URLs: Long links are not user-friendly. People prefer short and catchy URLs that are made up of a few easy-to-understand words.

Photo by Gloria Jeans on Instagram

Strategy:

1. Create a webpage

Since your business is pretty new, we would set the basis for its future success by getting a webpage that will be the center of all the online traffic we want to direct to maximize your sales.

2. Establish your branding

We need to establish what is your brand, and why is it different from others.

3. Sign in to Google My Business

This will help you to start building your digital fingerprint, the same way as the webpage does, and is another of the first steps that we should follow since is free.

4. Start a blog linked to your webpage

A blog as we mentioned before, will help you improve the SEO of your webpage, and I think that in your type of business a lot of people would be interested in seeing how you make your desserts.

5. Do proper research of your competitors

Follow the steps mentioned before on point 5)

6. Few tips to improve your content on social media

You should post video tutorials or new recipes for your stories and general content on Instagram.

Trends and social media :

Know the current trends and take the advantage on them. Remember trends eventually become phenomenas and finally a global lifestyle.

Your display should look delicious and your products should look beautiful. Coffeewise latte art is very instagrammable. Customers are taking pictures of them. Just make sure your location can be tagged in the posts.

Choose the things you want to communicate in this channel: products, offers, events, feeling…How about having your staff make stories to Instagram? Anyway, be recognazible and consistent. Know your target group. Stand out and bring forward your specialities. Be real and approachable.

Conclusion :

To make it happen, you need high quality products, professional service and something that people recognize you of.