Digital marketing should play a major role in any modern marketing strategy. Especially in the current environment!
Understanding what your target audience is doing online is becoming increasingly important.
As a cafe owner, there are many routes you can take when it comes to digital marketing. There are some simple things you can do yourself that can make a big impact.
The following list of five digital marketing strategies for cafes will help increase your businesses brand awareness and drive customers to your location in the process.
1. Optimize Your Google Maps Listing
Verification of your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing is one of the key steps in any cafe digital marketing strategy. Ensuring this is done will boost your chances of appearing in Google’s Local Finder, Google Maps, and help boost your organic ranking in general. Cafes can claim this free listing on Google, and include information about their shop, such as address, phone number, business hours, and types of payments accepted.
Google My Business features can further assist cafes optimize their listings and capture the attention of users with more specific targeting options and listing notifications. Learn more about Google My Business features here.
Claim and verify your Google My Listing at google.com/business.
2. Visual Branding / Social Media Theme
With the abundance of social content, ensuring your cafe has cohesive visual branding in the form of a social media theme can take your business to the next level. Even minor changes in branding style can break the connection between you and your audience and cause confusion in the digital space.
Having a unified theme across your social media pages will ensure users on all platforms see you as one brand, streamlining your brand awareness in the process.
Listed, are some tips to improve your visual branding on social media:
Colour Palette: Repetition of brand logo and colour ensures users remain familiar with your brand. While strategic use of various colours can help produce emotions in your posts, every business, every cafe should aim for customers to associate a colour palette and logo with your brand.
Logo: Use the same logo on every social network! This symbol represents your company and should be used to keep your brand consistent. Customers should notice a distinctive connection between your logo and your brand.
3. Social Media Contests
Social media contests are a great way of building a quick relationship with your online audience. If you give your customers something today, they feel more inclined to give something back; like their email address!
Boost Online Engagement: Customers are looking to deepen their connections with brands. Social Media Contests help motivate your customers to be “conversation starters”, consequently, making them communicate with you!
Grow Your Email List: Sometimes, advertising can only get you so far. The introduction of new digital marketing strategies in the form of social media contest can entice your customers in providing their email addresses for email marketing purposes. If your audience is convinced that they are getting a reward for providing you with their email address, your cafe can quickly build your email list and start strategizing email marketing campaigns.
Inspire Virality: Today’s online audiences are captivated by viral content and the ability to be a part of an experience. If you provide your audience a fun and exciting contest, they will want to share that experience with their friends and this will improve your chances of going viral.
4. Audience Engagement
How you can engage with your customers? this is the most important and opportunistic unit of social media for businesses.
The art of expressing one’s feelings via. the internet is practically limitless. Instead of analysing your cafe or searching for biased points of view in store, use Facebook and Twitter to initiate and facilitate this conversation.
Ask Questions!
If you are not certain about potential changes in your shop, make sure to ask your customers first! Rather than making changes and hoping for the best, social media communication is a powerful tool to connect with your audience. Not only will this help you make a strategic decision, it will give your audience a feeling of importance and improve your customer loyalty.
Pay Attention to Responses and Provide Feedback
Asking questions is obviously not enough – you need to carefully analyse and utilize customer feedback.
Effective and timely feedback on requests and questions have the same effect as great customer service in your store. Pay close attention to what people like and reply to when you post an update. While you may think you know everything there is to know about your clients, taking the time to analyse your audience on social media will bring forth concealed ideas and suggestions that will help you scale your cafe business.
5. Social Media Advertising
It’s simple, if your cafe currently lacks an online following, there is very low chance that your content will be seen — even that fresh social media contest from above. When you’re starting out, a high percentage of your content will get no shares at all, and < 0.1% will be shared more than a thousand times.
Which is why many cafe owners turn to Social Media Advertising.
Social Media Advertising allows businesses to target their customers directly and ensure posts are being seen. This is currently the best way to kick-start a social media following, increase brand awareness, and bring more customers to your cafe from social media.
Advertising options are offered by all major social networks; but not all will be a good fit for your business. The most popular social advertising platforms for cafes tend to be Facebook and Instagram, which both run under the Facebook Ad Manager.
Various factors are considered when creating an advertisement on Facebook and Instagram. To ensure your cafe advertising campaign is effective, it is important to manage your campaigns, and depending on your individual circumstances you may enlist the help of a digital marketing firm, delegate to a dedicated member of your team, or manage yourself.
No excuses – it’s time to get digital!
Original article source: https://transpera.ca/marketing/blog/coffee-shop-marketing-strategy/
