Many leaders in the coffee shop industry are breathing a collective sigh of relief as 2022 ends, and 2023 strategizing begins. While it has been a tough year, many coffee shops and cafe marketing professionals will come out stronger than their larger competitors.
Competing with larger organizations is easier with these low-cost and budget-friendly coffee shop marketing tactics that any location could utilize.
Quick Links:
- Manage and Improve Online Ratings and Reviews
- Make Delivery an Initiative
- Consider Subscription Services
- Increase Marketing Outreach with Email and SMS Marketing
- Evaluate Core Demographics to Ensure Branding Success
- Collect and Analyze Customer Data
- Take Advantage of Marketing Automation
- Use First-Party Data for Online Advertising
- Live Video is a Must
- Hone Your Email List
- Ramp up Your Instagram Strategy
- Leverage Digital Marketing & Interactive Content
- User-Generated Content Sells!
- Create a Coffee Subscription Service
- Online Ordering Marketing
- Aggregate Ratings into One Platform and Offer Social Proof
- Use AI as a Force Multiplier
1. Manage and Improve Online Ratings and Reviews
86% of consumers are willing to write a review for a business.
70% of consumers look for more than four reviews before they can trust a business.
No trust means no business. It’s essential to focus on brand reviews by:
- Replying to every single review that a brand receives. Responding shows review-viewers that the brand cares.
- Asking every customer to log into WiFi to leave a review on the location’s WiFi landing page.
- Placing notes in collateral that encourages reviews.
- Increasing positive reviews with WiFi marketing’s automated email campaigns.
If you are worried about the time and effort necessary to consistently solicit and respond to reviews on various websites, consider using the Ratings+ feature from Bloom Intelligence. It will automatically email your guests and ask them to rate you on Google, Facebook, and/or directly on the Bloom platform.
With the Facebook and Google integration, all of your ratings and reviews will be in one place where you can quickly respond to them in real-time, all in one place.
Learn more about Ratings+ here.
2. Make Delivery an Initiative
Digital ordering and delivery have grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic since 2014.
At least 31% of consumers say they use these third-party delivery services at least twice a week.
Adding a delivery model can be a massive undertaking, but brands can start offering delivery by working with third-party delivery services.
Plus, after the pandemic lockdowns lift, more consumers are using delivery than ever before.
3. Consider Subscription Services
Of those who drink coffee in the U.S., the average coffee drinker enjoys 3.1 cups per day.
Coffee drinkers are also willing to pay more for products from local coffee roasters. Consumers will spend up to $25 per pound, compared to a maximum of about $20 per pound from a non-local high-end roaster.
Many cafes and coffee shops are turning to monthly subscription services for a variety of reasons.
Subscriptions improve relationships because brands connect with customers more often.
- They introduce more up-sell opportunities.
- They provide recurring revenue.
This can be a great way to improve guest loyalty and increase overall customer lifetime values.
4. Increase Marketing Outreach with Email and SMS Marketing
More than 90% of adults in the United States use email.
According to an eBook from Gourmet Marketing, 70% of customers want restaurants to send them coupons, and they are prepared to use them.
During COVID-19, many coffee shop owners struggled to reach their customers from their homes. The coffee shops with a collection of email addresses were able to reach out to their loyal base increasing sales. Remember, it is 7x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep one.
Bloom Intelligence builds your coffee shop customer database for you. Moreover, it collects important contact information, such as email and phone number, so that when disaster strikes, you will have an easy and effective way to stay in touch with your guests.
5. Evaluate Core Demographics to Ensure Branding Success
Many managers in the food & beverage industry are unaware of the average age of their guests. Likewise, they don’t know whether or not most of their guests are male or female. Coffee shop owners should know the answer to all of these to have a strong brand presence.
These answers can determine a brand’s look, a location’s environment, the music playing, and overall culture. After all, a brand is about the consumer.
With Bloom Intelligence, food & beverage leaders can create customer profiles to understand better who guests are and what they would like from cafes. You’ll have a large and growing customer database with clean, verified data.
You’ll not only know demographics, but you can also spot trends in guest behavior. This will allow you to optimize your marketing and operations over time to create a more engaging and memorable guest experience.
6. Collect and Analyze Customer Data
Customer data is the lifeblood of successful marketing. It is crucial to know who your guests are and how they behave at your locations.
With no real guest data, it becomes impossible to generate the right messaging and target specific messages to specific groups of guests. This is done using a restaurant CRM database.
A restaurant CRM database is a collection of customer profiles that can include online and offline behavior, demographics, email, phone numbers, income, ZIP Codes, transactions, and even visit history.
Building a restaurant CRM is the first step to unlocking unknown customer insights like how loyal a customer is, their likelihood to churn, their frequency to your locations, and much more.
The best part is that you can automate the entire process of collecting customer data, unlocking customer insights, and driving tangible results through marketing automation for less than the cost of 1 hour of your time in a month, with Bloom Intelligence.
These lists, or segmentation, of your restaurant CRM database allow you to identify and define your customers categorically. Then you can group them into segments for personalized marketing, advertising, and other demand-generation activities.
To make it easier, it can all be automated using marketing automation tools.
7. Take Advantage of Marketing Automation
Nucleus Research found that sales productivity grew by 14.5% when marketing automation software was used.
Business.com explains that investing in marketing automation has many benefits, including efficient and centralized data management, automation of tasks, and more specific, targeted, and segmented marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation refers to creating marketing messages that are configured once and then run automatically, giving you back valuable time to run your business.
Our WiFi marketing automation platform leverages artificial intelligence and guest insights to automate marketing to find new customers, win back lost customers, improve online ratings, measure customer sentiment, and increase your guests’ frequency.
Learn more about Bloom’s marketing automation software here.
8. Use First-Party Data for Online Advertising
In 2023, Google has done away with cookie-based ad targeting. This means that you cannot target ads toward specific guests – or lookalikes – with a cookie on the user’s device.
Unless you have your own coffee shop first-party data.
With a quality restaurant CRM database, you’ll be able to passively collect a limitless supply of first-party customer data. Then you simply export your guest database and upload it to Google and/or Facebook.
Google and Facebook will analyze the guest data you upload and send your targeted ads only to those in your list. This is guest remarketing.
According to Signifi Media, the average click-through rate (CTR) for remarketing ads is 10 times higher than regular display ads.
The average CTR for retargeted ads is 0.7% compared to 0.07% for regular display ads.
A CTR of 0.7% is a significantly better conversion rate compared to other digital advertising strategies, which could make a meaningful difference in restaurant and retail ROI.
To further increase effectiveness, you can segment your list and create targeted ads for various groupings of your guests.
Google and Facebook also allow you to create lookalike campaigns. After analyzing your guest data, they will serve your ads only to those who have similar demographics as those in your list.
9. Live Video is a Must
Live video plays a massive role in building awareness and relationships on social media. For instance, tools such as Facebook Live and Instagram Stories capture attention and encourage followers to connect more with cafe brands. Likewise, it helps build customer loyalty.
In fact, according to Forrester, people watch live videos 10 to 20 times longer than on-demand content, making live streaming a compelling way to deliver interactive content to consumers. Incorporating live video into your coffee shop marketing strategy is a must if you want to engage your followers more and increase brand awareness.
The good news is, there are several ways coffee shop owners can use live video in social media marketing. Here are a few ideas:
- Take your social media followers behind the scenes to show what it’s like preparing a cup of coffee and other foods in your shop.
- Highlight your coffee shop team on live video so that customers can get to know them. Implement an employee of the month contest and feature your winners.
- You can promote your new flavors and share the reasons why people will love them. You can also communicate why you decided to add them to your coffee menu.
10. Hone Your Email List
Growing your email subscribers is the lifeblood of your business and is essential for your marketing efforts. The more potential customers that you have coming into your funnel, the more opportunities you create to build relationships and share promotions.
Your email strategy keeps your coffee shop at the forefront of your customers’ minds, fosters relationships with new and loyal customers, and keeps your brand top of mind in your local community.
Therefore, focus on honing your email marketing in 2023. You can achieve an excellent strategy for gaining new subscribers by providing free WiFi for your customers. Send users to a captive portal or landing page before they go online to collect their email addresses. You’ll quickly gather valuable information that can fuel your entire digital strategy.
Rather than just sending sales and promotional content, nurture your leads by offering value your audience can use. Think about your target market and the common problems they experience, whether it relates to your industry or not. Share resources or give tips on how they can overcome them. Answer their questions.
They will see your coffee shop in a whole new light!
11. Ramp up Your Instagram Strategy
Instagram remains one of the fastest-growing social networks, currently boasting over one billion users.
It’s an ideal platform for attracting new followers and customers to your coffee brand while showcasing your creative side. It’s essential to stay up-to-date on the best social media marketing campaigns for your coffee shop.
Therefore, you can use these tips to amplify your Instagram strategy in your coffee shop social media marketing:
- Hashtags are king on Instagram! If you’re not already using them, be sure to include popular and industry-related hashtags in your content. You can use tools like Hashtagify.me to find relevant ones and drive new followers to your page.
- Be responsive. Remember, this is a social media platform. Replying to comments and online reviews and reposting others’ content is a sure way to maintain engagement on Instagram. It also humanizes your brand, making you more relatable and personable.
- Share useful content. How-to videos and motivational posts are a hit on social media. Leverage them to your advantage while offering value to your audience.
- Make sure your visuals are high-quality as they perform better on Instagram. Here are some Tips to Take.
Use Awesome Food Pictures.- Be consistent. If you can only post twice a day, maintain that cadence for improved engagement.
12. Leverage Digital Marketing & Interactive Content in your Coffee Shop Marketing
In 2023, remember that consumers do not interact the same way with content as they had in the past. Techniques like blogging and social posts still work, yet followers are seeking more engaging experiences.
Additionally, offering multiple ways for people to consume your content allows you to reach a bigger audience.
Content for your coffee shop is crucial. That’s where interactive content and digital marketing for your coffee shop comes to play. Formats such as quizzes, assessments, surveys, and polls are excellent ways to entertain and engage your followers. Even as a coffee shop, you can think of creative ideas to leverage interactive content in your digital marketing strategy.
For example, create a quiz using interactive content tools like Apester, where users discover their “Coffee Personality Type.” Or, build a poll asking social media followers about their favorite coffee or specialty tea. Finally, you could develop a survey to discover more about your consumers and what they want to improve your customer initiatives.
The options are endless with interactive content.
13. User-Generated Content Sells
User-generated content is one of the most effective forms of content in marketing. Your customers’ comments, selfies with your products, testimonials, and videos provide you with valuable content to implement in your coffee shop marketing. Social proof and reviews sell.
The Nielsen Consumer Trust Index shares that 92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than they believe in traditional advertising. This trust plays a massive role in generating buzz on social media and getting more people into your coffee shop!
With that prefaced, encourage your customers to leave positive reviews on your Facebook Page, Yelp, and Google. Make it easy by sending a direct link where they can click and write. Consider hosting a contest where each participant shares a social media post about their experience with your brand.
The key is to collect as much user-generated content as possible to amplify your overall digital marketing strategy. And it can help build your word-of-mouth marketing as well.
14. Create a Coffee Subscription Service
COVID-19 has transformed the way that cafes and local coffee shops operate. Customers are more comfortable staying at home, and coffee shops struggle to attract their business. That’s why many coffee shops are turning to subscription-based coffee services for their customers.
One type of cafe subscription service involves providing an unlimited amount of coffee for a set monthly cost. The other coffee shop subscription service entails providing customers with packaged coffee beans delivered to their homes.
More than half of online shoppers (54%) say they subscribe to a subscription box service. The subscription box industry appeals to consumers’ desire for convenient, novel experiences.
15. Online Ordering Marketing
Coffee Shop online ordering has become very popular over the last several years, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The pandemic has only fueled this immense growth.
If your coffee shop is offering online ordering to your guests, then you are collecting valuable guest data that you could be using for your coffee shop marketing campaigns.
By integrating your online ordering system with a CRM database platform like Bloom Intelligence, you can collect and store the data you collect in individual guest profiles.
Then, you can segment your profiles into similar personas and send laser-targeted marketing messages to each group that will engage them much more effectively.
You can also automate these messages based upon “triggers” such as when they place an online order, when they leave a rating if they appear to have stopped ordering online, and more.
Since 2014, online food ordering has grown 300% faster than dine-in. If you’re not offering it to your guests, now is the time. Capture and collect guest data to supercharge your coffee shop marketing.
16. Aggregate Ratings into One Platform and Offer Social Proof
With Bloom’s integration with Google and Facebook, you can have access to see both the individual ratings or the aggregate total of all ratings collected, all in one place.
Even better, you can respond to all of the ratings directly from the Bloom restaurant and coffee shop marketing platform.
17. Use Artificial Intelligence as a Force Multiplier
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly made its presence known in the hospitality industry, and it is revolutionizing the way coffee shops create and execute their marketing strategies.
Using AI, marketers can utilize guest data to gather both quantitative and qualitative information to better execute their marketing to improve ROI and engage their guests.
With AI, coffee shops can identify their guests who have churned, or stopped visiting or ordering online. Then, using marketing automation, a message can be triggered automatically and sent to the guest to lure them back to your place of business.
You can also use AI to discover true customer sentiment. Using online ratings and reviews, AI can determine your voice-of-guest and know what your guests enjoy about your establishment, and what could use more work.
AI can also be used for things like advanced guest segmentation for more personalized and targeted automated marketing campaigns for better marketing ROI.
AI can also be used to quickly suggest responses to online reviews, saving you time and resources to spend on other more important areas of running your business.
Overall, the use of AI in restaurant marketing has the potential to improve the guest experience by helping coffee shops better understand their patrons’ needs and preferences.
As AI technology continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, its role in coffee shop marketing is likely to expand even further, enabling them to deliver even more personalized and effective marketing messages.
Other Key Coffee Shop Statistics to Keep in Mind
- Coffee statistics show that the average consumption in the United States is 3 cups of coffee per day among coffee drinkers.
- The typical and most committed coffee drinkers are 25 to 45 year old, affluent, educated adults.
- According to Business Valuation Marketing, the top 50 coffee shop companies have captured around 70% of the U.S. market.
Implementing smart digital marketing tactics in your coffee shop marketing plan will position you well in 2022 as a business owner. It’s essential to continuously test your efforts to keep what’s working and modify what isn’t. With consistency, you’ll create a winning strategy that keeps people connected to your brand online and drives new customers through your doors.
Now is the time to plan for a healthier 2023 with a level, competitive playing field.
To learn more about how Bloom Intelligence can help with your coffee shop marketing, call us today at 727-877-8181 or click to schedule a free online demo.
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