How to successfully market your coffee shop

Managing a coffee shop takes a lot of work. You need a good location, attractive interior design, well-trained baristas, and high-quality coffee.

If no-one knows about your coffee shop, it won’t succeed. Let’s take a look at how you can successfully market your café in the digital age.

Know Your Brand

Before starting any marketing efforts, make sure you know your brand. Can you describe your offering in a few simple words? If not it may be too complicated and need revising.

And who is your audience? Identify which customers you want to attract. Is this crowd realistic for your environment and location?

For example, if you’re close to offices and have enough room, you may want to target workers looking for a space for meetings and be sure to attract the morning coffee crowds. The more clearly you can identify your audience, the better you can market your coffee shop to them.

Use Great Photographs

Online content is a key marketing strategy, so photography is more important than ever. Your customers are likely to spend hours on social media including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. To get them engaged with your brand, you need attention-grabbing content.

Posts with photos perform better on social media, they help grab attention when users are scrolling through their feeds, so be sure to include them, or even better create short videos.

There are plenty of online resources to help improve your photography skills, it’s a skill that will greatly improve your marketing results.

Make Your Content Varied But Consistent

Having a familiar format can help reinforce a brand and keep loyal followers. Your content needs to be varied, but not so diverse that your customers don’t know what to expect from your brand.  Your content helps build the personality of your brand, so consistency helps your audience get to know you.

Consider including a coffee fact of the day or a regular feature on industry news. Can you offer helpful tips? How about behind-the-scenes content?

If you’re stuck for ideas, pick up a couple of magazines that are similar to your brand. Or look at their social media accounts. Are there categories or ideas you could use in your own content?

For those who have recently opened their coffee shop and are new to this venture – then be sure to have a look at our coffee machines for cafes, and commercial coffee machines. Our coffee machines for cafes cover a variety of machines, suited for small to large coffee shops.