How to promote your café

The power of marketing is enormous. Trust it. But belief alone is not enough. How do we harness the power of marketing? How to build an effective marketing strategy? What marketing activities are best for a café? Unfortunately, after this article, you probably won't become a marketing specialist. But you don't need to be.

Rather, think of this article as a quick overview of what you, as a café owner, should know about marketing. There may be times when you want to delegatemarketing tosomeone else. What can you expect, what can you require and what are the options? Find out all this in today's article.

HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF MARKETING

• Get clear on where you are going as a business. How much financial and timeresourcesdo you have? What are the potential risks?
• Think about whether you are ready to implement long-term and meaningful marketing activities.
• Create a marketing strategy. Once you have created it, you will know exactly who you are targeting, what you are saying, why and where, how much it will cost, what you will get out of it, when and who will be responsible for it.
• Decide which marketing activities you will carry out yourself and which you will outsource to an external marketer or specialist.
• Decide exactly what tasks the marketer will handle. Establish the job description and responsibilities of the marketer.
• Implement the marketing strategy - test, adjust, evaluate, cut and change.

MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE. IT'S ABOUT MARKETING STRATEGY.

Before you embark on any communication towards your customers, you should create something called a marketing brief. You'll be sure to develop one if you're entrusting your marketing to an agency or freelancer. However, you should also develop one if you are going to handle your marketing yourself. It would be a mistake to imagine that someone else will prepare the marketing brief for you. No one knows your business and your goals as well as you do. So take a few minutes and try to develop your marketing brief.

AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

You already know that you should develop a brief before you start your communications. But how?

Thefirst step is to understand whatyour communication objective is. Is it to raise awareness of your café? Are you looking to increase market share? To increase sales volume? If you don't know, we have a little help for you. 99% of the time, it's to increase sales.

Now take a look at your business. What are its characteristics? What is its function and use? Is there anything special about your business? What is it? How long has your business been on the market? Are you a market leader, a follower, or just entering the market?

Don't forget about your competitors. You already know that your competition can be divided into direct and indirect. Who is it? What is its position in the market? What is the benefit it communicates? How does it perform in this market? Who is the strongest? Why might customers prefer your competition?

The moment youknow who your competition is, look at the competitive differentiators of your products and services. Your goal is to identify your unique selling proposition. Is it lower price? Higher quality? Is your café the best value for money? Does it have a great location? Of course, your unique selling proposition can be something else entirely. Think about it.

Now focus on the market. What is its capacity? Is it growing or stagnating? Why? What changes and trends are occurring? Theanswers to all these questions should be found in your business plan.

WHO AM I TARGETING?

Your marketing communication is primarily for your customers. So focus on who your customer is. How do they think, what do they live, what do they feel? What are their demographics? What are his habits? Is he coming to you on impulse, on purpose, or out of habit? How often does he come to you? What are his practical needs and emotional desires? To what extent is visiting your café a serious decision for him? Might he have any concerns about visiting your café?

Try to find out how people perceive your café. What is their awareness of it, how does it affect them? What do they like about your café, and what turns them off? Different marketing, focus group and customer analyses can help you to get this data . If you're not currently in a situation where you can afford to pay big money for marketing research, ask people in your area and your customers themselves.

WHAT DO I WANT TO ACHIEVE?

Look at the strengths and weaknesses of your current communications. What does it look like? Is it inadequate on all levels? Is it poorly set up? Is it poorly designed?

What are your ideas for future communication, what effect should it have? Do you want to build awareness and image? To change customer attitudes and strengthen customer loyalty? Do you want to get on the customer's shortlist?

Next, think about themost important things your customer should learn about you and remember. Try to create a concise and succinct formulation.

What style do you want to communicate in? What are your limitations and communication taboos? How big is your communication budget?

After getting answers to all of the above questions, you should have enough information to put together an effective marketing plan.

HOW TO PROMOTE PRACTICALLY?

Promotion can be divided into online (the one on the internet) and offline (the one in the real world). The tools of promotion vary from case to case.

Let's focus on online promotion first. How can you promote your business online? Online marketing tools include SEO, PPC advertising, content marketing, display advertising, emailing and social media promotion.

COMPANY DIRECTORY

The first step you should take in your online promotion is to list your business in an online business directory, such as Google My Business. If someone starts searching for cafes in their area on Google, your cafe will show up in their search results.

You will have noticed that these results appear in a certain order. This order is not random. There areseveral factors that determine the ranking of your cafe, such as distance, the authority of your website, how many times your cafe has been mentioned somewhere, or the number of sources for your blog article.

You don't need a website to list your business in the directory. However, we would highly recommend creating one, for several reasons we'll cover later.

WEBSITES

Is it even worth it for a coffee shop? For us, it certainly is. Making your own website is not difficult at all these days. You can have cheap and expensive websites. Websites that you create yourself and websites that a professional creates for you. If you decide to create a website yourself, try Mobirise, Wix, or WordPress, for example . Web development here is very simple, intuitive, and inexpensive. You can find plenty of tutorials on YouTube. The only other cost you'll be dealing with in connection with the site will be paying for your domain.

WHAT WAS FIRST? APPEARANCE OR CONTENT?

When creating a website, you start with the content first. When you start planning your website, the most important thing to think about is what you expect users to see on your site. Do you want them to call you and make a reservation? Do you want them to visit your café? Put a map on your website and directions on how to get there. Also include an "about us" section, contacts, photos, glossary, FAQ, reviews, or your menu. You can introduce your staff here, or show off what brand of coffee you have on your grinder. If you have the space, you can start a blog. If you don't have quality content, the search engine simply won't use it and move you up in the search results.

RANKING FACTORS FOR SEARCH RESULTS

1. Content. How professional and unique is the content you write? Is the author of the content and their details visible?
2. Authority. How authoritative is the site? How many links and how good are they leading to your URL? How often is the site cited? Is your content backed up by credible sources?
3. User signals. Anything a search engine can pick up after clicking on a search result.
4. Trust. Are you protecting your users (HTTPS,...)? Is there a form of owner contact on the site? Information about him? Do you have an ID number listed? Is the content up to date?
5. Personalization. This is based on search history and location.

5 GOLDENRULES OF GOOD CONTENT

You already know that quality content can help you a lot. But how do you know if your content is successful? We've written five rules of successful content that search engines can check:

1. Content is easy to read on all devices.
2. Fast loading. Your page should load within two seconds. Anything that exceeds this limit you should try to resolve. For example, you can check the loading speed of your website HERE.
3. Comprehensive topic coverage.
4. Fast access to content without ads and pop-ups!
5. Identifiable author, content backed by sources.

But what to write about? Keyword analysiscan help you with that . Find out what people are searching for and also look atrelated search - the most similar topic by search engine (found at the bottom of the page). Try to cover these topics in your article - the search engine will like it and move you up.

WHAT NOT TO DO IN SEO

Sometimes people are looking for ways to make things easier. Don't. Google will punish you by stopping you from showing up in the display results. Google's Panda and Google Penguinalgorithms keep an eye on whether you're trying to get around something .

Things Google will punish you for that definitely don't pay: rank manipulation, hidden text, MFA/MFM, link farms, cloaking, doorway, misdirection, mirroring, domain spam, cybersquatting.

TOOLS

It's a lot isn't it? Fortunately, there are a number of tools to help you with your digital marketing:

• ON page tools: Screaming Frog, Xenu
• SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Marketing Miner
• Mention (social), Google alerts (content), Marketing Miner
• Analytics tools: Google analytics, Data studio, Power Bi, Supermetrics
• For position measurement: Collabim

Google Analytics and Marketing Minerwill suffice in your early days .

APPS

You may have heard the term mobile-first. Today it's more like mobile only. The vast majority of content is consumed via mobile devices. So don't underestimate their potential. Mobile appsare a great tool . The latter can offer a variety of uses. Summarize your daily menu here, or add notifications about upcoming events. But the greatest potential lies in creating loyalty programs. So give apps a chance. TheProgressive Web App, for example, can help you with this .

FINALLY, SOCIAL NETWORKS

If you've made it this far, you know that digital marketing isn't just social media. However, we certainly can't underestimate their power. For you, social media management represents a great opportunity. While you need experts for SEO, PPC ads and more, you can handle social media management playfully on your own. Which networks should you not miss out on?

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is the platform of choice for sharing happy moments and coffee shop photos. Set up an Instagram profile for your coffee shop. Create a company profile, fill in all the details such as address, website link and more.

Post posts from your cafe here, show the daily menu, highlight special offers, take photos of your cupcakes, showcase the coffee you have on the grinder right now. Take advantage of every feature Instagram has to offer. Post daily Instagram Stories and then save them to your Favorites. Take advantage of interactive features, geolocation, live streaming, or try out the IGTV concept.

Reach an age group of roughly 20 to 35 on Instagram, tailor your communication accordingly.

FACEBOOK

Everyone is on Facebook. Youjust need to be aware of who isbehaving there. Don't expect a young age group under 20 to interact with you here. Rather, you will be communicating with people of working age and your oldest target audience. Put a Facebook Pixel on your website .