Learning how to promote your coffee shop after establishing the operations is crucial to success. With all the technological advancements and resources available, which would you use to market your cafe?
In this guide, I’ll walk you through 11 coffee shop promotion ideas and even share practical examples you can apply to your cafe immediately.
Let’s get started.
11 Coffee Shop Promotion Ideas For 2024
1. Holiday and Seasonal Events
Every month has its share of seasonal events and holidays you can use to promote your coffee products. In the Philippine context, we have an average of 18 holidays you can prepare in advance.
What works for us at Hills & Valleys Cafe is preparing for every holiday and season with two main objectives:
- Entice new potential customers to visit the store (i.e., Buy 1 Take one promo)
- Launch new products during holidays
We’ve found these two very effective as you give customers a good reason to purchase existing or new products.
Pro tip: You can use ChatGPT to generate ideas for holiday or seasonal marketing campaigns.
You can use this prompt:
Give me 10 engaging marketing titles for our new [PRODUCT] launch to be promoted during [HOLIDAY]. Make it compelling and easy to understand.
From these ideas, you can choose what fits your coffee shop and create a holiday or seasonal campaign for your customers.
2. BOGO (Buy One Get One)
Buy 1 Take One promotion is a conventional marketing campaign to entice people to purchase more beverages from your store, increasing monthly sales.
Appropriately done can help you acquire new customers who are looking to get money for value from their pockets.
Conversely, if you did it wrong, it could skyrocket your expenses, decreasing your monthly profits.
Your product launch is the best way to start a BOGO marketing campaign. You want your customers to taste your new coffee beverage while being affordable so you can reach as many customers as possible.
Pro Tip: You can combine seasonal and BOGO campaigns, where customers can enjoy buy-one-get-one beverages during the holiday season.
3. Discounts For Students or Teachers
This applies to local cafes near schools and universities.
You can offer a little discount to students or teachers (or both), and you’ll have them as your recurring customers.
The best thing about this strategy is retaining a specific group of customers and increasing group transactions in your store.
Pro Tip: Do a Meta Ads campaign and promote your discount targeted to students and teachers. Before the launch, set up the campaign so you’ll benefit from early visibility for your store.
4. Local Partnerships
Local partnership builds connections and trust among nearby businesses and establishments that can cross-promote your coffee products with their services.
By being in touch with local businesses within your area, you’ll start to build stronger bonds that are mutually beneficial for companies.
For example, we’ve created a solid local partnership with a local gym brand near our store. Given they have five branches in our area (San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan, and other cities in Cavite, it’s a plus to get our brand out to their existing clients.
This brought groups of fitness enthusiasts to our store, increasing our monthly sales.
How do local partnerships work?
Think of a marketing campaign to give discounts, freebies, or value to their customers or clients. It should be something enticing that the business owner would want to grab the opportunity.
Ask the business owner if they want to give discounts to your customers so they can capture your existing buyers.
Create a win-win scenario where both parties (you and the other business owner) get their desired customers through a BOGO or discount marketing campaign.
5. Invest in Meta Advertising
One of our early wins at Hills & Valleys Cafe is the customers we gained from Facebook. By leveraging Meta Advertising weeks before our store opening, we were able to promote our brand to people within our target town.
This helps increase our brand awareness because most of our target market engages in this social media platform.
Here are some tips to leverage Meta advertising (both Facebook and Instagram Advertising) to promote your local cafe or coffee franchise.
Create a campaign with 3 Ad Sets. Each Ad Set is targeting three interests.
To give you a quick understanding, I’ve created this image so you can see how it works.
So, for the three Ad Sets, here’s how it looks like:
- 1st Ad Set (MOST NARROW)- 3 interests overlapping
- 2nd Ad Set (MEDIUM) – 2 interests overlapping
- 3rd Ad Set (MOST BROAD) – 1 interest
You can test which audience will resonate with your customers by targeting these three audience groups with different interest intersections.
Add more budget to the adset where ads are highly performing. Or distribute it to adsets with significant ROI regarding clicks and leads/inquiries.
6. Claim Google Business
Google My Business is a free Google service that lets you create a business listing online.
Once your account and data have been verified by Google, you’ll see your business displayed on Google Maps. And when your coffee customers start looking for your brand on Google, they’ll start seeing your map location, an image, and all the general business information you input.
Follow this procedure to create or claim your GMB Listing. You’ll be asked to fill out many fields related to your business’s specifics. In the Philippines, we have to do the traditional way of entering a code via snail mail to verify your account entirely.
Ensure you include accurate information about your business – NAP, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number.
Take photos of each area of your store and upload them to GMB. The higher the resolution of your images, the better.
And to rank your GMB better on local map packs, you must ask for reviews from your potential customers. The more reviews you have, the more chances you can climb the map pack rankings faster.
One of the best ways to provide feedback on your store and products is to incentivize them with freebies (or discounted products).
Many potential customers search on Google when they’re looking for a cafe near their place (or when they visit a particular tourist spot – e.g., Tagaytay).
And when your Google My Business ranks for keywords like “coffee shop in Tagaytay,” you’re likely to increase visibility for those customers and get more foot traffic to your store.
This leads to our next coffee shop promotional strategy: creating your website.
7. Create Your Business Website
Having a business website is a minimum requirement in marketing a coffee shop. It displays your store address, store hours, and contact information, and you can also use it to promote your coffee shop.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of the digital marketing disciplines that aims to optimize the website to rank on its target keyword on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
You want to rank for “coffee shop in Baguio.” You optimize your homepage for the key phrase, “coffee shop in Baguio,” so you’ll have chances to rank for it.
And through online rankings, you get visitors who’ll be curious about coffee shops and could add up to foot traffic for your local cafe.
Here are a few tips when doing SEO for your local cafe:
- Include your target keyword in the page URL (/coffee-shop-in-baguio/), or it is your homepage. You simply add the keyword in your meta title.
- Add the keyword in the meta description, H1, H2s, and first sentence.
- Publish an “about”, “history”, and contact pages.
- Include all relevant information about your cafe, including store hours, address, menu, and Google Maps.
The goal is to make it easy for potential customers to visit your store by providing all relevant information.
Pro Tip: Include a Meta Chat Plugin connected to your Facebook page. So when someone wants to ask a question about your cafe, you’ll receive it straight using your Meta Page.
8. Create a Loyalty Program
One effective method to retain your customers is to create a loyalty program.
A loyalty program helps you to entice people to purchase recurring transactions every week (if not every day) and get the most benefit from your products by offering a more affordable option.
At Hills & Valleys Cafe, our loyalty cards allow customers freebies on their 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 10th transactions. At the 10th transaction, let’s say they’ll get a free coffee of any size.
More tips on creating a loyalty program:
- Determine your best-selling coffee/drinks and include it as part of your loyalty program, i.e., they get this free best-selling drink at the 10th purchase.
- Design your loyalty program at its best. Make it glossy and easy to carry in customers’ pockets.
- Sign every loyalty card as proof of purchase. Train your baristas to do so.
9. New Product Launches
New product launches are a great way to promote your coffee shop. Not only do you encourage customers to buy new products, but you can also use them to support other products on your menu.
You can integrate it into other coffee shop promotional strategies like seasonal or holiday campaigns.
When launching new products, the good part is you add excitement to your customers, giving them more reasons to buy more and repeatedly from your local cafe.
Pro Tip: Think of a new beverage (drink/food) every 3 to 4 months. And aim to launch them to attract new customers and retain loyal ones.
10. Exclusive Of Stores For Events
One of the uncommon promotional strategies for local cafes and restaurants is allowing customers to use the store venue exclusively.
This means they’ll pay for 2 to 4 hours and use it for business meetings or personal gatherings like bridal showers, presentations, seminars, pre-nuptial celebrations, or a simple hangout with friends.
Think of how you can create an exclusive event program that may or may not include consumables of your products.
For example, at Php10,000, your client can use the store for 2 hours, with Php10,000 worth of drinks and food.
So, based on your target audience and location, how can you incorporate an exclusive store for events.?
11. Grow Social Media Profiles
63% of consumers use social media to find new restaurants or explore new menu items.
This paves an important truth that every cafe or restaurant should start and grow their social media profiles.
Not only targeting likes and followers but aiming for the main goal – driving foot traffic to your local cafe.
Actionable tips to grow your social media following:
- Identify your target audience.
- Base your messaging on your audience groups so you can empathize and resonate your content with them.
- Set a content calendar to schedule every content asset on your social media profiles.
- Create content that targets your target customer’s pain points, challenges, and needs.
- You can use ChatGPT to generate content ideas and even write captions for your social media profiles. Be more specific with your prompts.
- Use Meta Advertising to get direct conversions – messages or inquiries to your website.
- Collaborate or tag other local business partners and cross-promote their products or services.
- Post user-generated content (images of your customers in your store, sipping your coffee, and other photos snapped by your customers).
Build Your Branding For Your Local Cafe
You’ve seen how to promote your coffee shop using 11 different marketing strategies, done online and face-to-face setups.
Assess your resources and determine which promotional strategy best suits your needs, context, and preferences.
