An easy digital marketing strategy for coffee shop
When F&B brand owners search for a digital marketing strategy for their coffee shop, two key variables are fast and cheap. In this article, we will show how we rank on search engines without any advertisement and one that can be activated quite fast.
Introduction: How to do digital marketing for F&B?
Before moving on to our recommended coffee shop marketing strategy, let’s look at digital marketing strategies that are commonly used:
For more information on F&B digital marketing - you can delve into more information in the link.
Social Media Marketing
This involves the use of various social media platforms such as:
- Tik Tok
- Youtube
Social media platforms are especially useful to reach a large number of people, best for the uplifting of brand awareness and are often used to communicate a narrative or a certain brand image that a coffee shop is adopting.
In social media marketing, engagement with your audience is key as it builds relationships, and a coffee shop is able to move them from being potential customers to an actual customer, ordering a cup of coffee online or in your outlet.
Here is an example of what we did for our coffee Instagram account (0 to 10K followers).
Search Engines marketing campaigns
When discussing search engines, we are talking about:
- Search Engine Marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation
We will be going in-depth about search engine optimisation, so here we will focus more on search engine marketing, also known as pay per click advertising (PPC).
For search engine marketing, it does not matter if you are doing it yourself or via a digital marketing agency, the ability to suss out low competition keywords meant getting more traffic from your investment. Awareness of your keywords is critical to a successful campaign, learn more about it in this session that we have on cafe keywords.
Email Marketing
Cafes/coffee shops all have a comprehensive email list of their customers, and while a very powerful strategy, not many cafes are using email marketing as a strategy. Somehow, cafes are all drawn to the more exciting campaign such as Tik Tok, Instagram, sending emails is so “old school”.
A well-managed ezine, not only engages your existing customers, it has the potential to onboard new customers that have yet to try your coffee.
Why are we talking about search engine optimization?
Two words: local customers.
None of the marketing campaigns that we discussed earlier, is able to engage your local customers. These are customers that know about your brand, they are the foot traffic that is in your surrounding but is not sure of your exact location.
And the thing they do is to fire up their Google Map on their mobile phone to look for your coffee shop's exact location or use it to direct them to your outlet.
If you have not claimed or owned that local using Google Business Profile (used to be known as Google My Business), then you will not be able to engage this group of customers. And of course, if you have do not own the location, you will not be able to reply to the reviews that any customers leave for your business.
And when your Google business profile is well managed, it is also very likely that it will come out in the first few results of the SERP (search engine ranked pages).
In the case study based on a competitive search term (video below), we will highlight how being on Google Map help your coffee shop to be at the top of Google Search Engine.
Case Study: OCM ranking of the keyword “Coffee Makers”
One reason most cafes would not consider using SEO as part of their coffee shop digital marketing strategy is because of the competitiveness of the keywords - most keywords are just so competitive!
In the video-sharing session below, we showed that it is possible to rank for a hyper-competitive keyword - “coffee makers” in our location.**
In total, we occupied 3 of the top results in Google SERP.
- We appear for the organic search with our blog post (homepage).
- We appear in our location on the location map.
- We appear in the related image section as well.
**Note that the result might be different for you based on your location, your chrome usage and also the time of you reading this article (we might be outranked for the keyword).
Google Organic Result
This is by far the most difficult to achieve compared to Google Business Profile or Images. The sheer competition also meant that while we are currently ranked, we can also easily be outranked after a while.
Thus, maintenance of your blog post, monitoring of competition is key when it comes to keeping and raising your rank in SERP.
What can I do to optimise my blog post?
- Look for low competition keywords
- Do your on-site (post, image) optimisation.
- Find relevant internal pages to link to the blog post.
- Have an active link building campaign ongoing for every blog that is built.
Google Business Profile
We appear numerous times for the very competitive keywords in our location because of the name of the business. This shows the importance of keywords for your Google Business Profile, searching for low competition and then using it for your local business will assist in the ranking.
What can I do to use Google Business Profile?
- Optimising Google Business Profile is very similar to optimising your blog posts.
- Look for low competition keywords
- Do your on-site (post, image) optimisation.
- If possible, get listings in your local merchant associations, business directories (with a link back to your Google Business Profile).
- Be clear about your NAP (Name, Address, Phone).
- Post regularly
- Ask for reviews from your customers.
Google Image Search
Traditionally, this is one vertical on its own. But in recent years, images are also showing up in the main search results, this means that if you optimise your images well, the result will be shown on the main search results as well.
In this case study of coffee makers, one of our images is the first few image results that appear, this gives us another real estate on the competitive first page of the SERP.
What can I do to use images?
The first thing you need to do is to change your alt-tag (the file name of your image), to a keyword that you want to rank for, e.g. coffee makers. And of course, you can proceed further to give a description of your image to further optimise it.
*If it is for a particular location, you can add in the location as well.
Here is a video on how to optimise your image.
One thing to note is the originality of your Image, it is a good practice to use your own images and if you want to share it on various social media platforms, make sure that the image first appears on your website before it goes on to any other platforms.
Conclusion
The digital marketing strategy for coffee shop that you can do immediately that we recommend here is local SEO - the use of Google Business Profile to reach your local customers, the foot traffic that might be looking for you or coffee in your location.
When it is well optimised, you will appear for food and beverages that people are looking for in that area as well.
And of course, if time permits, press on to optimise your blog post (it has a more sustainable return on investment compared to SEM).
Written by: Ebenezer Heng
About US | OCM Profile
OCM (OnCoffeeMakers.com) was started in 2007 with the first webpage about coffee machines. And for a number of years, we focused on helping people find their desired coffee machine (we still are helping folks with that! So, if you are looking for coffee machines for office or restaurants - check out the link).
In 2010, we started getting enquiries on restaurant marketing and we start to help food and beverage brands with their marketing. Below are campaigns and events that we have done over the years:
OCM's campaigns: F&B Marketing Ideas by OCM
OCM's Events: F&B Industry events by or with OCM
Check out this restaurant marketing guide to learn more about the many campaigns and companies we have worked with.
Since then, we have also created many marketing workshops and classes for the F&B industry. Many of these modules are still running in tertiary institutions such as Temasek Polytechnic Skillsfuture Academy and also ITE College East COC classes, below are some snippets of our lectures and workshops:
OCM’s F&B workshops: Food and Beverage Marketing Lectures | Workshops - click to watch classes on customer journey map, JTBD and more.
So, if you are looking for industry practitioners to help you scale your coffee or F&B businesses, do drop us a message or book an appointment. Do also check out our various social media platforms on regular F&B and coffee market updates:
For regular coffee (F&B) related videos: OCM Youtube
For Daily Coffee Inspiration (fun coffee content): OCM IG
For insights into the coffee (F&B) industry: OCM LinkedIN
PS: For the coffee lovers, we continue to share coffee articles (and videos) and have also started a free coffee class section (with free online coffee training supported by coffee partners).
