As a coffee shop or café owner, you are almost certainly going to be active on Facebook. But why? Facebook is the go-to social platform for coffee shop business owners and with its integration to Instagram, there is even more of a reason to be active in your online advertising. Facebook and Instagram combined cover the target demographic for coffee drinkers, from teenagers to adults and seniors, coffee is a widely used product and these platforms can advertise for just that.
Moreover, coffee is a highly social drink, people meet for coffees, go on dates to coffee shops and generally, spend a lot of time in the establishments. Therefore, by engaging and advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, you can generate an online following and loyal customer base that will translate to your coffee shop. So, what can you do to advertise and generate awareness for your coffee shop by using Facebook?
Learn to Promote your Coffee Shop
Coffee shops are highly saturated, especially in Cyprus, so attempting to engage and advertise and promote your business needs to be stand-out. Typically, you will offer coffees, pastries, desserts, smoothies and more so it is good to highlight anything that makes you stand out. If you have vegan options, advertise it, special offers, deals, new products, these all make for great content when advertising your coffee shop. The aim is to use Facebook to get people to know what they want even before they walk into your business.
Importantly, using nice images, pictures of spectacular drinks, mouth-watering food and more can fuel the engagement on your Facebook page and grab potential customer’s attention. If you are not actively engaging online, then people may forget about your shop and go-to other companies who they have seen pictures of on social media. Although coffee shop loyalty can play a part, due to the competitiveness of coffee shops in Cyprus, loyalty can easily fade away.
Be Found
People need to know where you are, how to get to you, what times you are open and if you are going to be closed. Every so often remind customers of where you are located, it may trigger a location-specific event in their minds, if they realise, they will be near the area one day, they will likely pop into your shop. Use convenient maps and directions online to make it as easy as possible to be found.
Personalised & Human Approach
Let’s face it, you are not a big and scary business conglomerate, you are a local coffee shop who wants to provide great tasting coffee and snack and an excellent experience for your customers. So let them know who you are and why you love doing what you do. When you post online, on Facebook or Instagram, make them as human as possible, endorse a personal touch in your marketing.
Luckily for small businesses such as coffee shops, you do not have to be held back by big business media restrictions and policies, you can be friendly and personal and make yourself stand out from the crowd.
Engaging, Reviews & More
Be heard and be vocal. If guests enjoyed their time at your coffee shop, ask them to review it online. Reviews are like a currency to businesses and act as social proof to a successful establishment. Moreover, by having quirky features or special events in your shop, which aims to get people to take photos and share them online, you can get tags, features and more which all share your brand and your location. Whether you have a crazy candy event or funny mannequins or whatever you do, get engaging and get the pictures rolling, this will spread your brand across social media like wildfire.
Facebook Advertising for Coffee Shops
Facebook ads are a great way to spread brand awareness and to share the love you have to give to potential new customers across your local community. Facebook ads can be targeted locally to your community, to certain ages, genders and many more demographics. My personal belief is that by running branding awareness campaigns you can show what you do and what your current customers love, but to a wider market.
Coffee goers share common ground, so if your social posts are working with your current Facebook and Instagram pages, getting attention, likes, shares and so on, then, more likely than not, by turning them into targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, you are likely to get more positive responses and can expect to see more new customers in your shop.
Ad Targeting
Because of the comprehensive ad targeting features that Facebook has, you can specifically target an audience that you desire and plan for. If you wish to have more customers from a certain area, or who work a certain job or pretty much anything else you can think of, you will be able to target them directly on Facebook, so you can be found and people can start to fall in love with your coffee shop.
Facebook even allows you to target by interests, if people are interested in juice bars, coffee shops, outings, beach bars or more, you can have your posts be displayed in front of their eyes. Therefore, you will know how to best utilise the features of your coffee shop to promote it to the right people.
You can set conversion goals to store visits and create location-based ads or used local awareness as your marketing objective. These indicators will allow you to focus your ads on certain locations, allowing for a whole new audience to become familiar with your brand. You can simply add postcodes, cities, pin locations and more, to specifically target certain locations. With this setup complete, you can save the audience you have created and reuse it in future campaigns.
Facebook Ad Retargeting
After you have run your Facebook or Instagram ads, you can use the data to see what groups of people interacted best with your brand and your posts and you can directly retarget them with new ads. Whether this may be special offers, new drinks, delicious food, or anything you want, that you know will appeal to them.
Using a data-driven approach for your coffee shop advertising is an important and effective way of promoting your business. Initial ads provide you with the data to know what is working, what people like and respond to and where these people are located. Therefore, with planning and ad strategy you can use this key information to advertise your coffee shop to the people who will most likely become customers.
Coffee Shop Social Media Management
Yes, by advertising online consistently, running ad campaigns and spreading brand awareness is all great to do, we understand that running a coffee shop is highly demanding and time-consuming. Therefore, a good investment could always be to outsource social media management at a cost-effective price and, in turn, the team of social media marketers will generate new customers, create engaging posts and build your online community so you can focus on your coffee shop and the new influx of customers you are about to receive. If you wish to learn more about social media advertising for coffee shops or considering using Facebook and Instagram to promote your business more effectively, then Absolute Websites can provide you with the necessary tools and expertise to get more customers in your store without you having to stretch yourself too thin with time and energy.
We love to talk, so you can simply contact us and we can meet (at your lovely coffee shop) for a free discussion and consultation on how we can help each other. Here at Absolute Websites we work and live for coffee so we understand its importance.
