Digital marketing strategy plan for coffee shop business

This strategy was created for a pretend business and might be used as an example for your own real coffee shop, if you are considering starting your digital marketing activities or want to improve your current one.

To set it up, we need to find the answers for some of the questions. Let’s start!

1. Who we are and why our coffee is the best?

To start working on the marketing strategy we should always know who we are, what we are doing and what our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. 

Let’s call our pretend coffee shop “Coffeeroom”. What is the Coffeeroom?

The Coffeeroom is a team of young and creative baristas who realized that coffee is not just a cup of energy drink, but also a lifestyle. Because it’s not only about good coffee. Room, atmosphere, and ideas are as important as good beverages and excellent customer service.

With more than a 5-years experience in the coffee industry and understanding what customers really need, we can offer not only high-quality coffee, a unique menu and outstanding service but also a good time, inspiring atmosphere and positive emotions. Our core values are:

• Perfect, perfect and one more time perfect. Perfect coffee, perfect room and perfect ideas.
• Never stop creating, because nothing is eternal. 
• Simple but tasteful. 

And now let’s conduct a SWOT analysis:

Strengths:

• We are a local brand with our own philosophy and unique atmosphere.
• We can offer to our customers more than just a coffee, we can offer a room where they can spend time and a place they can come to.
• Our unique selling proposition is that in our coffee shop customers can entertain themselves while waiting for their coffee (we have books and board games to borrow or to buy).
• We are always looking for enhancing and growth, so we are constantly working on improving ourselves and our service.
• We can offer good quality coffee and food.
• Our team is constant and works with us for a long period of time, so we know our regular’s preferences and can provide a stable service.

Weaknesses:

• We are a small coffee shop with a capacity of only 50 customers, which is not enough for everybody who wants to come and sit in the cafe for a couple of hours.
• We have only 1 location that might be not the most convenient location for our potential customers that live in other neighborhoods.
• Our prices are higher than competitors’ prices and we can’t afford to decrease it because of the small size of our coffee shop.
• We have a small staff which can affect the speed of our service during the rush hour.
• We are a new brand with a low brand awareness. 

Opportunities:

• We can open more locations in other vibrant communities.
• We can apply for small business awards and win there as a new local company.
• Our brand is new and it means that we can create a modern marketing strategy without “repairing” the old one.
• We can communicate more with our customers unlike our competitors.
• It is expected that people will need to socialize and be out of home after the couple lockdowns and pandemic uncertainty, so we can meet this need.

Threats:

• The market stagnation because of the Pandemic.
• Competition on the local market.
• Competitors with more affordable prices.

2. How many cups of coffee do we want to sell or what is our business goal?

The marketing objectives come from business goals.

So don’t hesitate to ask how many cups of coffee you actually want to sell and how many of them are expected to be sold by your digital marketing activities.

Let’s say that our business goal for the next year is to open the second location. To achieve it we will need to increase our profit (to afford opening another location). At the same time we will need to provide a steady busyness for our current and future location. So for the next year, the marketing goal is to increase our profit at least by 25% for every single day by implementing digital marketing campaigns to improve our brand awareness and to attract more customers in our store. And this will be a long-term goal. 

The short term goals would be:

• to start social media advertising campaigns with ROI at least 5%
• to increase monthly sales associated with digital marketing activities by 10%

3. What has been already done or let’s talk about digital presence?

To know where we want to be, we should define where we are now.

What steps have been done previously? Were they successful? Did it help to achieve some goals? Are you happy with the current strategy? 

For example, Coffeeroom might have established social media accounts in Instagram and Facebook with an active audience of more than 3K subscribers, which is good for this type of business. They tried TikTok and Youtube to promote the coffee shop, but found out that it didn’t bring them expected results.

They tried paid social media ads and that helped to increase their online audience by 3% and also increased offline sales.

Coffeeroom doesn’t have a website, but has a Google my business account with basic information provided. They want to keep working on their digital marketing strategy to get more customers from online.

4. What have our competitors done?

We always should carefully monitor our competitors and their marketing activities to know how we can improve our efforts or stand out from others. 

Research some of your competitors and compare it with your own strategy. 

Here is an example of conclusions that we can do after conducting a competitive analysis:

• Create more activities for customers.
• Develop an online ordering system.
• Work with customers’ reviews.
• Improve imagery and social media content.
• Be more progressive and use innovation with the customer service and payment method.
• Work on prices, compare with the competitors and try not to overprice.

5. Who is drinking our coffee or what our buyer persona looks like?

Before selling something, it is really important to define who will buy it.

Let’s try to describe the ideal customer (or in other word, the buyer persona) of our pretend coffee shop. 

The customers of the Coffeeroom are young professionals, students, and socially active people who are looking for more than just a coffee. They are looking to meet their need for inspiration and impressive time spent. 

The average customer is 28-38 years old, is single or has a partner, doesn’t have kids.

The secondary audience is young families ages between 30-40 that want to spend their time with friends and looking for some weekend activities. 

6. How can we make people drink more coffee or how to attract more customers?

And now let’s think what could be done to achieve our business goal.

According to the previous analysis, Coffeeroom is a young and small local brand with opportunities to grow and enhance on the local market. There are a couple vectors that we can work on: 

• We can open another location in other vibrant communities and promote it online.
• We have to increase online sales and services to be more stable and competitive.
• We have to use our social media and other digital channels to keep in touch with our customers online.
• We have to develop a modern digital strategy.

7. To sum up… or our digital marketing strategy.

Finally, after a long research we can develop some steps that will help us to achieve our business goal and to improve our brand awareness.

For our example business we will use following channels:

• Improve our Google my business page.
• Create a landing page and use it for SEO to have more customers from the organic search.
• Use our Social Media to create and post our own content consistently and to communicate with our customers.
• Use paid social media advertising to promote our brand.
• Work with reviews (stimulate customers to leave reviews and work with current reviews) to manage our image and to attract new customers with positive reviews.

8. Let’s measure or how can we know that our strategy works?

After the work is done it is really important to measure results. 

Did we achieve our short-term goal? Did we achieve a long-term goal? What is the ROI of our campaigns? Did it improve our sales? Hopefully, the answers are “yes”. But even if not, try to analyze what didn’t work and what did work to use it for your next strategy.



Written by Liia Galieva