Enticing Café Customers through Social Media

​If you are starting your dream business café, you surely have thought of your marketing strategy and asked yourself so many questions. How can you make people want to take a coffee sip from your café instead of brewing their own in the comfort of their coffeemaker? How can you attract non-locals and tourists to smell and taste your brew? How can you lure customers to be coming back to drink your coffee? These are only few questions that require answer.

The good news is social media is readily available to help you with these questions. No it’s not just about making a social media page which you possibly have at this point. It’s not just about being present online which must have been doing. It’s about engaging online and maximizing the use of it to virtually “talk” to your customers and target audience. Use it to spread awareness, make statement, promote, discuss, and connect. Use it to make them realize that they need to come and drink coffee from your café instead of anywhere else.  Discover the ways to use social media to engage and entice coffee lovers.

1. Engage and Evaluate
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Let your target market participate on the contents you are posting. Ask them questions, encourage them to comment, like, tag or share. Let them do more than just reading your posts. With more than 50% of consumers who agree to buy products and avail services from social media pages they follow, you need to use this as a key to attract them. Let your customers interact with you and feel that they are not just being asked to buy a brand.

It is important that you don’t stop with just asking questions and having them participate on your posts. It’s essential to respond and take actions. If you asked for opinions or if someone opened up a complaint, you need to respond and resolve it. If they positively engaged with your content, appreciate their effort. Follower responses are great tools to understand your customers and get great ideas to improve your business. Evaluate the data that you get from their responses and take advantage of the data to make plans and new strategies.
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Use organic stories and posts. The feedback and stories that your satisfied customers share are one of the most effective ways to entice new customers. Highlight it to let others see what they can expect from your café since these contents are from unbiased customers who experienced your service.

​2. Impactful Images

​If a potential follower visits your page, will they be impressed and pleased? Images and other visual contents such as videos and gifs are all attention grabbers. You use them to attract customers and give great first impression. Since visuals are more eye catching to customers, make sure to use banners, display photos and graphics wisely. Also, make sure that your graphics would match your business style and level of professionalism.

​3. Attract not Annoy

Surely you have followed and possibly un-followed other sites that have been posting their products every hour or even more frequent than that. You don’t want that to happen to your business of course. That is why you have to know how to determine the best time to post on social media. It is definitely not just making people see your service on their feeds all the time but making them feel that they actually need to come and avail of your service.

You can determine what contents to post by posting few and focusing on the one that got the greatest response. Choose the contents you’ll post wisely and try not to sound like an agent selling something but instead, you need to sound like a friend informing.

​4. Following Privilege

​Send out exclusive privileges and discounts that are only available to those using your social media of choice. Make them feel that following your social media account or getting others follow you could get them something. You can use codes, special coupons, or come up with your own idea. You will drive more visits to your page and possibly new followers once other people learn about your following privileges. If you are too constricted with the budget, you can run it for a limited period of time.

​5. Host and Promote

As a continuation to engagement, you need to learn how to host contests that relates to your business. Who wouldn’t want to join a contest and get a reward? Thus, you can create contests and promotions where consumers are incentivized when they participate and win. You want to focus on contests that are related to your brand to market the café while contest is on.
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Nowadays, one of the most common contests in social media is photo contest. You can host a photo contest for best picture of coffee froth when they had their coffee on your café or a blend-of-the-day selfie contest. The idea is to get customers to visit your café, take picture, join the contest with the chance to win. You can serve as the judge of who wins or you can engage followers to vote.

On the other hand, if you are trying to do research and gathering some data for your business strategy, why not host a voting contest. You simply ask your followers to vote. They could express their opinions with the hope of actually winning the contest.
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So what happens after you’ve hosted a contest and you were able to choose the winner? What do you award them? Simple. Something that has a relation to your product. You can award a gift card, personalized mugs or coffee stuff, or possibly gift basket. Anything that would make them come back to your cafe for more.

There you go. Those are the things you need to know to use social media to gain new customers and retain old ones. From here you can further enhance your online presence through webpages. Always remember that these tips will all be useless if you don’t work hard to provide satisfactory service. Make it a combination of online and offline strategy! Continue to learn social media marketing for free.

​It would also be helpful to get a social media strategist to help you with your café social media management.