If you run a cafe you no doubt have some sort of social media presence for your business. At the bare minimum you should have a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account, as well as a Tripadvisor page. These platforms are vital ways to be found in an extremely competitive space.
Over the past few years, many social media sites have made it increasingly difficult for cafes to speak to their potential customers by drastically reducing the visibility of their posts. At the same time, networks have made it much easier for business owners to spend money promoting their pages.How to avoid wasting advertising budget on social media
From popups and notifications, through to buttons attached to every post, it has become so straightforward to advertise on social media that many do so, quite literally, without even thinking about it. Do you spend money on social media advertising your cafe? Have you seen any results compared to your organic posts? Yes, organic unpaid reach is achieving less and less for cafes, but that does not automatically mean that spending money to gain visibility is going to actually benefit your business.Using organic and paid social media to grow a cafe business is not a lost cause, but both unpaid and paid campaigns need a thought out approach in order to be effective. Ever seen a notification like the one below? Don't be taken in by them, hold back and approach things with a real plan. Let’s take a look at how to make the most of paid social media for those running cafes.
Setting a goal for your cafe's social media advertising
Having a goal for your advertising is really important to make it effective. By setting a goal, we can start to form a strategy. For a lot of cafe owners the goal might simply be to increase revenue through customers and orders, but how might you achieve that? Is there a particular product you sell that has a higher profit margin, or something unique you specialise in? Just making more people aware of your cafe is not going to be enough, you’ll need to give people a reason to be interested in coming to your place in particular. What do your customers want? Coffee? Cakes? Could you promote a specific event or holiday special offer?How to create content for cafe social media
With an idea starting to crystallise about what you’re going to achieve, we can start to plan our content. For social media advertising to achieve the greatest possible reach, the post itself has to be a really good one. The comes from the angle of the post and the visual element you use. You could use a picture, a video clip, a 360 degree image or something else entirely, just make sure it’s really engaging. Pictures with people in them tend to get good engagement so that’s a good place to start, but you also want to make it relevant to your cafe. Think about the angle too, what is your post saying? “Come to my cafe” is not appealing enough. Everyone loves free stuff, how about encouraging users to retweet or share a post and offering a free coffee to some lucky people that do? You could start your own hashtag like #FreeCookieFriday and give a lucky visitor who uses it a cookie based reward. These promotions shouldn’t cost much to run but will really get people to engage. By incentivising people to share your advert you are effectively supercharging it’s reach and getting way more for your budget.Promoting an event at a cafe on social media
Another strategy that works great for cafes is to host an event. This could be anything from coffee cupping, to having a friend DJ in your space for the afternoon or even a charity event. Promoting this less sales-driven material can help get you on the radar of a much wider group of people. Make sure you’ve got your social profile usernames on display in your cafe so that anyone who visits can easily find you and tell the world how great you are.Targeting social media for cafes to a relevant audience
Don’t fall into the trap of continuously clicking tempting buttons like ‘boost post’ or ‘reach a bigger audience’ without spending some time making sure your targeting is properly set up. Think about the type of people who visit your cafe and who you would like to visit. Are you a hit with young, arty types, or with older business people? Is your cafe especially dog friendly or does it offer some other benefit for a certain type of person? Social media sites allow for really accurate targeting. You will only get good results from your campaign if you spend time setting this up. Most important of all, make sure your posts are geographically targeted, there’s no point in showing your cafe to people who cannot become customers.
