While your coffee shop might have a strong customer base, you still have big plans to grow. You’ve built a sleek website, and you post on social media daily. But when you check your site’s data analytics at the end of the day, you see the same uninspiring site metrics...
You think you’re making the right moves because you have a website and are present on social media. Why can’t you boost your online presence? The answer begins with engagement.
To become a presence online, you need to use your website, social media, and other tools to provide value to your customers.
In this article, we’ll guide you through a few methods that will supercharge your coffee shop’s website so you can engage even more customers.
The Importance of Attraction for Interaction: Appealing to Your Site and Social Media Audience
Your brand identity rests on how you present your coffee shop online. Having a website and social media account isn’t enough - you need to be present on those accounts. What we mean is that it’s super important to use your website and social media to interact with your audience.
Before you interact with your audience on social media and your site, you’ve got to attract them to your platforms.
How to Make Your Online Presence Attractive and Interesting
Before featuring your site, some housekeeping is in order. Make sure your site is connected to Google Business, which will put your coffee shop on the map, literally. This will allow customers to review your coffee spot on Google.
While doing this may seem trivial, having your site registered with Google Business makes finding your site and brick-and-mortar shop very easy.
Are you regularly posting content on your site? If you’re not, visitors have very little reason to come to your website. Posting content to your site is like giving your plants sun and water, it’s the basics. Without consistently posting new content, your site won’t give visitors much value, and it won't grow successfully.
What exactly do we mean by content? We mean anything your audience can read, watch, or listen to that will teach them something new about your coffee shop, your coffee brewing, coffee beans, and anything else you’d like to share.
Here are some coffee-centric content ideas to get the ball rolling:
- Write regular blog articles about coffee - the newest coffee trends, coffee bean varieties, and more. The topic possibilities are endless, and you don’t need to write 20,000-word in depth papers. Readers can easily get value from a simple article of 500 words!
- Basic instructional videos that teach how to properly brew coffee, how to use certain machinery, and a walkthrough of the roasting process. Viewers will enjoy learning how the roasting process affects the flavor of the coffee they’re currently drinking.
- Feature guest blogs written by coffee aficionados. Find coffee bloggers on social media and through simple Google searches, and invite them to write about coffee. Send them a bag of your top-notch specialty roast, and feature their review on your blog.
- Do you source your beans directly from a family-owned farm in Antigua? Reach out to them and offer some free publicity on your site by having them send you some videos of their coffee farms. Feature these on your site. Showing your customers the people and places that provide your coffee will make them feel more connected to it.
When you publish this content, feature it on your social media accounts. But doing this is only half the battle. To have a strong online presence, your audience must engage with your content, site, and social media.
Getting your audience to interact and engage with your content might seem tricky, but with a solid strategy, you can quite easily gain momentum. Here are two rules of thumb that will encourage your audience to engage with your content:
- Google Business Reviews: Reward customers for writing a review of your cafe on Google Business with a free gift. The more reviews you get, the stronger your Google Business profile will be, resulting in better visibility.
- Periodic Rewards: Allow site visitors to comment on your content, and entice them to do so by offering free coffee or a raffle ticket to win something awesome like a French press. Every few weeks run promotion periods where customers receive a discount for posting a picture with your coffee on social media.
Build an App to Further Increase Your Cafe’s Online Engagement
An effective way to increase online engagement is to build an app for your cafe. Wait, you ask - don’t you need 5 years of coding experience to build an app? Luckily, it’s the 2020s - coding and tech knowledge are no longer needed to build an app.
Today, you can use an app builder like Adalo that leverages a drag-and-drop interface to smoothly build out your app, adding components and features with the click of a mouse. You’ll need zero tech knowledge to harness Adalo’s powers. The user interface is super intuitive, and you can start building your app without much instruction.
Having an app for your coffee shop will make your customer’s experience convenient, and it will ease up your operations. It’s a win-win for everyone. These are some features your app can accomplish:
- Take-out ordering: Let your customers order their coffee in advance so it will be waiting for them as soon as they walk into your cafe.
- Delivery: Give nearby customers a delivery option so you can sell your coffee to people who are too busy to make it to your brick-and-mortar.
- Membership Rewards: Instead of relying on 20th-century punch-card “technology”, give your customers membership rewards through your app - Starbucks-style. Every time they buy a coffee from your app, they could receive a point towards a discounted bag of beans or a free cup.
- In-app messaging: Let your customers directly communicate with your staff with in-app messaging. If your customers want to make a quick change to their order, they can immediately do so by using your app’s messaging feature. An in-app messaging feature is also more professional - and much more sleek - than using WhatsApp, text, or SMS to communicate with clients.
- Push Notifications: Keep your clients in the loop about certain promotional periods, or let them know that their delivery will arrive soon with push notifications.
Adalo is also connected to several payment platforms like Stripe, Square, and PayPal. When a customer orders, they can pay immediately, which will make transactions easier and faster. Paying for your coffee directly on your app is a convenience that busy customers will love.
With Adalo, you’ll also be able to publish your app for free in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, or to your site. Your customers will love being able to easily download your app.
Next Steps
Building a strong online presence takes persistence. You’ll need to make consistent efforts and implement our methods daily. Doing this over a long period of time will boost your coffee shop website’s online presence, and your client base will grow, too!
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