Now that you’ve kick-started your childhood dream of running a café and your business is growing fairly rapidly, what then can you do to further market your business to increase the profit margin and up your reputation in the saturated market?
Firstly, congrats on making past the first year mark! As you probably would have realised, starting a business is not as difficult as sustaining it and business failure is very high and a common occurrence too. So, what can you do to grow your business? The answer is having a good marketing strategy. Below are a few ways to market your café business to help it grow.
Customer Loyalty
Since customers are your end consumers, it is absolutely necessary to put them at the top of your priority list. Many businesses tend to focus more on gaining customers and often neglect the importance of keeping their regular customers. Essentially, this means retaining your customers by creating a hook to get them to come back again and again. Needless to say, if your food tastes great, your customers will come back for more. This hook not only helps to retain your regular customers but also shifts the customers who visits twice or thrice into the regulars category. You can create a loyal customer base through giving out customer loyalty cards and memberships. Customer loyalty cards and memberships are like reward systems, so you’ll have to be prepared to give away freebies from time to time, but you’ll gain better returns, so don’t worry. Who doesn’t like freebies? Giving out freebies is a great way to attract new customers. Certain membership benefits include giving out freebies on birthdays and through point earning system. However, if you’re new to these kinds of platforms, then it is advisable to seek advice from marketing consultants. This can help you to save a lot of time- and time is money.
Special Menu
If you’ve been serving the same food since the day you started operations, it is high-time you do a “menu upgrade”. Your customers are probably itching to try something new from your café and something new will always create attention to both new and regular customers. You may also choose to have special menus for special occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc. If you’re stuck with coming up with creative ideas, the experts, i.e. F&B consultants are always one click away.
Amping up your social media sites
You probably already have an existing Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account, but if you haven’t, it’ll be good to start on one as soon as possible. Say you’ve got your social media accounts, but question is, are they active? Inactive accounts will not generate much traffic, hence making it redundant. You can keep them active by holding contests, having 1-for-1 offers on a regular basis. If you don’t have a creative mind, you can always make use of graphic designers, content creators and photographers to help you create good marketing collateral for your contests and events.
Online orders
Another way to increase profits will be to create an online ordering service which allows customers to order takeaways online and collect them either at the café itself or delivering to their doorstep if they have spent a certain amount on their orders. If you’ve a bigger budget, you can also consider opening up your café for corporate events and birthday celebrations to rake up more sales. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, you’ll also want to consider sourcing event photographers, performers, etc. for your customers and increase customer satisfaction. Should the event be a success, there’s a high chance gaining earned media through word-of-mouth, recommendations, etc.
The aforementioned are just some ways to better market and grow your café business, but the list is by no means exhaustive. If you’re seeking vendors (consultants, web designers and photographers) mentioned above and wish to choose from a number of vendors before you make a decision, ThunderQuote is the right place for you!
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