effective coffeehouse marketing - pt III
Let’s Generalize...
In my last posting, I outlined the primary marketing tools
that worked for me. I'd like to use this
posting to draw conclusions from these successes and put together a systematic
approach for developing an effective marketing campaign for any coffeehouse.
To start with, I'd like to put forward a few principles of
marketing that you must consider when you are developing a marketing plan for
your shop with the explicit goal of
getting new people into the shop.
1. Consistency: a single one-off marketing shot does not
work. A single batch of posters, a
single article in the newspaper, a single door-to-door flyering does NOT
work. Marketing by its very nature is
designed to convince people to try something new (your shop), and people are
not convinced by just a single 'touch' point.
There is a basic principle of marketing called '7-touches' wherein a
consumer will not register your brand or product until they have had seven
touch points with your brand (seeing a poster, a comment on Facebook about your
shop, a phone call, a passing comment by a trusted coworker, etc.). Once they have seen these seven touches, then
the brand/product will register with the person, and they will be open to
trying the product or service. You can
see an article about this marketing principle here. So, the only way you can create seven touch
points is to have a regular, consistent, sustained marketing effort. When you are planning your marketing, make
sure it is planned in such a way that it will be on-going. I might also suggest that you automate the
marketing, so you don’t actually have to do anything for the marketing to
continue. You will always have 36 things
tugging at your time, so if you don’t automate the marketing, then chances are
it will fall down your priority list and not get done. An automated, consistent marketing effort is
key.
2. Cluttered Advertising Space = Ineffective
Marketing. There is SO MUCH
advertising out there! According to a
Yankelvich Consumer Research study done a couple years ago, the average person
is exposed to 3,500-5,000 advertising messages per day!! PER DAY!
There is no way for any person to absorb, consider and respond to such a
fire-hose of advertising messages.
Instead of seeing and comprehending the advertising, we just filter it
out of our consciousness - or just ignore it.
Don’t despair! There are ways to get your message through
this barrage of advertising to reach your customer! You see, we don’t filter the advertising
messaging from all mediums equally. The
more advertising clutter there are in a specific medium, the more you tend to
ignore messaging from that medium. Take
highway signage as an example:
The sign on the left is a single highway billboard. As it is alone, you will likely notice it -
and even read it. This is an example of
selecting an uncluttered advertising medium that will actually get
noticed. Now check out the picture on
the right: a long series of billboards that stretch into the distance. You might catch the first one... maybe even
the second... but the visual clutter and multitude of messaging of all those
billboards would quickly overwhelm you, and your internal filters will shut
them out. The same type of advertising -
billboards - but two very different levels of effectiveness due to the
clutter.
This is *part* of the reason I don’t like advertising with
places like Facebook (quite apart from the fact that Facebook is an evil
empire).
Just on this single Facebook page, there is ONE posting from
a friend, and SEVEN advertisements. Why
would you pay good money to have Facebook jam your advertising message with six
other companies to try and grab the attention of the consumer? No - that is a losing battle. It is better to find a more effective
advertising medium in which you don’t have to compete with other companies for
the customer's attention.
In summary - when looking for an advertising medium, find
one that is NOT cluttered with messaging from other companies.
3. Small, Ultra-Local. Your coffeehouse has a small draw radius. 1-2 block draw radius - max. You draw 95% of your regular customers from a
population of people who live, work or commute through a 1-2 block radius from
your shop. Period. So, focus your attention on JUST those
people. There is no point in doing a
newspaper ad that will reach 100,000 people if only 20 of them meet your
*possible* customer definition. There is
no point in advertising in a magazine with 20,000 subscriptions, if only 3 meet
your *possible* customer definition.
The other cool thing about highly-targeted, ultra-local
marketing is that it is too difficult for big chain-stores (like say Dunkin
Donuts) to do.... and it doesn’t make sense for them to create a ultra-local ad
plan for every store. Instead, they
prefer to spend their ad dollars on mediums such as print ads and television
that allows them to hit a wider audience.
This means that ultra-local marketing tends to be cheap (very little
competition) and uncluttered.
4. Be Different: Time to turn on those creative juices; come
up with something that is creative, interesting and catches people’s eyes. If you just do the same boring crap that
everyone else does, you won’t get noticed.
Try something strange or outrageous; don’t limit yourself. I will sometimes google "strange
advertisement" to get inspiration from what other creative people have
come up with. Here are some AWESOMELY
creative ideas:
5. Select appropriate
mediums for your specific niche or shop type. Not all advertising mediums are appropriate
for all coffeehouses. If you have a
high-end, expensive coffeehouse that caters to a wealthy clientele, then putting
raggedy posters up on telephone poles is probably not an appropriate medium,
Instead, maybe having some engraved invitations printed up and sent to homes of
wealthy nearby individuals (you can get such a mailing list from INFOUSA.com)
would be a more appropriate advertising medium. If you are a coffeehouse with a classical
cinema theme, then advertising at the local moviehouse, joining the classical
cinema Facebook group, or hiring a handful of look-alike famous movie stars (or
actors) from the 1960's to saunter
around town giving out coupons for free cups of coffee may be appropriate.
I stumbled across a coffeehouse in Boston last summer called
"Olga's Cafe." All they do is flavored iced coffee. Ok, that is a bit of an exaggeration; they
do some other stuff, but flavored iced coffee was their big thang: snickerdoodle,
birthday cake, chocolate mint, cinnamon mocha chip, mudslide, etc. It was AWESOME. It was clear from the product they were
selling and the overall look/feel of the place that they were competing for the
same customer as Dunkin Donuts. If I
were them, I'd look to find the nearest Dunkin Donuts (anyone who has spent any
time in Boston knows that there is a DD on almost every corner; it is like
Starbucks in Seattle) and then do some kind of outrageous promotion to mess
with them. Create controversy - it sells. Find a big enemy and then start shooting at
them in a very public way. People love
to root for David when he is taunting Goliath.
It will get attention, then it will make the news, etc., etc.
6. Message - Two hallmarks of an effective message: brief
and emotive. For most marketing
messages, you will have about 2 seconds to communicate to the person. Thus, the message must be short and clear. Come up with something that can be read and
understood in about 2 seconds.
Emotion rules our decision making process (see article),
not logic. So don’t even bother to try
and sway people with a logical argument for visiting your shop; instead appeal
to the emotion. Who is your target
market, and what deep needs do they have that you can fulfill? That is the message you want to convey.
7. Feedback Loop
- It is impossible to know if a
marketing campaign is going to be effective before you actually do it. For this reason, you must have some sort of
feedback loop that will allow you to reasonably assess the effectiveness of the
campaign. There are a number of ways you
can do this, depending on the type of marketing that you do. Some are better than others.
- assess impact to sales: This is the worst way to figure out how well
a campaign worked. See what the sales
were before you started the campaign, then see what the sales were a couple
weeks after the campaign and do the math.
While it can be helpful to at
least get a rough idea of the effectiveness of the marketing, this does not
take into account other exogenous variables that may also impact sales:
weather, some event going on near the shop, seasonal effects, sales by day, special
deals run by competitors, etc., etc.
Furthermore, you don’t really know what the lag-time on the marketing
could be. When we started putting up
effective posters, we saw an almost immediate pop to sales. On the flip side, when we started sending
'welcome to East Rock' letters to people moving into the neighborhood, it took
six months of monthly mailings to start seeing the impact.
- keyword: in
the ad, tell people to mention a key word when they get to the register to
receive a 'free gift'. This is better,
because you only have to count the number of times that secret word is used then
compare that number vs. another campaign with a different secret word to see
which works best. However, it will only
tell you which campaign works better, it will not tell you the actual sales
increase due to the campaign (current customers could use the secret word,
customers could use the secret word more than once, some people may come in to
just get the free gift and not come back, some may see the ad and come into the
shop as a result, but not use the key word because they are not interested in a
free gift). It is also prone to being
poorly counted, because employees will sometimes forget to count the number of
people who come in and say the keyword, or they will whisper the keyword to a
customer/friend so that person can also get the free gift without having seen
the advertising.
- coupon: Some
might consider giving out coupons (or sending them out) with a certain
promotional campaign, then counting the number that return. Like the keyword, it is good in that you can
get a real number to compare with other campaigns, but it has all the same
downsides to the keywords. In addition,
coupons tend to attract a certain type of customer - the type you don’t
want. Customers who are serious
penny-pinchers... the ones who collect and use coupons... tend to be terrible
customers. They buy when there is a deal
(low profit), they buy the cheapest items in the shop, and take up space in the
shop. For this reason, I suggest
steering clear of coupons.
- OTHER - there are an array of different, creative and
interesting ways to get people to indicate that they saw and are responding to
a specific marketing effort. Take some
time to design a solid feedback look, and it will pay for itself quickly in
cutting out wasteful promotional programs.
Once you start testing out different marketing messages and
mediums, you will slowly begin to triangulate in on the variables that work for
you and your demographic. You can then
use those lessons to try other related messages/mediums that might also
work. Think of marketing as a constant
source of learning. I like to shake up my marketing every 6-9 months, so it
does not get old and stale.
So, these are the main principles of effective coffeehouse
marketing targeting new customers: regular
and consistent program, avoid cluttered mediums, ultra-local, be creative (and
controversial), be brief and bake in a feedback loop.
I'd love to hear from you!
Please let me know what you think!
Duncan
Coffeehouse Guy
On a final note: as you may know, I'm in the process of writing a series of guides to show people how to move from a corporate job to owning a coffeehouse. Unfortunately, they are not going to be ready for a little while. However, If you are REALLY serious about starting your own coffeehouse, and you cant wait for my guides to come out, I also offer a 2-day, one-on-one intensive boot camp on starting a coffeehouse. You come up to New Haven for these two days, and we spend two intensive days going through all the intricacies of starting, owning and operating a successful coffeehouse. If you are interested, send me an email and we'll get it set up: coffeehouseguy1@gmail.com
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