I own a Houseplant Café, where you can sip coffee while you shop for houseplants and small handmade items, think jewelry, pottery, candles etc. We’ve been open six months and things are going not as well as we’d hoped. Demographic: millennial women, brunch crowd (I can break this down further) Area: 12k cars pass us a day, we do have road signage and a flag Returning customers: 17% of our clients visit more than once a month Offerings: locally roasted coffee, lattes, smoothies, sandwiches, fresh pastries
I have a marketing background, but I’ve been out of the game a bit and so I feel like I’m not living up to the needs of the business. We do post daily on social media. Have a following of over 5k between insta and FB, starting on Tiktok next week. We need to nearly double our daily numbers to get to the profits we estimated before we opened. We do theme days that are very popular but then the rest of the week is under $500 days. I have a small marketing budget of about $1000 a month which I’m not sure where to utilize. Help? I’m getting desperate for my space to succeed.
Give people a reason to come in. A compelling reason. Make sure that their experience during that conversion event is positive. They’ll leave, want to come back, and tell their friends about it.
A burrito place near me has $5 burritos every monday. It’s slammed, they have a lot of staff on, and the line is out the door. Every monday. It might be a loss leader but who knows, they might still make a small profit at that price. I’m now on their text alerts and email newsletter. And because they’re always quick, friendly and its an amazing deal, I’m a loyal customer and I recommend it to others.
You could do something similar, growing your newsletter email list, social media following, which will give you the base that you need to run other scalable social ads for your customer base. It doesn’t need to be advertising that feels scammy. If you have a nice brand and aesthetic, which it seems like you do, the advertising can be authentic, fun and engaging.
Others have proposed the idea of having an events calendar, that could be an idea but it isn’t your core business. The amount of planning that it will take to plan and run the events wont feel repeatable or scalable. Something like $2 latte Mondays will feel scalable. People will come in every Monday, not just once every few months for an event.
I doubt successful cafes spend much at all on marketing. It’s all about user experience, access and cost.