If you’re a café owner, you could screech to the skies about the deliciousness of your coffee and pastries. And you can roam the streets, hooting and hollering about the one-of-a-kind ambiance that your café provides to its patrons.
Of course, traditional marketing measures are a must for any business. Unfortunately, your own attempts to advertise and inform the surrounding community about your business are drastically weakened without the benefit of word-of-mouth marketing.
After all, studies suggest that 92% of people believe suggestions from friends and family far more than they do from the business itself.
In today’s landscape, word-of-mouth goes far beyond in-person or phone conversations between friends. Now, your clientele can generate online content about your brand to spread the word.
However, it’s up to you to provide the marketing platform for those enthusiastic individuals to reach their vast social networks. It’s not going to happen out of thin air — instead, it necessitates savvy strategizing and an array of initiatives to encourage the generation of user content.
Fortunately, we’re no strangers to this world. As such, we can provide a helpful guide on how your café can leverage user-generated content.
A Brief Rundown of User Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC), as a concept, might seem slightly confusing at first — especially if you’re unfamiliar with the notion.
Beyond just believing word-of-mouth marketing, consumers trust UGC 51% more than marketing directly from the company. Beyond that, millennials — whose spending power is continually on the rise — turn to social media 3x more than previous generations to learn about companies, products, and services.
The main takeaway is, for the most part, social media is your bread and butter for user-generated content as a coffee shop or café. But you need to do more than open a Facebook page and hope for the best.
Let’s take a closer look:
Leveraging Your Instagram Account
Instagram is a primarily visual platform and a great way to tell photogenic stories about your café.
You just need to create an environment conducive to the Insta-culture.
It would be wise to hang up a neon sign (to grab attention), pointing to a magnificently colored selfie wall. Also, think about providing various board games (like Jenga) as well as offering specialty items (like a unique latte with plenty of compelling colors). These measures provide an array of photo opportunities that your patrons can put up on Instagram.
When your coffee shop has an Instagram account, your patrons can both tag your business in their photos. You can also encourage the use of branded, unique hashtags.
Implement an iPad Photo Booth
We live in the era of the selfie. Still, like any overwhelming trend, there tends to be sizeable pushback against the culture.
So, why not appeal to all your patronage by offering a photo booth with an iPad in your café? This removes that clunky selfie arm from photographs and encourages a different kind of customer to capture their enjoyable café experience in an image.
The other advantage with these free photobooths is they’ll include branding, such as logos and custom graphics, in the resulting images.
Unlike relying on customers to whip out their phones to take photos of their experience, the photo booth acts as a visual prompt for your patrons to take pictures. It’s like the movie, Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come.
Other than the cost of the booth and iPad, this amounts to free marketing for your business. It’s not unreasonable to expect 2000 branded images a month to be generated with this method. And all of it costs next to nothing.
Furthermore, these photobooths convey the good vibes experienced at your café. It might also cause your customers’ online friends to feel like they’re missing out on something special. Those feelings of FOMO will encourage those individuals to find out what the fuss is all about.
If Your Customer Scratches Your Back, Scratch Theirs Back
A Canadian chain, known as Cactus Club Café, holds contests where the end result is customers winning a gift card, drink, or treat.
What do they have to do to win these prizes? It’s virtually effortless: patrons must follow the café on social media and tag a friend.
This café understands the value of this kind of marketing, grasping that the word-of-mouth influence of these measures far exceeds the cost of a few free products.
On top of word-of-mouth and UGC being fantastic forms of marketing, so is offering discounts and free items. For context, 61% of consumers use discounts when they’re offered.
A very effective way to drive more user-generated content and engagement for your cafe is to rewards customers with an extra stamp or two on their Loopy Loyalty stamp card when they share a post or check-in online via social media such as Facebook or Instagram.
Reach out to Bloggers
We live in a day and age of food blogging culture. That very much extends to the coffee, tea, specialty drinks, and pastries available at your café.
Plus, if your ambiance is on point, it’s even more reason to invite a food blogger into your café to enjoy the full experience.
If you need further motivation to attract food bloggers to your café, 84% of consumers make purchase decisions after reading a blog about a product or service.
Of course, there’s always the worry that a blogger won’t leave an excellent review. However, you should be confident enough about your business to know that critics will have good things to say.
The blogger will first inform their own vast range of followers about your café. Then you can plug their review through your social media channels.
And say you happen to receive some criticism? It’s better to know what you need to improve as opposed to being left in the dark on why you’re struggling to attract foot traffic.
It’s Time for Café Owners to Embark on a UGC Initiative
Traditional marketing campaigns are insanely expensive, and they’re nowhere near as valuable as user-generated content. As a café owner looking to make a splash on the scene, you might not be flush with a big marketing budget. UGC provides both the cost-effectiveness and a return on your investment that’ll take your café from surviving to thriving.
Just follow the above advice, and you’ll be able to cash in tremendously on UGC.
