Marketing your small business is how you find people who love the hand-crafted lattes you specialize in or the Belgian sour beers you want to share. If you tell them, they will come. But do these craft beer enthusiasts and morning coffee lovers know where to find you? That’s the trick. Explore Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as a way to engage with your customers. Social media is an ideal promoting outlet for any small businesses.
Meet Your Customers Where They Are
Retail and food service engagement in and around your neighborhood has probably shifted since people started working from home and changing their recreational habits. One thing we know for sure is that many people are spending time on their phones scrolling through social media as a way to connect with the world.
You need to be active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so your customers can find you when they’re spending time swiping around on their apps. Customers may be less likely to drive through your neighborhood on their way to the office these days, so you should grab the opportunity of engaging social media feeds to meet them where they are.
Promote Your Brand
Depending on your business and your tone, your content will be different. If you’re just getting started on social media marketing, spend some time thinking through your voice and make sure it’s consistent. You want people to recognize the personality of your brand the way they recognize a friend. Using social media to market your coffee shop or brewery should feel like an extension of your brand story.
Another vital way to promote consistency across social media marketing is to frequently visually reference your logo and your brand across social media channels. You want your customers and followers to recognize your logo and associate it with your shop automatically.
Consider using social media to promote your branded merchandise as well. Branded merchandise is like the secret agent of small business marketing. Once you’ve got your customers wearing your apparel, using your stoneware coffee mugs in their kitchen, or enjoying a beer with neighbors in a custom logo beer stein, you’ve got the best kind of marketing working for you.
People trust their friends and neighbors, and social media is the primary place friends and neighbors connect these days. If someone asks about your branded merchandise and a friend tells them about your fantastic coffee, they are more likely to take that opinion seriously and check out your business next time they want a cup of coffee or a growler.
Extend Your Storefront
Once you’ve established your brand and created some merchandise that people want to buy, think about using social media channels to make your social media an extension of your retail relationship with your customers. Promote fall brews or the return of pumpkin lattes by featuring a beautiful branded mug nestled in the leaves or surrounded by pumpkins. Promote the opening of your taproom patio in the spring with an image of a group of friends enjoying the sun, wearing your caps, and sharing beer in branded steins.
Weaving product or merchandise giveaways into your social media posts amps up customer excitement for little cost on your end. A simple, low-cost giveaway of a branded mug and a free drip coffee will create an incentive for people to engage with your social media feeds and provide contact information for future promotions.
Explore features like Instagram Shopping to make your posts shoppable. When your products are linked from an image on a social media outlet, you make shopping easier for your customer. This also increases brand awareness and creates more tangible marketing opportunities.
Other tools available to businesses on social media are not unlike Facebook Events. You can use Facebook events to promote the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day at your taproom. Use it to also promote live music or provide a schedule for your visiting food trucks on select summer evenings. Facebook Events also allows you to link to calendars, maps, and other business-running users, which can multiply the various ways people might find your business and engage.
The Key to Branded Merchandise
The secret to making your branded merchandise work as a marketing tool is to make sure your stoneware steins and mugs, your bumper stickers, and your t-shirts are good looking and high quality. If people buy your pints and the screen print immediately starts to come off in the dishwasher, your brand will be tainted by your merchandise’s shoddy quality.
Grey Fox Pottery has been working with small business owners to craft high-quality, handmade stoneware drinkware for a long time. We use a ceramic scrimshaw process to create a logo badge that will not fade away. Talk to us today to see how we can work with you to create memorable mugs and steins that you can use to market your brewery or coffee shop on social media.