Coffee shop marketing strategy: How to market and sell coffee online

#1 Know your customers: The foundation of a coffee shop marketing strategy

To understand your customer might sound obvious. But when you’re busy doing other things, it’s easy to ignore the changing preferences of your core customers.

One way to better understand the groups of people you’re selling to may be creating personas. Give them a name, a face, jobs, interests, and priorities. Why not even life goals? Then you can continuously weigh your marketing tactics against those personas.

Personas help you become and stay relevant.

To dos:

• Speak to your customers. Ask them questions. Ask them how their dream coffee shop looks, where they search for information on cafes, and of course, how they found you. It’s a win-win.

By speaking to your customers, you will:

1. Show that you care about them
2. Get invaluable information about what they’re looking for
3. Create relationships that’ll lead to loyal customers over time
4. Encourage them to recommend your coffee shop to their friends and family

And, if you do it well, you’ll create ambassadors who’ll spread the word about your amazing coffee shop experience!

• Create physical personas and put them up on a wall. Based on the conversations you had, create 3-4 personas, representative customers who differ from each other in terms of age, interests, and preferences when it comes to coffee and light food. Select portrait photos for each persona and put them up on a wall. Glimpse at your new personas every other day (especially when you feel stressed out or overwhelmed). However, it’s important to remember that personas shouldn’t include actual customer data and shouldn’t reveal any customer information.
• Choose the right platforms. From your previous customer conversations, connect each persona to their most relevant social channel. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or even an offline channel. Don’t forget that some groups still highly value the local newspaper or a public pinboard.

Don’t forget to…

• Ask open questions. Don’t start off by asking how much time they spend on Facebook. Instead, throw out a question about how, and if, they use any types of social media. Then move on to ask about their favourite platforms. Open questions will lead to honest answers.

• Understand what you actually sell. Be smart when you’re interviewing your customers. There are dozens of coffee vendors out there, and maybe it’s not the need for caffeine you’re satisfying. Are your customers looking for a good deal? To be seen as trendy?

• Print out customer reviews. Why not pair your personas (that you’ve put up on a wall) with good and bad reviews you’ve received on Facebook?

#2 Coffee shop marketing strategies that help you stand out

With seven billion people populating the world, it’s not exactly easy to come up with new ideas. Something smart and different. Something unique. How do you stand out?

Let’s rephrase the questions and ask yourself, why should they go to you instead of someone else? Are you competing on price, like offering the cheapest cappuccino in the neighbourhood? Do you spend more time than anyone else on teaching your staff, so you can guarantee a new level of customer service?

To dos:

• List all the advantages of your own shop. What are you most proud of? Your Italian espresso machine or your talented barista who makes everyone feel special? Maybe both?

• List all good and bad things about your top 3 competitors. Visit them, spend time, absorb everything. What’s the atmosphere? Lightning? Cleanliness?

• Compare yourself to your competitors: What are you offering that’s significantly, or at least in some way, different than the options nearby? Review your compiled list of competitor features internally. Your conclusion will make up a good description of your business and how it’s different. This can guide your branding and unique selling points – however, you shouldn’t publicly call out your competitors!

Don’t forget to …

• Think outside the box. Maybe you’re not that different when it comes to the coffee you’re selling, but you can communicate in a totally different way. Evaluate social media posts and ads from competitors and think of better ways to convey the same message.

• Consider doing the opposite. Doing something like everyone else is normally not a successful strategy. So-called thought leaders act differently, but fully understand their customers. Be unique, yet humble.

To attract 30% more customers to my coffee shop by the end of the year through four contests on Instagram and monthly discounted offer codes on Facebook.

Start selling coffee online with PayPal Point of Sale

If you really want to stand out on a crowded high street, consider this: your marketing efforts shouldn’t just generate footfall, they can drive online sales too. That’s where the PayPal Point of Sale (POS) truly shines, by smoothly bridging your physical and digital worlds.

With PayPal POS, setting up an online coffee shop based on your existing brand can be as simple as adding menu items to your POS library with clear descriptions and pricing.

Share your catalogue link on Instagram, Facebook, your website (or even via QR codes printed on laminated cards and mounted on in-store tables), and customers can buy coffee, beans, subscriptions, gift cards, or branded merch from any device, anytime.

That physical and digital divide is mitigated by the fact that every online purchase is tracked in real-time alongside in-store sales. Imagine you run a limited‑edition promotion for a new oak milk latte and send an email or post a story on Instagram to promote it. When someone clicks ‘Buy Now’, PayPal processes the payment, updates your stock, and records the customer details in perfect sync from within your dashboard. You'll also be able to see which items are flying off the shelves, which promos performed best, and how many new vs returning customers you've added to the fold.

There’s real magic in integration, and PayPal POS not only simplifies operations but potentially supercharges your marketing too:

• Quick promotions: Post a flash ‘24‑hour cold brew sale’ and track instant sales through your POS.

• Loyalty growth: Capture emails and repeat buyers through discreet follow-ups or offer subscribe-and-save coffee plans.

• Data‑driven targeting: See which SKU your Instagram audience loves? Run paid ads featuring it and monitor the ROI in your dashboard.

• Flexible fulfilment: Ship orders from your back‑bar deftly while your POS manages inventory and order info in one place.

• Built-in analytics: These insights help you see the story behind your campaigns: which channels drive most sales, which products build loyalty and how seasonal trends affect demand.

Ultimately, PayPal POS is a tool that makes running your coffee shop both on and offline by bringing everything under one roof. It helps small cafés move beyond bricks‑and‑mortar limitations, unlocking natural, scalable growth.

Use your digital marketing to drive ecommerce sales and let the same platform track and fulfil them. The perfect solution for cafés and coffee shops ready to brew up new and return business on all fronts.

#3 Setting SMART goals for coffee shop marketing success

May we guess what your goal is? To stay profitable and grow your business! But how? Do you want to attract new customers? Sell more to existing customers? Let’s keep things straight and use an example goal:

To test if you’ve come up with an effective goal, test it against the S-M-A-R-T philosophy.

What do you want to accomplish? 30% more customers!

Why would it make sense to my coffee shop? Because 30% more customers could mean more money!

How will you make this happen? Well, my creative friend John and I will come up with some new and engaging contest ideas for Instagram.

Is it measurable? Yes, you don’t want to attract ‘more’ customers, you want to attract 30% more customers!

Is it attainable? Is it realistic to achieve a 30% increase? Because you doubled your revenues last year, yes!

Is it relevant? Based on your customer interviews, you know that your target audience spends a lot of time on Instagram and Facebook. Check!

Is it time-bound? I said by the end of the year, boss!

But only through your KPIs will you know if you’re going in the right direction. Simply: if your postings on Facebook in the end lead to more pounds in your pocket.

For example, by customising discounts for specific items in your product library (in your Point-of-Sale) — such as for beverages you run on promotions — you can easily measure the success and see the percentage of returning customers in your sales data.

Are you giving a 20% discount to every customer who likes you on Facebook? Create a customised Facebook campaign item in your product library. Follow up after some weeks to measure the success!

Examples of social media KPIs for your coffee shop:

• Followers and fans
• Shares on Facebook
• Comments
• Post reach
• Video views

Some additional useful KPIs for your website and email marketing:

• Backlinks
• Website traffic
• Subscribers to newsletters

To dos:

• Write down all your goals. Make sure you can connect all goals (estimated likes, followers, etc.) to somehow increased revenues, cost savings, or increased brand awareness. Remember that you’re not running a not-for-profit organisation — at the end of the day money matters. We’ll be including on how to connect your marketing activities to business goals in future guides.

• Create a process for each goal. For example, let’s assume you’d like to increase your followers on Facebook from 500 to 1000. Publish 2-3 posts per week → respond to all comments on your posts → spend £150 on Facebook ads per week → replace the cover photo every Sunday with new product photos→ review and follow up on a regular basis to track follower increase.

• Set a budget and distribute it among your channels. Nope, it doesn’t have to be rocket science. Figure out how much you can spend on marketing based on your anticipated annual revenue. That way, it’s easy to figure out how to distribute it over the year and identify how much you’re spending on different marketing channels.

• Pick out your most profitable persona. Prioritise among your target audiences wisely. Which one will spend the most in your coffee shop? It’s probably a good idea to focus on marketing yourself more in channels where the ‘big spenders’ hang out.