The Importance of a Cafe Marketing Budget Your Coffee Shop
Marketing is an essential component of any successful business, including a cafe or coffee shop. By effectively promoting your business, you can attract new customers, increase sales, and drive business growth.
3 Important Benefits of Marketing Your Cafe
Unfortunately, too few cafe business owners set aside a budget for marketing their coffee shop and means that they are missing out on these three important benefits of marketing.
1. Attracting New Customers
Marketing helps you attract new customers by promoting your business and its offerings beyond your existing customers. By effectively marketing your cafe, you can reach potential new customers. People who may not be aware of your business right now and would be happy customers.
2. Making More Sales
Marketing also helps you increase sales by encouraging existing and new customers to purchase more frequently. Whether by promoting special offers, new menu items, or other incentives, you can encourage customers to visit your cafe more often, which means they spend more money.
3. Enhancing Your Reputation
Marketing is also great for building brand awareness and increasing your known reputation. By promoting the best qualities of your business and its values you are adding value to the valuation for your business. Consistently promoting your business and its offerings, builds trust, attracts talented employees and makes you brand identity memorable.
5 Reason Why You Need a Cafe Marketing Budget
1. Reserves the Money
It’s easy for money to flow in and out of a business, so having a budget where you commit to and allocate funds to marketing means that it won’t be spent on other things.
2. Necessitates Planning
When you have a ‘bucket of money’ set aside for a specific purpose, you are forced to put together a plan for how you will use the money in your budget. Having a plan means less risk of wasting the money.
3. Results Matter More
Having a budget for your marketing forces you to allocate time, people and ideas to marketing. Which all need to be tracked to make sure the right thing is done and to find out if what was done worked as expected.
4. Deciding Strategy is Easier
When you have a fixed amount you can use for marketing, you can quickly rule out campaigns and channels you can’t afford and focus on marketing tactics you can afford.
5. Turns Mistakes into Lessons
A budget sets up expectations for campaign spend and ROI. Any past marketing campaigns that ended poorly are more likely to be used as ‘lessons learned’ and not repeated.
How Much Should I Budget for Marketing My Cafe Business
There are several factors to consider when coming up with the amount to budget for marketing.
The first is how old/established your cafe business is, the second is how much money your business makes.
The more established your business is the lower your budget needs to be. Being in the one location for a long time, with the same name and signage is already doing some work for you.
A new cafe would need a much bigger budget because there’s fewer people who will know you exist. You need to get the word out there and keep reminding people that your cafe is great.
If you’ve got small sales by volume or dollar amount, then you’ll want to bigger budget as a proportion of your sales revenue, than if you’ve got great turnover.
The marketing consultant recommended amount to allocate for your marketing budget is somewhere between 5% and 10% of your cafe business revenue.
So if you have an established, profitable cafe a marketing budget of 5% of revenue would work well.
Got a brand new cafe with barely any sales? A marketing budget of 10% of revenue plus doing lots of ‘guerilla marketing‘ or ‘growth hacking‘ promotional activities is more appropriate (check out our ebooks for more low-cost/no-cost marketing tactics.)
If your coffee shop business is somewhere in-between, then it’s up to you to decide how much you can afford to allocate for marketing.
Our experience recommends 8% as a good target – this will give you enough money to do some impactful marketing that brings in customers.