Week 15: Optimizing Yourself and the Company

Sales forecasting for coffee shops can be a piece of pie for data analytics professionals with viable historical sales data. Because knowing today what you are going to sell tomorrow makes you not just more prepared but turns planning into an easy task. Another benefit would be checking promotions and advertising. Creating promotional product bundles is an easy and fruitful task with data analytics. It helps easily to identify product correlations which will turn into increased turnover. Lastly is pricing. It is that particular value which is going to maximize your sales in terms of profitability. For instance, if my coffee is sold for $2, reducing or raising the price by just 25 cents will have its impact on the actual sales. 

Week 14: Developing Online Advertising

This week I created 3 ads. 2 of which were similar and 1 of them was looking for a part time barista. I love the fact that social media can be used to find jobs. I think a free coffee is a small price to pay to get someone to click on my ad and visit my coffee shop. The audience I was targeting is everyone. Everyone who enjoys coffee. I don’t think the limit is set on who to specifically call my “customers” because they can be any gender, race and age. 

Boosting posts for my shop makes the most sense because for a small coffee shop like mine because there can’t really be much to sell other than a few different items. I want to be able to invite people into the store because coffee is everywhere. It’s a competitive group area in social media marketing when people already choose Starbucks for the name and inconvenience. All three ads I created are directed to my actual website where I hope that people can be directed to and learn more about On the Edge Coffee House. 

Week 13B: Online Advertising-Analysis of the Marketplace

After reviewing the multiple Facebook ads possible for my business, a small coffee shop would benefit from using a boosted post. I would use automated boosts, which is where I would schedule the posts I would like boosted, such as recipes and pictures I think would target my audience. I would like to boost my posts though Facebook and Instagram. 

Some other ads I thought were pretty cool were domain ads. This ad is a linked directly to your website for people to browse. Another one was canvas ads. This ad is linked directly to the page you’re wanting to purchase the item. Ive seen Target and Walmart use these ads on Facebook all the time. I think it’s extremely effective, but with a small coffee shop like mine, I wouldn’t have much to offer other than trying to get my customer to come into the coffee shop to purchase coffee. 

Week 13: Online Advertising

I searched for coffee shops near my area. The ones I found were Skybound Coffee + Dessert Lounge, Succulent Cafe, The Story Caffe, Leap Coffee and Sleeping Tiger Coffees. All five have similar and different social advertisings. I love that they all take beautiful photos that are appealing to the customer. I almost always stop thats in an advertisement or magazine if a photo is beautiful. The advertising seems effective because many people have either “liked” or commented on their Facebook under the photo. 

After looking through Facebook, I know another thing that draws me in is videos. Know a days, companies have used a beautiful, nice to look at face in their adds. And those people are using their products. I recently just saw an advertisement for Wunder2Cosmetics on Instagram. It was a girl (says she’s a makeup artist on her profile), and she was using the product. It was a short 30 second video, but it got the point across. She had expressions on her face saying the product was good, and she even wiped her white shirt on her face and no makeup came off. It’s more effective to video your product, rather than take a photo and hope that people read what you have going on in the description box below. 

Something I think that is annoying is when companies suck you in to their add, but there is small print that has exclusions or some sort of catch that throws off the actual add and makes it seem false. An example would be a free coffee. You can scroll through a magazine and it will say FREE COFFEE in bold letters and then right below or in small print it will read “with the purchase of another item” or something along those lines. That’s pretty small and just an example, but you get the point. 

Personally, I am on social media more than I’d like to admit, so I think that Social Media advertising is effective. However, traditional advertising is just as effective. It depends on the audience you are want to target. Social media is a 2 way conversation because people can interact with you, where traditional is only one way. Social media uses influencers and users of the product, while traditional usually uses celebrities and actors. 

Week 12B: Using Other Social Media

Im very interested in coupon networking. I think small businesses like coffee shops or boutiques could succeed using sites such as Living Social and Groupon. It allows them to get their brand out in the open on sites that millions of people visit everyday. The only problem with the two sites is they take 50% of your profit from whatever you offer. So say I am offering a $20 gift card to my coffee shop for $15. Groupon would take half of that only leaving me with a $7.50 profit. Essentially, you loose out on money but in return it could be profitable. I bought a Groupon a while back on a local coffee shop that had 25% off your order for free that you just had to redeem. That’s also another route someone could go. 

It’s funny that we bring up Yelp because I check it every time I am either 1: looking for somewhere new I’ve never been, or 2: leaving a review for a business that had a huge impact on my experience. Yelp would also be great for a small business like mine because when people are looking up coffee shops in the surrounding area, my shop will pop up with the location, reviews, photos and website. I believe Yelp has a huge impact on customers because if someone had a bad experience, there is no way to edit or block on their side. They are real reviews and customers will take them into consideration. 

Week 12: Using Other Social Media

After reading the lecture, I think using Yelp, Groupon and Google Maps would be important to the growth of my business. Since I am a small coffee shop, using Yelp would be helpful for reviews and feedback from our customers. On Yelp, customers are also allowed to check in to your location for 10% off an item or something similar like that. I could also utilize Groupon. I would sell a $5 Groupon for $10 worth of coffee or pastries from the coffee house. I’ve seen Starbucks do this multiple times and its been successful at selling out within hours. Google Maps is also helpful. Even if people aren’t trying to find us, if someone were to look for directions at an area near our shop, it would pop up on their maps that we are a surrounding coffee shop. 

Week 11B: Email Marketing

I added a post about my newsletter on Instagram.
I also commented on the following people’s blog post:
Taylor Bantle
Olivia Cruz
Jesus Farias