Digital Marketing covers a lot of different areas but at the very heart of most strong digital marketing strategies and ideas is a strong, functional and reliable website. Your website is essentially your online storefront and it is what people see when they want to find out more about your company, services or offers. Your website should be quick to lead and easy to use for anybody that visits it with a responsive design that offers the same experience across mobile, desktop and PC.

For the sake of this article we are going to look at a coffee shop web site design as an example of a business that can really thrive with the right website and the correct digital marketing strategy. We will be looking at the different functionality you can add to your website to enhance your business as well as what you can offer to your customers. In this article we aim to provide you with an overview of some of the functionality you can add to your website with relative ease to help your business grow. In addition to this we will be covering what digital marketing techniques you can use to drive potential customers to your website once it’s up and running.

Functionality On Your Website:

Ultimately as a coffee shop you want your website to serve as a point to provide more information to your customers and convince them to visit your location and check out your store. This is one of the main benefits of having a strong and easy to use website, even outside of business hours you can be driving interest to your website and in some cases even converting that interest to sales. With certain functionality on your site you can add additional features that will expand your business outside of your physical store such as an online shop, click and collect services, home deliveries and much more. Below we take a look at some of the most common website features for a coffee shop style business:

Online Menu

There are many different ways that you can create a menu on your website and it largely depends on what platform you have made your site on. Platforms such as WIX and Squarespace can provide out of the box menu functionality in the form of a widget. The most common CMS for websites is WordPress with the vast majority of websites online being made on WordPress today. WordPress comes with a massive range of customisation and there are certain plugins you can get to provide menu functionality. These include:

WpForms – Although WpForms is a form menu you can easily add on your menu options to let customers browse your menu.

Formidable Forms – Similar to WpForms, Formidable Forms allows you to add your menu to your site without any custom code and even has additional functions which we will explore in later points.

WpPizza – WpPizza is a great menu plugin for WordPress and is easy to use out of the box. This plugin allows you to create, maintain and manage your coffee shop web site design menu online with ease.

Table Reservation

In the current climate of COVID-19 and the additional restrictions that it puts on your venue taking table accurate and efficient table reservations is more important than ever. Using WordPress as an example, you can easily set up and manage your table reservations through the simple use of a Plugin. As an example the ‘Five Star Restaurant Reservations’ wordpress plugin allows you to make easy reservations on your website and accept table bookings online. You can then easily confirm or reject reservations, sent out emails to your customers, restrict booking times and much more.

Click & Collect

For many food and hospitality businesses click and collect can be a good middle ground between people physically sitting in your venue and home deliveries. Click and collect functionality allows you to serve customers from your physical location without taking up capacity inside your café or restaurant whilst also saving you on the cost of hiring a delivery driver to fulfil orders. There are also certain advantages to having customers visit your physical location, it gives you the opportunity to create a positive customer experience in person, upsell products, and secure future custom going forward.

There are several options to install a click and collect functionality on your website and with WordPress it’s as easy as properly setting up a plugin to help. Some ways you can set up click and collect include:

WpForms – Similar to the online reservation functionality you can set up WpForms to record Click and Collect Orders

ByC WooCommerce Order Delivery or Pickup with Date Time Location – This is just one example of many custom made plugins that will allow you to fulfil your click and collect orders with ease.

Online Store

If one thing has become apparent during that last 15 months or so it’s that ecommerce has some serious legs and having the ability to sell products online will really help you to future proof your business against most eventualities. There are several options for a brand such as a coffee shop or similar retail businesses to sell online, they can sell products and long life food for shipping orders or even branded merchandise to create a dedicated following of your physical location.

Many platforms such as WIX and Squarespace have built in ecommerce functionality and make it quick and easy to set up your own store and start selling your products. In addition to this WordPress plugins allow you to create some very robust and flexible online stores with plugins such as Woocommerce. Finally, there are dedicated ecommerce website creation platforms such as Shopify which allow you to create a website with a store first approach.

Home Deliveries

In an age post-covid or at least post-covid restrictions there are going to be many people anxious about going out to a physical location to eat and drink. For businesses such as coffee shops and other hospitality venues this is a unique challenge with a relatively easy solution that will help you continue to serve your customers going forward. Once again there is a lot of functionality you can build into your own website with specialised order forms via WPForms or GravityForms as well as dedicated menu and delivery plugins such as WpPizza.

If you don’t fancy doing the leg work or don’t have the experience to set up your own home delivery functionality on your website you can always take advantage of other third party services such as UberEats, Just Eat and Deliveroo. These services allow you to serve local customers without doing any of the leg work but often come with a fairly hefty fee per order.

Digital Marketing Techniques To Help Your New Website:

Once you have your website up and running with the features you want the next important thing will be to drive customers to your website, this is where digital marketing comes in. There are many different techniques you can use to drive traffic and customers to your site, down below we are going to look at our top 4 for coffee shop website design/hospitality style businesses.

SEO – SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is essentially the practice of making your website as visible as possible on search engines such as Google and Bing. There are many different ways you can do this but the most important is to make sure your website doesn’t have any errors on it, loads quickly, and is easy to use across all devices. In addition to this having high quality content in the form of blog posts on on-page copy will help improve your rankings.

PPC – PPC refers to the practice of Pay Per Click marketing and is often associated with Google’s Adwords service. This allows you to jump to the top of the search results when somebody searches for a specific term then you bid against other companies running ads on the same search query. One somebody searches and clicks on one of your ads you are charged.

Social Media – Social media is brilliant for building your brand and running competitions or even paid advertisements on social media can be a fantastic way to reach new customers and let them know about your business.

Email Marketing – Email making is often seen as the unpopular choice for digital marketers but with a strong mailing list and an engaged customer base it can be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Email marketing will be particularly useful if you implemented any kind of online order, purchase or delivery system as it will allow you to chase up and engage with people that are already ordering from you. This will allow you to send promotions to people that haven’t ordered from you in a while such as discount codes or reward your most loyal customers with something similar. With email marketing you can even run ‘refer a friend’ style competitions to expand the mailing list further and reach a whole host of new customers.

This is just a brief overview of how getting your hospitality business online can help your grow and be more robust. Ultimately there are a lot of options out there when it comes to building a website and we’d always suggest you talk to a specialist for all of your coffee shop web site design needs.