The pioneers of the second wave of coffee, the one that turned coffee from an energy drink to one that is flavourful, the one whose social media strategies have been revolutionary, the one that customises each cup of coffee for their customers – yes, you may have guessed it right! This blog is going to be all about Starbucks!
Since the beginning, Starbucks has devised different marketing strategies—from writing names on the Starbucks cup to personalising every cup of coffee to running online campaigns. People can never forget! In this blog, we will break down all the strategies Starbucks uses and explain how they are ruling the digital world! Read on and join us on this journey.
Before anything, let’s start by talking about the roots of Starbucks.
About Starbucks [History]
The story of Starbucks, from brown aprons to green and selling fresh-roasted coffee beans, tea, and spices to coffee, is an inspiring one. They have grown to welcome millions of customers each week over the following decades after 2000, becoming a part of the fabric of tens of thousands of neighbourhoods worldwide. Starbucks is committed to its mission in everything they do: to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup, and one neighbourhood at a time.
Today, Starbucks has over 30,000 retail stores worldwide in 33 markets. In the 2010s, Starbucks was interested in entering the Indian market. By focusing on the specific upper-class demographic in India, the company hoped to profit from the rise of coffee culture. It declared its debut in India in 2007 but then abruptly withdrew without explanation. Starbucks ultimately made its major entrance into the market in 2011.
When the world’s largest bistro chain decided to enter the Indian market, it formed a 50-50 joint venture with Tata Consumer Products Limited, Asia’s largest coffee grower.
Why Should Digital Marketers Study Starbucks’s Digital Marketing Strategies?
Digital marketers can learn a lot from Starbucks’s digital marketing strategies. They inspire other marketers to create creative campaigns and encourage them to create campaigns that work!
1. Festive Marketing
Starbucks often introduces its campaigns around festivals. Starbucks has also launched a new seasonal whole-bean coffee, the #StarbucksDiwaliBlend, for customers in the United States and select international markets. Hand-picked and obtained from Tata Estates in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the current exquisite blend is a must-try. Starbucks Diwali Blend pays homage to the region’s rich coffee legacy and skill.
It created the #SketchTheBlend promotion, in which consumers could win five free beverages by sharing their creativity on the Diwali Blend cup and sleeve.
2. Consistent Branding
Everything they make follows the same clean, modern design idea. Everything about Starbucks looks, sounds, and feels like Starbucks, from the environment in their stores to their digital content to their advertising.
Even the glasses and tumblers available for purchase have a clean, modern style. What’s the end result? Whether you’re reading a social post, waiting in line, watching a TV commercial, or interacting with Starbucks in any way, everywhere, the experience is always constant.
Starbucks’s Digital Marketing Strategies
1. Starbucks’s Social Media Strategies
Starbucks’ customer promotion approach is driven by social media marketing. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are some of the most commonly used platforms.
The coffee firm invests social media ads in addition to organic content, leveraging its abundance of demographic data to target specific consumer groups and new audiences.
In a nutshell, this is how Starbucks is performing on the different social media platforms:
| Platform | No. of followers | Engagement rate |
| 17.8 Million | 0.87% | |
| 34 Million | – | |
| YouTube | 416K Subscribers | 26.18% |
| X (Twitter) | 10.7 Million | 0.01% |
Starbucks’s Instagram Marketing Strategies
Starbucks India’s Instagram page (@starbucksindia) has over 17.8M followers. You can find a variety of promotional posts, posts featuring their products, and starring their employees in their content bucket.
Lately, they have made multiple posts on their collaboration with Sabyasachi, introducing their new range of cups to support the education of female children.
The Sabyasachi x Starbucks announcement
Both brands announced the big CSR collaboration on Instagram with similar posts and captions. The power of social media has clearly shifted from just getting updates from your friends to something much more significant.
What is Starbucks’s Instagram engagement rate?
Starbucks’s Instagram engagement rate is 0.87% and they receive an average of 2,944 likes and 20 comments per post.
Starbucks’s Facebook Marketing Strategies
Starbucks’s social media marketing strategies include special offers, coupons, saplings, and discounts distributed through Facebook because Facebook is the company’s main social networking site. In 2008, Starbucks promoted the world’s biggest Facebook ad campaign, which included 16 Facebook members who will be served ads for a Starbucks charity sing-along of The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ when users log in.
Starbucks undertook the biggest global Facebook ad campaign to raise awareness of the project, which was a celebration of its partnership with Sabyasachi to support girls’ education. This particular campaign invited people to buy mugs and cups in stores.
More importantly, Starbucks effectively manages a variety of engaging content updates, such as blog posts and films that cover all aspects of coffee, such as how to cultivate coffee beans, as well as pieces of writing about Starbucks and Starbucks employees.
The tone and pitch of the updates are educational and easygoing. Even on their own, product updates are maintained broad enough to remain engaging, such as by offering and introducing new music and book reviews to be displaced and for sale in their cafes.
Because of the well-managed and high-quality status update material, the social networking site has an extremely active fan following. Each update receives hundreds of feedback and comments.
Starbucks’s Twitter Marketing Strategies
Like its Instagram and Facebook pages, Starbucks’s X (Twitter) (@StarbucksIndia) posts the same kind of content. Starbucks interacts with its followers regularly by replying to their questions and retweeting what others say about the company. Twitter users can also receive an e-coupon for a fresh coffee or create their virtual drink to share on the social media network.
Starbucks’s YouTube Marketing Strategies
The videos uploaded on Starbucks’s YouTube website late too are related to their new collaboration with Sabyasachi.
Starbucks’ YouTube films are more about coffee than about its brand or products, which is why YouTube has such a large subscriber base. Starbucks employs marketing and instructional videos to deliver information and build relationships with its followers and viewers.
Starbucks offers a variety of educational movies on topics such as the origins of various coffee blends, how to make the ideal cup of coffee, farmer stories from Costa Rica, and much more. Starbucks allows people to post its films anywhere on its website to increase its visibility.
2. Starbucks’s SEO Strategies
Website Overview
Starbucks has a website with a ‘good’ domain authority of 44. Their website ensures complete user-friendliness and is easy to navigate.
With subtle colours, clear fonts, and even the option to order their coffee for takeaway/delivery is available.
The only place where the font is a little difficult to read is for the drink’s name. Marketers should ensure that all the fonts used in a website are easy to read and do not demand much effort from the user.
Keywords
With over 24,851 organic keywords, Starbucks can get 4,09,828 organic monthly traffic, which is amazing.
Their top organic keywords are:
- Starbucks India
- Starbucks Indian
- Starbucks India menu
- India Starbucks menu
- Starbucks Mumbai
GBP Page
If you are a local business with a physical presence (particularly if you have many locations), you must register with Google Business Profile. It’s free, pretty simple to set up, and when it comes to free promotion.
If you look at what Starbucks does, you’ll notice that they do an excellent job of setting up Google Business Profile sites for each of their locations, but some businesses never get around to setting one up for all of their locations. It takes a lot of effort initially, but as you can see, it pays off in the end.
Reviews on Google
Reviews are quite important when it comes to local searches. As much as we’d like it to be true, simply creating a listing isn’t enough. You must consider it from the standpoint of the search engine. Businesses with more reviews (especially excellent ones) will rank higher (as seen below) since it provides search engines with more data points and demonstrates that people have great things to say about them, implying that it must be important.
After getting listed, one of the most difficult aspects of local optimisation is building reviews. Getting reviews isn’t easy, but if you put your marketing hat on and apply your imagination, you can do just as well as Starbucks.
Starbucks’s Top Digital Marketing Campaigns
1. Cup Contests
Starbucks has always been ahead in using user-generated content and ensuring that its customers receive a personalised experience. Their two cup contests – the red and white cup contests- generated some buzz around their brand and got people posting about it online.
2. The Red Cup Art
Starbucks launched the “Red Cup Design challenge” in 2016. Through this challenge, they invited people to design their red cups and post them on their social media wall. By the end of the challenge, Starbucks chose the best five designs and launched cups with those designs across all their stores.
3. The White Cup Art
The #WhiteCupContest was a 2014 campaign that encouraged its customers to doodle on white cups and post their creations online on Twitter or Instagram. The person with the best design could have their designs printed on a limited edition reusable cup.
4. To be human
In early 2019, Starbucks launched ‘Starbucks Stories,’ a content website that focuses on storytelling about the company’s social effect. This information is also shared on its respective social media channels, such as Twitter and Instagram.
Starbucks’ illustrated series #ToBeHuman is one of the platform’s most effective and popular types of content. Short but captivating video drawings are overlaid with the voice of several Starbucks employees sharing personal and encouraging experiences.
5. The Unicorn Frappuccino
In April 2017, the Unicorn Frappuccino was only available for three weeks, but its impact lasted much longer. It was no surprise that the drink – a sweet, vibrantly coloured mix – erupted on social media. Starbucks produced the limited-edition beverage with the expectation that dedicated customers would share it on social media.
On Instagram alone, the hashtag #unicornfrappucino is linked to over 150,410 photographs. The majority of the most recent photographs are recreations of the Starbucks original, demonstrating how long-lasting limited-edition products can be.
Starbucks has continued experimenting with secret menu items, successfully generating excitement on social media and directing customers into stores.
Conclusion
As you can see, Starbucks has made inroads into the internet arena to promote its products and brands. Do you want to come up with your standout tactics? To strengthen your company’s digital marketing methods, enrol in Digital Scholar’s online digital marketing course. This course is for anyone who wants to understand everything about digital marketing and how to apply it to their own business. Also, try this free digital marketing course to get started.
Are you prepared to improve your company’s image? Enrolling in an online digital marketing course is the best option!
Which Starbucks campaign is your favourite? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
Thanks for Reading!!
