Digital Marketing Strategies for Costa Coffee

This article discusses the digital marketing strategies adopted by Costa Coffee to enhance its brand image and reach out to its target audience. It covers the brand's search engine marketing and optimization, social media marketing, and official website. The article also highlights the reasons for the brand's declining sales and suggests ways to improve its digital marketing strategies. The article compares Costa Coffee's digital marketing strategies with those of its competitor, Starbucks.

[Date]
Digital Marketing
Costa Coffee

Digital Marketing 1
Introduction
Costa coffee is a leading multinational coffee house that was founded in 1971 in London. Since
its inception, Costa Coffee has garnered immense appreciation and loyal customer set owing to
their excellent quality coffee and effective service offered to customers. The brand has grown to
over 3500 stores across 31 countries across the globe.
The target audience of Costa Coffee includes city customers and youth belonging to high income
groups of the world. They target every coffee lover throughout the world by promising a cup of
coffee that leaves a lasting impression. The mission of the brand is to save the world from
mediocre coffee.
Marketing strategy of Costa Coffee
Digital marketing involves the marketing of any product or service offered by a company
through digital platforms. Digital marketing has been pivotal for various organizations as a
promotional tool. Promotional tools are adopted by businesses to reach out to their target
consumers. Digital marketing along with direct marketing constitutes a complete model for
doing business (Armstrong, Kotler, Adam & Denize, 2015). These promotional tools can range
between event marketing, digital marketing, television marketing or email marketing. Digital
marketing involves all forms of marketing which is conducted on digital platforms. These
include marketing done via search engine marketing, optimization, social media or mobile
phones.
Search engine
Costa coffee has invested in its search engine marketing and optimization. SEO and SEM allows
customers to easily search about a given product or brand. Search engine marketing and
optimization enhance visibility of the brand on various search engines including Google, Bing or
Yahoo. SEO is an important part of inbound marketing which is the marketing focused on being
found by customers (Zilincan, 2015). The Costa coffee search yields results that take users to the
costa coffee official website, nearest outlet of Costa coffee and its social media page. This
depicts good search engine strategies by the brand.

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Social Media
Source 1Instagram
Social media marketing refers to any kind of promotions conducted through social media
platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest or even Snapchat. Social media can be
used as a tool to create buzz in the market (Tuten & Solomon, 2017). Costa Coffee is presently
active on these social media platforms and continues to put efforts in curating unique content to
target customers.
Social media marketing report (Costa Coffee)
Facebook 1.6 million followers Average 1 post every 3-4
days
Instagram 263k followers 960 posts
Twitter 237k million followers 195k tweets

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Source 2 Facebook
Official website
The official website of a brand speaks largely about the brand. Costa Coffee’s official website
has been creatively designed to attract viewers. The website specifies details of the all the food
and beverage variants offered by Costa Coffee. The website also highlights the loyalty programs
by the brand (Costa Coffee, 2018).
Reasons for lack of success
Costa Coffee’s brand image is slowly declining and the clearly the brand needs to rejuvenate
itself by offering something new to customers. This is due to increasing competition and
effective strategies adopted by these competing brands. The brand’s sales at high street outlets
has fallen by 1.5% (The Guardian, 2018).
Costa Coffee must focus on enhancing their user generated content on social media by creating
and organizing campaigns. User generated content goes a long way in setting the right

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positioning for the brand. The brand must also enhance their social listening skills by
consistently being aware about what is being spoken of the brand across various social media
channels.
A slowed approach to social media marketing and lack of user generated content is impacting the
brand’s sales and hence Costa Coffee must buckle up in terms of its digital marketing strategies.
Starbucks
One of the leading competitors of Costa Coffee is Starbucks. Starbucks has changed the shape of
the coffee industry by offering customers with delicious coffee, excellent service and a perfect
ambience for leisure as well as work. Starbucks has adopted various digital marketing campaigns
to engage its stakeholders (Taecharungroj, 2017).
Source 3: Twitter
Tweet-a-coffee
Starbucks also involves its users in various campaigns which establishes a two way
communication with the customers. For example, Starbucks recently started a tweet-a-coffee

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campaign wherein a customer could tag a friend on twitter and gift a coffee. This campaign alone
generated $180000 of sales from 27k customers.
Source 4: Sensei Marketing
Social media presence
Social media marketing report (Starbucks)
Facebook 37 million followers Average 1-2 posts daily
Instagram 16.2 million followers 1598 posts
Twitter 11.9 million followers 132k tweets
The Table above clearly indicates that Starbucks is a lot more active on social media platforms as
compared to Costa Coffee. These improved strategies of digital marketing create a better
positioning in the minds of consumers and help in raising awareness about the brand.

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Treat Receipt
Starbucks also started a Treat Receipt campaign wherein the users who have purchased a coffee
during the day can tweet the receipt of the same and avail discounts on their next coffee. This
encouraged users to go for their second cup of coffee leading to increased sales.
Conclusion
Digital marketing strategies adopted by brands play a vital role in ensuring high reach and
effective positioning of the brand in the minds of their consumers. Costa Coffee’s declining sales
are a clear indication of a need to innovate better marketing strategies of the firm. Starbucks on
the other hand must continue its creative campaigns and indulge its customers through unique
digital marketing strategies.

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References
Armstrong, G., Kotler, P., Adam, S. and Denize, S., 2015. Marketing: an introduction. Pearson
Education. India. Page 412.
Costa Coffee. 2018. ‘Join the Costa Coffee Club today’. Retrieved from
https://www.costa.co.uk/coffee-club/about-coffee-club/. Accessed on 11 April, 2018.
Taecharungroj, V., 2017. Starbucks’ marketing communications strategy on Twitter. Journal of
Marketing Communications, 23(6), Abstract.
The Guardian. 2018. ‘Costa coffee loses its froth as sales fall’. Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/18/costa-coffee-loses-its-froth-as-sales-fall.
Accessed on 11 April, 2018.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage. United States.
Zilincan, J., 2015. Search Engine Optimization. In CBU International Conference
Proceedings... (Vol. 3, p. 506).