A café can – indeed, should be – a community institution. It is known locally as a hub for meeting your friends, taking a break from work, or just hanging out for a relaxing hour or so.

Although its presence is advertised by signage, menus and a hopefully bustling interior, there are many things you might do by way of marketing your café online – and set the virtual world buzzing with all that you have to offer.

Social media

Social media, of course, has become the world’s biggest talking shop. And you might easily use it to make sure that your café remains on everyone’s lips and featured in users’ lists of favourite places.

As anyone who has used social media probably knows, it does not take many comments on any topic, person or place for the snowball to really start rolling. Before you know it, you might soon find yourself with a following of hundreds if not thousands.

Think what that might do for your business. Creating a page for your café is not that difficult and any social media site is likely to offer you all the guidance and help you need to set it up.

Far and wide

Another of the great things about the internet and social media in general is that it knows no regional or geographical boundaries. That, also, is no accident in an age where practically everyone seems to be travelling with increasing ease to many other parts of the UK.

Your café is in one part of country, of course, but the next customer to walk through your door might have been on the road from places far and wide, making a point of dropping into your establishment in passing because of what they have read online.

Marketing your café online is something that might be going on without your even knowing it, since some review sites, such as Yelp, for example, are open for your customers to post their comments on your café, even though you have not opened an account with the site.

Suppliers

What goes for your customers, also goes for the lengths to which you might cast your net when looking for suppliers.

No longer are you restricted to regional bakers and suppliers, but may take advantage of wholesaling solutions which cover the whole country and can get you frozen products delivered straight to your kitchen for your own preparation, cooking and presentation to your customers.

Award-winning Goddard’s Pies, for instance – including their range of hand-made meat, vegetarian or dessert pies, not to mention their famous, traditional London pie mash and liquor dishes – can be brought to you wherever in the country your café happens to be situated. So take advantage of Goddard’s following on the internet to direct interest to your own webpages too.

Pictures

It may be a cliché – but no less true for all of that – pictures really do speak more than any thousands of words.

This is likely to be especially so with the fare you display when marketing your café. Any number of words might be employed to describe the tastiest dishes you have to offer, but a well-taken photo or two might do the job even more convincingly.

And with the ease with which photos may be taken and uploaded immediately online, making the most of your pictures couldn’t be easier.