8 Winning Marketing Strategies for Boba Milk Tea Businesses

“I’ve tried various marketing strategies but nothing seems to work”

“I’m running out of ideas on how to bring in new customers”

“I’m not making enough money to keep my boba shop afloat”

These are all issues that are common that affect thousands of boba shops around the world.

But you’re not alone. This guide will hopefully help you come up with ideas and strategies to help your business survive & thrive.

But be forewarned, these are long-term strategies that take quite a bit of effort and time.

Set a small goal to try and get 1-2 new customers a day.

Once you start getting 10-15 new customers per day. Over the course of a year, this could mean an additional $36,500-$54,750 in sales.

If you’re willing to invest your time (and money) into winning marketing strategies that will work, continue on! (also there are 2 free marketing ideas at the end so stick around until the end!)

Most local boba shops like yours are working with a limited marketing budget.

How Do I Market My Boba Shop?

First off, why is digital marketing so important for your boba shop in the first place?

Imagine you have a menu that lists all the flavors you offer and their prices. But, this menu is only available inside your shop and not visible to anyone passing by.

You’ll only be able to attract customers who already know about your shop, and that can limit your growth.

Now imagine you have a digital menu board, accessible to everyone with a smartphone or computer. This digital menu board not only lists your flavors and prices, but also showcases your brand and special promotions.

With digital marketing, you can put your menu in front of a larger audience, reach potential customers who haven’t heard of your shop yet, and encourage them to give your boba drinks a try.

Just like having a menu board in front of your shop attracts customers, digital marketing helps you attract more customers to your boba shop.

1. Establish Your Brand

Before getting started on this section, it needs to come with a bit of expectation-setting.

Branding is pricey! If you’re taking logos + brand guides into consideration, you can spend $3,000 – $5,000+ on that investment alone.

Before we talk about some ways to do this in a more inexpensive way, let’s talk about why it’s important.

Your boba business customers and potential customers need to know who you are and what you stand for. The ideal way to achieve this is through clear brand identity.

Branding is the first impression you give customers, and it helps you stand out in the saturated boba milk tea industry in Los Angeles.

Think about the recognition of big brands such as Starbucks or McDonald’s and how the recognition is tied to their branding, colors, and logos.

Branding your boba business offers you several benefits, including:

Credibility when you have a clear and established brand that makes you look like an expert
A chance to come across as a professional and therefore can charge like one
Elevating your business so you build on loyalty and recognition
Delivering on your brand promises so customers remember you and keep coming back
A chance to keep things consistent and improve on decision-making time
Helping you attract your ideal customer persona
Making it easier to introduce revolutionary boba products and services

Another thing you could do is identify new trends.

People are becoming more aware of being eco-friendly and the topic of sustainability.

Consider becoming an eco-friendly boba shop. Or at the very least, less-wasteful.

Here’s an example:

You could offer discounts to customers who bring their reusable cups.

Let’s say on average, a discount of $0.25 on a $4 drink could result in a savings of $0.75 per drink if you customer uses a reusable cup instead of a disposable one.

For a busy boba shop that sells 200 drinks per day, the savings would be approximately $150 per day, or $54,000 per year.

*This calculation is based on the assumption that all 200 drinks would be sold in disposable cups if the discount was not offered, but the actual savings would likely be lower.

2. Know Your Customer

No marketing strategy is a one-size-fits-all for all businesses. Each business caters to a different market niche. So you need a marketing plan that is specific to the goals and needs of your target customers.

Before you pick a strategy and tactic, boba business owners need to understand the ideal customer by finding out:

The demographic of your customer base
Age of your customers
Where your customers live
The online services they use
How they are looking for your products

Knowing these things about your customers will help create an effective and targeted overall digital marketing strategy that focuses on channels that bring in the best results.

Quick Tip:

One thing you can do is take a look at your reviews as well as your competitors.

While reviews should often be taken with a grain of salt, you can start to get an idea of customer preferences and why customers will decide to come pay you another visit.

Above, you can see that this customer prefers non milk-tea drinks.

You can gather quite a bit of this information to refine what your specialties are and get a better idea of what customers in the area might be looking for.

Bonus Tip:

You can use a tool like Sparktoro (you can get a few free searches each month). Let’s say I wanted to know what people who frequently talk about ‘milk tea’ in Los Angeles. I can use it to find out a little bit more about my target audience for my milk tea business.

Although some of these might not be extremely helpful, you can see that people tag #organic, #almondmilk and #glutenfree so from there, you can start to understand the audience a little bit better. They could be more health conscious and would like milk alternative options.

3. Create a Website

Before we get too far into this one, it’s important to note that for the smallest businesses, a website is a big cost once you factor in hosting, buying templates and especially if you’re paying someone to build it.

If you’re planning on building one yourself, even if you know what you’re doing, the time investment is huge.

But – If you’re willing to put in the time, effort and money, continue reading, if not, skip to number 5.

Yelp is the go-to review site with over 224 million cumulative reviews from customers looking to try out a new service, shop, or restaurant. 80% of people visiting Yelp intend to make a purchase, which can help get your boba milk tea shop to get found and make money.

Unfortunately, the review site’s algorithm may filter out real positive reviews left by your customers.

This usually occurs when the reviewer has written only one review, does not provide profile information, or the reviewer is far from the actual location of your shop.

Creating your website will help you leverage most of the positives of Yelp without the negatives. Plus, your website is the first thing customers see when they search for your business online.

A website creates the foundation of your marketing plan.

Use the website to provide customers with more information, get free traffic from search engines, and drive people to your social media pages. Your website also helps establish your authority by providing helpful content.

Lastly, your website is the best place to tell your brand story.

As Simon Sinek famously stated, ‘people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it’. This is your chance to tell your ‘why’.

If your boba business does not have a website yet, it is easy enough to:

Purchase a domain name related to your business name, see if it is available, and pay an annual or a monthly fee associated with domain ownership.
Sign up for web hosting, which can usually be done through the company that offers your domain name.
Get a content management software (CMS) to create and update your website using free or paid templates.

BUT

this is a big BUT –

You can’t just build a website and expect it to generate traffic.

You can’t just build a website and expect it to generate traffic.

You’ll need to optimize it to be as helpful to your customers as possible. The next section will help you.

4. Leverage the Power of SEO

Beyond creating an impressive website, search engine optimization (SEO) is an impactful strategy for boba businesses in LA. SEO involves optimizing your site and its content using keywords for search engines and customers to find your business easily.

The higher you rank on Google, the more likely you can drive traffic and customers to your site and business. So you must do everything possible to make sure that is where your business is in a Google search.

Instead of getting too deep into SEO and scaring you off, there are a few things that you can do, especially if you’ve built a website for your business.

If you look above, you can see that I’ve searched for ‘cheese foam boba’.

The highlighted section of the photo shows that Tan-Cha’s website mentions ‘cheese foam’. We’ll talk about this more in the next section.

This blog post itself is an example of SEO from a small business.

You likely searched some form of ‘Boba Marketing’ in order to land on this post.

The information in my Google Search Console lets me know that. You can learn just about everything you need to know about your content and even your audience with it. We can talk about how you can use it to your advantage.

Now that you have your website and have done a minimal amount of SEO on it, let’s take a look at an example of how it could benefit your business:

Let’s say a boba shop has an average revenue of $3,000 per month and sells an average of 100 drinks per day, they would make approximately $100 per day or $3,000 per month.

If SEO were to bring them just 10 more customers per month, this would increase their daily revenue by 10 drinks, or an additional $10 per day or $300 per month.

This additional revenue would be an approximately 10% increase in their monthly earnings, which could potentially be significant over the long run.

If you don’t have a Google Business profile set up for your business, you can set one up at business.google.com. From there, you can add in business photos, posts and more.

You can even get a direct link to give to your customers to leave you a Google Review.

These reviews often have keywords in them. Similar to how Google shows when your website mentions a menu item, Google will also return search results that show people mentioning them within reviews.

Once you have an account, you can also see which phrases people are searching to discover your listing profile.

Key Takeaway

At the very least, get a Google Business profile for your business and start collecting reviews!

Using social media for a bubble tea business is practically non-negotiable. Social media is a must-have for any small business that wants to reach a larger audience and engage with customers regularly.

Over 70% of adults use social media.

Users spend at least 144 minutes a day on social media apps.

These statistics may seem intimidating at first glance, especially if you are considering spreading yourself out on every platform. Instead, focus on your target customer.

Use your customer data to find out where they spend the most time, the type of content they enjoy, and how to make the biggest impact.

Depending on your specific customer requirements, some platforms to consider include:

Facebook—Ideal for posting status updates, entertaining pictures, and customer success stories
Pinterest—Useful for spreading visual content like blogs on your bubble tea products
Instagram—An excellent platform for sharing high-resolution imagery that showcases your boba teas
Twitter—Suitable for sharing news and answering customer questions in real time

YouTube—A suitable platform to dominate with branded and user-generated video content

This part is definitely time consuming if you’re doing it yourself. Social media management is a full-time job.

Then there’s TikTok.

1 in 10 small restaurants actually go viral on the app.

Which means there’s a ton of opportunities for you there.

7. Connect with Nano-Influencers

A nano-influencer is a content creator that has less than 10,000 followers.

In this particular case, you can take advantage of the ‘less-is-more’ principle.

Getting engagement on posts is difficult but as a smaller brand or as a smaller creator, you have an advantage. It’s estimated that if your account has less than 10,000 followers, you can reach roughly 36% of your Instagram audience.

A platform like Instagram tries to show its users content they think they’ll like. It’s very competitive considering you’re going to have to beat out other brands and pictures of babies and puppies.

But there are a select few who are able to really connect with their followers and nano-influencers may be the best at this.

You can reach out and connect with these influencers to speak about possible collaborations.

Quick Tip:

One thing you can do is head to one of your competitor’s pages.

You can hit the ‘Tagged’ section to see which posts they are tagged in.

From there, you can scour the posts to see which ones have conversations going with a lot of engagement.

8. Support the Cause You’re Passionate About

As mentioned in point #3, it’s important to remember ‘why’.

Supporting a cause that the community can get behind is a great way to support something you’re passionate about and to use your platform to help influence others.

An example of this is by a boba shop in Los Angeles called ‘Hey Hey’.

They have a campaign to help frontline workers during the pandemic.

BONUS FREE IDEA:

Let’s say you’re targeting folks who are ‘tea experts’. One way you can test them is provide a blind taste test and have two different teas, a black tea and a green tea (or an oolong tea or even a green tea and a green tea)

If they can correctly guess which ones are which, you can give them a free topping.

Since we all crave variability, make sure that it’s different each time your guests arrive to give them a unique experience each time.

I don’t believe I’ve seen this anywhere but it sounds like it would be fun. If you try this at your store, please let me know the results!

BONUS FREE IDEA 2:

This is an excerpt from the book ‘Hooked’ by Nir Eyal:

Two groups of customers were given punch cards awarding a free car wash once the cards were fully punched. One group was given a blank punch card with eight squares; the other was given a punch card with ten squares that came with two free punches.

Both groups still had to purchase eight car washes to receive a free wash; however, the second group of customers—those that were given two free punches—had a staggering 82 percent higher completion rate.

It’s a simple idea, but we feel more inclined to complete things when we feel as if the goal is within reach.

If you combine this punch card idea with the idea above, you can give people additional punches on the card if they can guess correctly.

Now how does that translate into extra revenue? Let’s use an example:

If you offer a free drink after every 10 purchases, it can incentivize customers to visit more often and spend more money each time.

Hypothetically, this could result in an extra $5 in sales per customer per visit, which could mean an additional $18,250 over the course of a year.

I haven’t personally seen any store do anything like this either but punch/stamp cards are fun. If you end up giving this a shot, please let me know!

Make it Happen

Hopefully these 8 tips (and 2 bonus ideas) gave you a good starting point.

Some of these are definitely easier said than done especially when you’re trying to save money by doing it yourself.

One solution is to hire people to help. I’ve personally had success hiring freelancers off of Fiverr to help with design items (I’m definitely not skilled enough to touch design elements). You can click to see some listings that might help you get started to build your boba business’s brand.

I wish you luck and I’d love to hear your comments below or you can reach me at peter [at] immenseo.com!

Bonus 2 – For anyone in the Los Angeles area who is looking for a product photographer to make your drinks look as good as they taste, please visit https://capturecraftstudio.com/.

Lastly, to all of my visitors from the Philippines visiting this page as well as anyone looking for a skilled designer, please visit my colleague Gayleanne who translates your brand vision into designs that your audience will connect with.

8 Marketing Strategies for Boba Milk Tea Businesses