I Run A Multimilliondollar Specialtycoffee Business That I Started 4 Years Ago. Here Are Our 3 Main Marketing Channels And How We Measure Success.

Sahra Nguyen is the Founder and CEO of Nguyen Coffee Supply. erik kun

Sahra Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Nguyen Coffee Supply, which sells Vietnamese coffee.
Starting out in organic PR and social marketing, he turned to storytelling.
Nguyen now also does paid advertising, but success is measured by collaboration across all channels.
This article is part of Small Business Marketing, a series that explores the fundamentals of marketing strategy for SBOs to acquire new customers and grow their business.

This annotated essay is based on a conversation with Sahra Nguyen, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of Nguyen Coffee Supply , about the marketing strategies that have helped her company grow. Insider has verified your company's earnings with documents. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When people see how quickly I've grown my direct-to-consumer coffee business over the past five years, they're often surprised to learn that we didn't do any paid advertising for the first year and a half.

Like many small businesses, we just didn't have the money to spend. That's why we've made it our mission to grow our audience organically for as long as possible. Although we ended up reducing our advertising spend, I think this diverse marketing mix has really served us well as it has allowed us to meet different types of customers wherever they are and create more touchpoints to eventually to become a customer.

Here are the three marketing channels we trust the most, the unique opportunity each gave us to connect with consumers, and how all three worked together to help us gain momentum and a business of many billions of dollars to build.

We use social media to tell our story and build relationships.

Nguyen brews in Brooklyn, New York. erik kun

Our marketing efforts have always been centered around education, storytelling, and building a community around our mission: to enhance Vietnamese coffee, especially the Robusta bean. Social media has always been a great way to do this as it gives me and my team direct access to our customer base.

On social media I can share ideas on how to enjoy our beans and ideas on how to use our specialty coffee equipment. I can provide behind-the-scenes insights into the Vietnamese coffee producers we work with directly and explain why Vietnamese coffee is so special. I will dive into my journey as a Vietnamese-American founder and discuss the changes I would like to see in the industry.

A post by Nguyen Coffee Supply ⚡️ (@nguyencoffeesupply)

What started with friends and family following us quickly grew into affinity groups that cared about the same things I did: the Asian American community, the immigrant community, and the specialty coffee community. . Finding our people and speaking our truth on social media has not only increased our social following, but I think it has impacted our word of mouth marketing, which is the third way, according to a survey we conducted , where people found out about us . Year. . Because of our strong commitment to storytelling on social media, followers are happy to share the brand and have the talking points for it.

We used public relations to educate consumers and change the narrative.

Much of our company's success is based on a massive narrative shift around the perception of the Robusta bean and Vietnam as a coffee producer. As such, public relations has been an important channel for social media coverage to further our educational efforts and legitimize our message and product.

First of all, traditional media allow for deeper and more nuanced education. While we often have a few seconds to get to the point on social media, longer articles or TV commercials give us more space to share context or connect our mission to world issues.

It has also helped broaden our audience to include people interested in the real-world issues of our mission. We turn to the mainstream media to discuss the ethics of visibility in the coffee industry and the connection between perceptions of Vietnamese coffee and anti-racism activism. We searched food articles to discuss why Vietnamese coffee deserves a rebrand and what it has to offer true coffee lovers.

From the start, we've measured our PR success by the number of our pitches that converted into published stories, which helped us gauge the effectiveness of our pitch, our hook, our storytelling, and its macro-cultural relevance. Now that we've started the process, let's look at press releases, website traffic, and Google Analytics to estimate impressions and website traffic for a specific article.

We've added paid advertising to boost our efforts

Nguyen visits a coffee plantation in Vietnam. erik kun

At some point I realized that the audience we were able to reach through organic marketing and word of mouth was somewhat flawed, especially on social media. The algorithm limits the number of people that can be reached organically and it is difficult to verify.

So eventually we started adding paid ads on Instagram, Facebook and Google to tailor our message to new audiences. In doing so, we had to change our message to appeal to an audience that might be cooler, as they call it in marketing jargon. Instead of sharing what's important to me as a founder, I needed to think about what's important to consumers: They want coffee that energizes them and tastes good.

Nguyen says its success comes from having all of its marketing channels working together to entice consumers to buy. Eric's Kun/Nguyen coffee brew

I also had to do a lot of experimentation and incremental testing to find out which paid advertising channels work for us. For example, at the beginning I had a founding friend who was successful with YouTube advertising, so I immediately invested a lot of money and in the end it was a total failure for us because the customer acquisition costs were too high for our average order value.

There are so many channels to reach your target market and not all of them work for all brands, so incremental testing is important.

When it comes to measuring the success of our paid advertising, we find it very helpful to think about how these channels interact. Consumers often interact with multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. For example, they might see an ad on Facebook, then read an article about us, and then Google to click and buy. While Google Ads can get an attribution in this case, multiple platforms played a role.

Therefore, rather than just looking at the ROAS of a specific advertising channel, we also look at the combined ROAS (aka Marketing Effectiveness Ratio) across all channels: how much money we spend on advertising across all platforms and how much revenue do we get from e- Commerce? It helps us get a holistic view of how our marketing efforts are working together.

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