Summary a project
Heartland Café and Mart – Client

Project Goal: To provide digital marketing recommendations and create social media content for the Heartland Café and Mart.

Why this specific partner: The client’s need for social media and digital marketing improvements match the goals of this course.

What issues does the partner face:

Heartland Café & Mart (HCM) is a Walnut-based vegetarian café with sales of all organic produces and healthy foods, mostly Asian styles. Mostly the cafe has its business from the communities around us. For the past three years, we have drawn some business from participated www.yelp.com and Google My business online presentation. We partnered with DoorDash and UberEats on meal deliveries for about one year. The store developed a very primitive web site, www.heartlandcama.com .

The vision for the business is to share more delightful vegetarian dishes and healthy food from better customer engagement approaches. Currently, we don’t have any developed short- or long-term marketing strategy to reach the goal. To be honest, we don’t know where to start marketing and no budget for that either. We don’t have the resources to re-design our website, create content or manage social media platforms. The SEO was not done yet.

Covid-19 pandemics rapidly shifts customer behaviors from in-store shopping to more online ordering. We are hope to have a better digital marketing strategy to weather the change and deploy our online shopping experience to attract customers with a smooth online shopping experience and more delivery options from shipping, in-person delivery to timely in-store pickup.

Project description: Students will:

· Analyze the company’s webpage and give recommendations for improvement

· Heartland Cafe’s website is very well formatted and layed out. One recommendation for improvement I would suggest is to have a button that translates all the asian words to english or any other language. A tip I would give to the website editor would be to fix the description under “Food from the Heart” on the main webpage, below that where Heartland Caffe should write about themselves it seems to be incomplete. It states, “I’m a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me to add your own content and make changes to the font. I’m a great place for you to tell a story and let your users know a little more about you.” Whoever was creating the page must have forgotten to set that part up. https://www.heartlandcama.com/

· Analyze current email marketing platform and give recommendations on how to leverage with other social media platforms?

The current email marketing campaign for Heartland Cafe and Mart is the tab called “Special Event” on their website. People can send an email to plan a special event at their cafe but the website does not display the email address. It only shows a box that requires the persons name, email address, the subject line, and the message. The first step is to place the email address under “Contact” because it will be accessible for people to email the restaurant. To gather more emails, there should be a pop up that gives people the option to enter their information, including their email address. Under the “Home” section, a “Get Email Updates” should be available. When a person clicks on the “Get Email Updates” the same pop up ad mentioned before should be available for people to sign up. Once a person signs up, a welcome email should be sent to the person. To leverage the email marketing campaign with social media platforms, the link to the website and the email address needs to be placed in the bio of the social media platform. Occasionally, a social media post should direct people to the website and suggest them to sign up through email for reminders. Small businesses do not have to send emails to people everyday because it will be ignored or people will unsubscribe. To sustain relationships with customers, an email a week to inform people about discounts, promotions, recommended drinks, or an introduction to new meals.

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· Creating social media content such as: infographics (using Piktochart), edited social media images (using Canva) and promotional videos (using AdobeSpark).

· Analyzing client’s current digital marketing strategies and preparing recommendations

· The client’s digital presence is relatively small and has little to no communication with their audiences through their social media platforms. There is also no consistency on their post for any of the platforms that they are on and locating their accounts on these platforms can pose somewhat of a problem for the consumers. For example, on instagram, there is another account with a similar name which can cause confusion for consumers who are trying to find their social media account. The most important criteria for an efficient digital marketing strategy is consistency and making sure your post is pushed in front of their audience. Some things Heartland Cafe can do is start being more consistent with their post and start creating a following. Another recommendation is making their accounts easier to locate by implementing redirecting links on the social media icon they have at the bottom of their website. This way customers do not have to go through extra work to locate their account. By making their account easier to locate, it increases the likelihood of the customer following their account and seeing their post. When creating a post, make sure the post can engage the customers by asking questions or inviting them to voice their opinion. This way each post is more memorable to the audience and makes them feel like they are part of a community. Once a proper amount of content and following is generated, using paid advertisement on these social media platforms can push their page out to more people.

Final Deliverables: At the end of the term, students will give a slide deck of their final project presentations to Heartland Cafe. Students will also provide the following to the client:

· 10 social media images, edited, with possible text descriptions and hashtags to use

· Digital marketing and website recommendations

· Infographic and promotional video

Expectations for public dissemination of student’s work: Social media content will be used in real campaigns, and recommendation will potentially be used to improve client’s digital marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

Website Design Analysis (Julie A)

Email Marketing Campaign (Kenny)

Social Media Analysis (Alan)

Social Executive Summary (Zihan chen)

Media Content Creation (Charles)

#fresh #brunch #lunch #vegan

#organic #fresh #chicken #sandwhich #heartlandcafe

#matchalattesunday #matcha #latte

#healthyliving #smoothie #peachyparadise

#misosoup #winter #soup