Photo courtesy of Pinterest: Jenny Tiedt
The Mill is a local coffee house located in the Haymarket in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Mill not only provides a great cup of coffee (or tea) but also a gorgeous view of the historic Haymarket, a quiet atmosphere, and friendly employees. The brand is dedicated to providing a wonderful experience that comes along with your delicious beverage. The most frequent customers are people of all ages living within 10-20 miles of the location. When I have been there previously I have seen many college students studying as well as business meetings and events being hosted. The Mill is a very well known coffee shop to Lincoln residents. This brand has an existing and effective website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. On these social media sites they are pretty active with posts and promotional news. Recently they have been promoting a Valentines day money give away which includes going to their location, taking a photo with their Valentines day display, post it and share it by tagging other friends. However, instead of using this method, they could just tweak it a bit in order to receive much more earned media. The cups The Mill uses are very bland, but people know them. But, they can keep their traditional logo while mixing up decor on the cups. They could do this for their styrofoam to-go cups as well as provide a cheaper option of decorated cups they can purchase (like Starbucks has for $2, and you save 10 cents each time you buy a drink using that cup). Instead of making people come take a photo inside their location at the display, they should give them something unique that they WANT to take a photo of. These themed/decorated cups could be promoted even bigger during holidays. They could still offer their money winning sweepstakes, but change the circumstances in order to get more people talking about their brand! With the new cups, customers would have in incentive to come in and see what all of the buzz is about. Instead of begging them to share your photos and use your hashtag this would make them want to do it on their own, without that extra push. The Mill also doesn’t really have a well known hashtag. That could be improved since they do have so many up and running social sites. By updating their very bland cups, they will gain an immense amount of earned media throughout Lincoln, and even maybe go further in the state of Nebraska.
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