Keeping Seasonal Promotions Fresh for City Brew Coffee

Client: City Brew Coffee
Industry: Hospitality & Food Service

Opportunity

City Brew Coffee is a regional favorite across Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, competing with national chains and an increasing number of boutique coffee shops.

Our partnership with City Brew began 14 years ago with a strategic coffee shop marketing focus on enhancing the customer experience. As they expanded across multiple cities and states, maintaining brand consistency and keeping up with coffee and food trends became increasingly complex.

To keep City Brew top of mind, we develop six seasonal promotions each year, each introducing new drinks and food items through eye-catching campaigns. Leading into 2025, City Brew had an additional goal of driving brand awareness and affinity for their flagship location in Billings, Montana.  To entice more app downloads, we utilized seasonal designs from Q4 2024 and created new assets specifically for a paid social campaign. This dovetailed nicely with the spring campaign by promoting app and delivery downloads.

Actions

For each seasonal promotion, our process includes:

• Discovery and Concepting: Understanding goals, target audience, and seasonal trends.
• Photoshoot and Production: Creating high-quality, on-brand imagery.
• Point-of-Purchase (POP) Strategy: Ensuring all print and digital marketing materials are produced and distributed efficiently.
• Design and Packaging: Developing seasonal specialty coffee bean packaging, store signage, and promotional materials.
• Digital and App Support: Designing assets for menu boards, social media, website, DoorDash banners, and app content.

This spring’s campaign, launched in early March, introduced City Chargers – mango, blood orange, strawberry, and yuzu-flavored energy drinks made with real fruit purée – along with new “Grab & Go” food items.

For this launch, we also went beyond our usual package, creating:

• A City Charger logo (multiple design options)
• A T-shirt design
• A press release
• Custom window clings for two Billings locations
• Animated assets for digital menu boards and the app home screen
• Sneak peek and launch emails with animated visuals

For the paid social campaign that ran alongside the seasonal promotions, we:

• Developed a full-funnel content strategy with a mix of high-energy, engaging creative, including two reels, two story ads, two static posts, and a carousel ad, blending animations, lo-fi, and hi-fi elements to capture audience attention.
• Implemented app download conversion tracking to precisely measure campaign effectiveness and optimize for engagement.
• Built a real-time performance dashboard, enabling agile optimizations to maximize impressions, clicks, and conversions.

 

Results: Keeping a Coffee Brand Percolating

Over 14 years, our work with City Brew has included a strategic coffee shop marketing plan and execution across branding, packaging, signage, social media, and customer experience. This partnership has helped them:

• Expand their retail presence while maintaining brand consistency
• Secure contracts with hotels and major retailers like Costco
• Build a strong local following in a competitive market
• Increased app downloads and app usage

The paid social campaign not only reinforced City Brew’s seasonal branding but also played a key role in driving app awareness and downloads in their flagship market. Our work has also earned two ADDY Awards, demonstrating the power of well-executed environmental design – not just as advertising, but as a way to transform how customers feel about a space. Download a copy of the case study here!