Pickles Cheltenham - A brand-new cafe with no audience. Twelve months on, there are queues out the door at weekends

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  Pickles Cheltenham - Bananna Bread

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  Pickles Cheltenham - coffee & Acai bowl

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  Pickles Cheltenham - Matcha & Acai bowl

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  Pickles Cheltenham - Lucy the owner

The results

Community built from a standing start	Just under 10,000 followers
Impressions in 12 months	2.9 million
Average engagement rate	8.2% on posts, 6.1% on Reels
Monthly revenue attributed to social	Approximately 25%
First birthday event	Sold out all 50 tickets, within hours
Raised for the MND Association	Over £3,000
Client rating on Google	5 out of 5

For context, food and beverage brands average 2-2.5% engagement on Instagram. Pickles sits three to four times above its sector benchmark.

The situation

Lucy opened Pickles in Cheltenham with a clear product and a real point of difference: a gluten free and dairy free cafe built around matcha and açaí bowls. What she didn't have was a brand, an audience, or a single spare hour as she was building other parts of the business.

That's the position most independent operators open in. You're behind the counter, on the rota, doing the ordering, fixing the coffee machine and cashing up. Marketing becomes the thing you'll get to once things settle down but, things never settle down.

There was no previous agency, no strategy, no system to fix. Pickles was a blank page with loads of potential.

What was the risk

This was never a brand awareness exercise.

Cheltenham has one of the most competitive cafe scenes in the South West, and independent hospitality runs on thin margins and short runways. If Pickles didn't establish itself quickly and start converting attention into footfall, the business would have closed.

That framed every decision we made. Not what looks good on a grid but what puts people through the door each week.

The strategy

We built the brand strategy first and the content second. Without a strategy, you can’t build the content effectively.

Own the thing you're famous for: Pickles didn't need to be a cafe for everyone. It needed to be the place in Cheltenham for matcha and açaí. We narrowed the positioning hard and built a following around two hero products rather than a menu.

Founder-led, always: People don't form attachments to a logo. They form them with a person, so we made Lucy the face and the voice of the brand, and made the marketing look and feel like she was doing it herself. Because in every way that matters to a customer, she was. We built the engine behind it.

Sell the feeling, not the food: The strategy defined a specific atmosphere of relaxed, warm, unapologetically fun, with strong female energy. Gluten free and dairy free stopped being a dietary caveat and became part of the appeal.

What we delivered

• Full brand strategy: positioning, tone of voice, visual direction, audience definition and content pillars

• Full social media management across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook including planning, shooting, editing, scheduling, copy and community management/engagment 

• A founder-led content system that fits around a live service rather than stopping it

• Product launch and event campaigns built specifically to drive weekend trade

• Story-led content around real moments in the business, not a manufactured content calendar

• Bi-weekly and monthly KPI reporting, so Lucy always knew what was working, what wasn't, and what we were changing to optimise performance

Then real life happened…

Twelve months in hospitality is never a smooth ride. Pickles had a harder year than most, and the marketing had to hold up through all of it.

A forced temporary closure - Through circumstances entirely outside Lucy's control, involving the building's sub-landlord, Pickles was temporarily shut. We managed the message, kept the community close and informed, and made sure that when the doors reopened the audience came back with them.

Growth that broke the layout - Footfall increased to the point that the space needed reworking, and the bar area was upgraded so the team could serve more customers visually so more content could be taken organically. We also turned a disruptive refit into a story the audience was invested in and part of the process. 

A first birthday that became something bigger than just turning 1 Lucy's dad was one of the reasons Pickles exists and very sadly passed away during the year. The first birthday became a ticketed celebration in his memory, with all proceeds going to the MND Association.

We put the tickets live on socials one evening and all 50 sold out within hours. The night raised over £3,000 to a very important cause. 

That sell-out matters for two reasons.

The first is attribution. Footfall businesses almost never get a clean line between a post and a transaction. Fifty tickets, sold in a single evening, from one post, to an audience that didn't exist 12 months earlier, is about as clean as it gets.

The second is what happened in the room. The tickets were £15, fifty of them is £750 and the night raised over four times that. By then the audience weren't customers attending an event, they were part of the community showing up for someone they felt they knew.

That’s when you know the strategy and the brand have aligned successfully and the business can thrive. 

Where Pickles is now

From effectively no presence and no strategy, in twelve months Pickles has built a community of just under 10,000 people, generated 2.9 million impressions, and sustained engagement three to four times above its sector benchmark.

More importantly, that audience converts into revenue. Lucy attributes roughly a quarter of monthly revenue to socials and understands the importance as a channel. And since we started sharing product launches and events into the marketing calendar, there have been queues out of the door at weekends.

Every hospitality owner's dream and the clearest possible proof that the audience isn't just watching. It's turning up and spending in a brand they feel part of.

Lucy's feedback

"The past year has been incredible and I can't thank you and your team enough for everything you have done for us."

"Understanding how important a brand strategy is, is so vital to every brand and I never knew this before working with JMS."

"Completely adapted to our business model. Professional yet fun. Organic and creative whilst capturing the brand perfectly."

Lucy - Founder & Director, Pickles Cafe Rated JMS 5 out of 5 on Google

Key lessons for hospitality owners

People buy from people: Whether it's a car or a matcha, the decision is overwhelmingly driven by the brand and the person behind it, and most of the time the customer isn't consciously aware of it. Get on camera, show your personality. It's the highest-return thing most independent operators still aren't doing.

Strategy before content: Posting without a strategy is expensive noise. The reason Pickles' engagement runs three to four times above sector average isn't the editing. It's that every post sits in a clear position, a defined audience and a consistent voice that’s authentic to the brand. 

Market your differentiator, hard: In a saturated cafe scene, "nice coffee and good food" is not a position. Pickles didn't win by being just another good cafe in Cheltenham. It won by being the matcha and açaí place, for people who'd been badly served by gluten free and dairy free menus everywhere else.

Give people a reason to come this weekend: Content builds the audience and the launches and events convert it. The queues at Pickles didn't come from posting more, they came from giving an established audience something specific to turn up for, for a specific reason.

Your best content is already happening: A refit, birthday, charity fundraiser, difficult month. The moments you'd never think to film are the ones that build real attachment. You just need someone whose job it is to notice them.

Running a hospitality business without a marketing team?

JMS is a plug and play marketing team for founder-led businesses and growing SMEs - brand strategy, content, social, email, CRM, events and website development. Your external team with an internal mindset, without the overheads of building one.

Book a free strategy call and we'll give you an honest view of what we'd do with your brand.

info@jmsmarketingconsultancy.com - 07714 227845