No matter how good is your menu and how tasty are your recipes, if you lack an effective marketing strategy for your food truck business, your business won’t be able to reach its maximum potential. The following food truck marketing ideas, if applied by you, can definitely help you see immense growth in sales. Let us start exploring them one after the other.
1) Start With Improving Your Site
The locus of almost all online marketing methods is a website and therefore, the first step for marketing begins with a website. Have an aesthetically designed website with a fast loading time, mobile device friendly, and with simple navigation. For even better conversions, integrate the option to book orders directly from your website.
2) Get Exposure Magnified With a Press Release
For promoting businesses and services, press releases can do wonders in terms of exposure. Once you send out a news release about your food truck business, it will appear on hundreds of websites soon. This will not only result in an influx of visitors, but it will also result in the acquisition of useful inbound links, which are essential to a high search engine ranking of your website. Sometimes, press releases also appear on the top 10 results of search engines if it targets low-competition search queries. The end results you get from press release distribution will be significantly improved if the choice of your press release distribution platform is good.
3) Show Up in the Top 10 of Google for Local Food Truck Searches
Optimizing your website isn’t deemed successful if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of search results when relevant queries are typed in Google. Once your website starts showing up on the top 10 Google results, it becomes clear that your website will start getting more organic traffic and consequently sales. The only way to get your food truck website within the top page ranking is by working on its search engine optimization (SEO). The availability of free resources online can facilitate you in learning about and implementing SEO. Outsourcing the work to any SEO company is another good way to boost the SEO efficiency of your website without having to mess with the technicalities of SEO.
4) Use GMB (Google My Business) to its Full Potential
When a user does a search on Google for something that has local relevance like “food trucks in [city/town name]”, Google lists three businesses to include in its “local pack” which appears on the first page of Google search results. The competition to appear in this local pack is big as there are many businesses out there. However, the first step to being eligible for inclusion in this pack starts with creating a “Google Business Profile” also called “Google My Business”. By handling all the optimization factors of the “Google Business Profile” listing, your food truck business will be shown more times in the local pack thereby getting you more sales. Due to these factors, it is recommended that you have an online marketing agency handle the process due to the complexity involved in handling the technicalities.
5) Use Quality Ad Networks for Faster Exposure
Though growing your food truck business through organic search engine traffic is ideal, the reality is, it takes much time to get your website to successfully rank in the top 10 results. A quick way to see leads coming in is through paid advertising for your food truck business on Google and Facebook through their respective ad platforms. When comparing the two ad networks, there is a big difference in various parameters for operating ads in both these platforms and so you must first put the effort into understanding the basics of ad management on these platforms. Running ads without having the necessary knowledge can cause a dent in your returns from paid advertising of your business. To simplify the entire ad creation and management, use a reputable digital marketing agency.
6) Start Getting Recognized Locally with Social Media
Your business will lose a great marketing opportunity if it ignores social media marketing at a time when there are billions of active accounts on such platforms. If you want to see positive results, it’s not adequate to just have Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter accounts. In order to have at least a few thousand people follow your social media profiles, some upfront time and effort is required in growing these profiles. This growth can be realized by regularly updating your profiles with high-quality content/photos as well as by building contacts with new profiles and by active participation on various topics. You can engage any social media marketing agency to handle the growth of your social media profiles if you are unable to do this process on your own.
7) Use Food Influencers
More businesses are now trusting influencer marketing and your business must not lack behind. These influencers are popular or semi-popular public figures with a sizable fan base on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. You can easily approach these influencers directly by sending a direct message to them on their respective social media sites. A large number of these influencers are always up and ready to receive business opportunities. To get your food truck business advertised effectively through these influencers, connect with the ones that have a matching demographic of followers (i.e. from your region mostly).
8) Gain More Referrals
It is found that business owners get more revenues from referred customers due to an element of trust in referral marketing strategy. For this cause, consistently aim to promote referral marketing. An effortless way to carry out this strategy is to reward your current customers who refer other people to your food truck. As this marketing methodology involves referral codes and other trackable elements, you can always differentiate where your lead is coming from! So provide referral vouchers, gifts, coupons, and discounts to encourage your clients to promote your food truck business.
9) Have Merchandise Ready for Promotion
Giving out inexpensive goods/products with your food truck business name printed on them, such as balloons, calendars, pencils, pocket diaries, etc., is one of the most underestimated advertising methods. However, businesses that have tried and tested this method know that it is an effective way to make a lasting impression on customers because people don’t ignore free items that have some utility. An indirect benefit is that everyone who comes into direct or indirect contact with your custom-printed products will see and remember your business name which is a key step toward business branding.
10) Start Collecting Emails for Lasting Connections
If you see the marketing strategy of many big businesses, you will find that a major percentage of them tend to collect the email addresses of people who visit their websites. There is a powerful reason why they do so. By maintaining an email list of targeted prospects, these businesses can sell their products and services many more times. Another good reason is that the cost involved in managing an email list is negligible when we compare it to the returns provided by email marketing. This is why your business should also integrate email marketing.
11) List Your Food Truck Business on Qualified Directories
Though most directories no longer get similar rankings that they used to get a few years ago, there are still some powerful directories like Yelp, Homeadvisor, etc where you can leave the details of your business in order to get a few more extra views and customers every month. In order to increase the number of customers that you get from directories, you can also consider opting for their premium packages.
12) Consider Promotion Through Videos
Videos are more successful in conveying an influential picture and convincing people than other content forms. The best platform to leverage the potential of video marketing is Youtube as the authority of the Youtube platform and the massive traffic enjoyed by it makes it easy for videos to get more attention and faster ranking. For more efficient video marketing, you must create videos for underserved low-competition keywords (above 5 words in length mostly) and optimize them properly to increase the likelihood of better ranking. The more videos you post, the more traffic and consequently customers you will attract.
13) Make Use of Time-tested Offline Advertising Methods
With offline marketing, you might not be able to accurately measure the results but still, they can bring more visibility to your business. You can even use offline marketing to direct people to your digital assets like your website and can use both of them together to complement each other. In most cases, offline marketing tends to be costlier than online marketing, but given the fact that you can generate customers from offline marketing methods, it is still worth considering if budget is not an issue. Booking ad slots in newspapers, distributing pamphlets, flyers, advertising through billboards, etc are some of the most widely used offline marketing methods.
14) Attend Food Festivals and Events for Getting More Recognition
Keep a watch on all the upcoming food festivals and events in your region and contact the organizers to book space for your food truck at such festivals and events. On participating in such events, you can distribute flyers containing the address where your food truck can be visited by these people on normal days. You can also give some sort of discount coupons or offers to those people to check out your food truck at your specified location.
15) Grow Your Food Truck Business with Relevant Partnerships
You can introduce your business to caterers, event planners, etc, so that they can associate with you whenever they get new orders from clients. Such a partnership will also be beneficial to those caterers and event planners as they will add new menus and food options for their clients by associating with your food truck business.
16) Come Up with Loyalty or Discount Cards
You must give loyalty or discount cards to all those people who eat at your food truck. By giving them such discount cards, you will give them powerful reasons to come back to your food truck again.
17) Explore Different Schedules at Different Locations
The location where you currently provide your food truck services might not be the best one. You can play with different locations at different timings in order to find the right combination of schedule and location to get more customers to your food truck. You must first start with the most crowded places like bus stands, railway stations, etc.
18) Co-host Events and Contests for Faster Growth of Business
By hosting events and contests, you can get more people to participate and take note of your business. Your cohosting partners must also be from relevant segments like bars, caterers, etc. The bigger the crowd that you get at such events and contests, the better it will be for your business.
19) Include a Charity Angle in Your Business
You can announce that some percent of every order will be donated to some charity or cause in your region. This will not only show the goodwill of your business but will also help your food truck business get noticed by more people. By inserting a charity angle, you will be able to make more sales than you are having currently.
20) Advertise Your Business Through Popular Mobile Apps and Mobile Advertising Platforms
Since the dominant demographic of your food truck will be young people, it is clear that most of them will be active on mobile phones. For this reason, you must consider mobile advertising. Prominent mobile advertising networks give various targeting options for businesses to get more leads and sales and you can get more sales and promotions through them.
21) Make Use of SMS Marketing
Display your business phone number on your food truck and announce “SMS to win” contest which will require people to send SMS to your business to get a chance of winning specific offers. By collecting SMS followed by sending offers to people periodically, you can not only make repeat sales but can also utilize this data to make new announcements and offers related to your food truck business
22) Play with New Recipes for Extra Revenues
Find new recipes from YouTube and start selling them through your food truck business. Since new recipes will be unknown to more people, you can enjoy a monopoly with new recipes and can earn more revenue per order from them. You can also get different recipe videos from other countries translated into English for growing your unique menu.
23) List Your Food Truck in Prominent App Listings
There are many popular apps for listing food trucks where you can list your food truck like “where’s the food truck”, “street food finder”, etc. As many people refer to these apps to locate food trucks, it will be very useful to your business to get your food truck listing done on such applications.
24) Leave your Business Open for Taking Bigger Orders
You must display in your marketing materials that your food truck is open for catering opportunities and for corporate events, etc. If your business doesn’t has a big menu to serve catering opportunities or corporate events, you can tie up your business with other service providers to give a big list of food items that can be served by your business on special occasions.
25) Partner with Delivery Services
You can partner with delivery services in order to get food from your food truck directly delivered to your customers who order your food products online. By adding this element of online delivery, it is 100% certain that this will result in more orders. You can also enlarge your menu once you see more orders coming due to tie up with delivery services.
26) Utilise Reels for More Publicity
Create short videos related to various food items on your menu and ask your customers to share these videos on their social media accounts. You can also offer some small incentives to your customers to do so. This way, your videos will start getting promoted to more people from your region.
27) Get a Positive Image of Your Food Truck Business
Just by typing your food truck business name on Google, people can judge your business by the reviews it has. While positive reviews will help to get more customers, negative reviews will do the opposite. So provide good food and ask your customers to leave reviews of your food truck business online.
We hope that you might have got many insights into food truck marketing ideas with this write-up. We are looking to hearing more from you on this article in the comments section below.
