How to best advertise a food truck?

Hi Ralfs,

I wish I lived closer; you've made me hungry. I live on the coast here in Wales and we have the local catch at least twice a week. Sometimes I even catch it myself. And by "sometimes" I mean about three times a year. The local dog fish often like my hooks. The other fish are too smart!

Right. Onto marketing.

You may get different advice, but I wouldn't put your money into flyers and brochures. Your best bet is going to be online, and you mention one of the best locations: Facebook. Before I continue, let me give you a little tactic that works really well in your line of work.

Put together a nice looking page. Invite all of your friends. Ring as many of them up as you can and ask them to invite their friends. Make sure you have sharable media on the page beforehand. In your line of work you can fill it up with plenty of non-promotional local fish-related media and the locals will (wait for it) eat it up. When you have a decent following (over 1,000), you can put together a competition campaign.

Post up a competition update where you deliver a free dish to the winner. The post needs to get x amount of shares (start with 50 until your page has decent engagement and then UP it to 100 and over). Once you get 50 shares? You select a winner and they get the free delivery. This is working very well at the moment. An easy way to get the word out and get your audience immediately engaged and used to sharing your media.

Learn how to work an FB page (more tactics) and be sure to look into Facebook groups. Second to that, look at YouTube, IG, and Twitter. Those are standard recommendations on WF but they work particularly well in your line of business. It's about reaching out to your local audience using each of their preferred modes of communication. Some prefer IG; others Twitter; and so forth.

The real trick here is to avoid pushing out 100% promotional media. You're in the type of business that makes for excellent images and videos. Use those and sprinkle in some local flavour and humour (making the media sharable) and you have a chance at growing organically, avoiding the costs of flyers, brochures, FB ads, and so forth.

Anyway! A few ideas. I'm starving so I'm off to grab a bite!

Cheers,

Tom

From what I've observed here in the USA, social media (especially Facebook) can be quite effective. Don't just blitz ads at people, though. Build a fan page for your food truck, and use it to get people on an email list.

Same with the insert. Use it as a kind of paper squeeze page, and offer either a free item (could be a taster of something - the smoked eel sounds delicious) or a coupon. But they have to opt into your list to get it.

Then, when you want to get some publicity for your truck, you do three things:

1) Post on your fan page.
2) Boost the post for greater reach.
3) Email the info to your list.

Have someone take photos of your customers (or have them post their own), and post them on your fan page. Encourage people to tag themselves and comment on the photos. This will up your engagement, getting you a bit more organic reach.

For the flyer I would make sure to have your social media accounts listed so they can follow you and find out where you will be next. I also like text marketing, so maybe build a list you can text every time you have a new event.

I think the facebook campaign is a 1st step, but dont forget about Google (:, it is most valuable source of targetted traffic, Google gives you a chance to target your audience very precise, a lot better than FB, you can target your campaign not only to specific area, but also for specific queries people do in their search engine. You can easily build such campaich at low cost yourself.

Facebook and Instagram can help out on this one. Social media marketing reaching a lot of audience, as almost everyone has them.

Watch this, if it's available where you are: The Great Food Truck Race, hosted by Tyler Florence | Food Network

I have learned a ton about how to run a food truck from watching this show. Yes, it's in the US and maybe cultural norms won't let you do what they do, but it's an education.

How to look at your spending and food costs.

How to market yourself online.

Who to partner with, like a bar or the parking lot of a grocery store.

How to draw business to your truck using displays.

And a whole lot more.

Oh, and a passive, let-them-come-to-me approach WILL NOT WORK. You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

It astonishes me how people often do not know to do the basic things like plan out locations for tomorrow. And an alternate. And a backup. And a backup location to that if it sucks, too. Teams waste tons of time driving around in a panic looking for a place to go when their first location doesn't pan out. Easily avoidable.

And...know where that main propane valve is on the outside of the truck. :-)

Think of your food truck as a moveable billboard - every time you drive through town potential customers can see your "advert". Voila - free advertising.

Great sustenance and administration with a grin are critical, however in the event that no one knows you're serving, you're in a tight spot. While you don't really require a full promoting arrangement, you would like to consider how you'll pull in clients.

Focus on social media. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest - these are image-based platforms. Capture the best shots of your food truck as well as the food that you are serving. Make a unique selling point. You can also invite microinfluencers who have decent and solid following.

1. Get Rolling with Vehicle Wraps
2. Determine Where Your Customers Are
3. Plan Promotions to Get Foodies Interested
4. Launch Loyalty Programs and Printed Materials
5. Invest in High-Quality Photography
These are the five ways by using these you can advertise for your food truck....

...Yes your truck itself is your best advertising medium.


Steve

You can use an iconic designs and stickers to the truck and keep a good color range that gives beast idea about fish products; use red, blue, ash or green like colors.
First you must use a good location to implement the business marketing strategy. It should be less competitive area because you are a newbie to the business. You can use a selected time for the location to location and mention in the handbill about that.
handbills are the first marketing program that you can use at start. You ca use a good logo design and with a color theme that test gives to the society as that is a fish food product. Then follow a marketing programs in social media and share your post with a good captions and from accounts and profiles that located in you chose. Then you can give the idea of your product to the society of the area.
You can use fake 'good word of mouth' to initiate the product in the hearts of your customers, because you have a challenge at the beginning, but you must keep the 'good word of mouth' correctly and cleverly.
good luck and do your best bro...!!

Are there any factories or large companies in the area? If so, see if you can post a message on the company bulletin board you'll be there every Monday (whatever) for lunch for the next month.

Create an app for your food truck and have a sign for some type of discount for people that download your app. Use the app to notify people of your location. I'd bet there's something like this already you can customize for your business.

Pass out flyers with every order telling folks that you do catering and special events.

JV with a few other food trucks in the area and give out "itineraries" for each.

Can you come up with an idea to "barnumize", which is to do something outrageous to attract attention? Think of the Oscar Meyer "Weinermobile".

I'm not sure how exactly these could work, but this video may give you an idea how to make your truck more memorable...

If you are doing larger events where the event is being promoted by the organisers or by local tourist groups etc then why not approach the event where you are attending and ask to put an offer on their website.

If you make the offer something people can just show you on their phone you will convert traffic from the people looking at the event program during the day and then thinking about which van to choose.

There are many events that do this well.

One that started up in my area initially as a temporary venue has become a permanent fixture. You might like to look at how they structure their food offerings and potentially you could leverage something like their outline to convince an event organiser to list the "food vans" as a highlight of attending. You can see how they do it at eat street . https://eatstreetmarkets.com/eat_and_drink

That is a link to their food section but you can dig around for ideas.

If you prepare good digital copy that you can provide to an organiser you make it easy for them to include your van and food style on their pages.

The other upside is if you provide them your "media pack" when they are trying to get other local media coverage they may share your pre-prepared PR content getting you more reach at no additional cost.

Best regards,

Ozi

Tap into other businesses like wedding tent rentals (example), they already have the clients but usually don't cater food.

Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can help you Social media marketing is the best now, i think.