Food Truck Marketing Ideas: How to Create a Food Truck Marketing Plan

The flat top is hot. The fryer is ready. You’ve spent hours testing your food truck menu ideas, and you can now cook each dish quickly in the small space you have. Your friends and family love the concept, and you know your food tastes great. You’ve acquired all the permits and hookups you need, and the food truck has a full tank of gas.

And yet, where are the customers? The food truck business is incredibly competitive. No matter how great your menu is, attracting customers is hard without a solid business plan and restaurant marketing strategy. You must create hype and let people know how they can find your truck.

In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to create a solid food truck marketing strategy. You’ll find tips on how to promote your food truck and ideas on how to generate new business. By the end, you’ll be fully equipped to ensure there’s always a line down the street every day of the week.

What’s in This Guide?

• What is a Good Food Truck Marketing Strategy?

• How Much Should I Spend on Food Truck Marketing?

• Marketing Ideas for Food Trucks

• Tracking the Effectiveness of Your Food Truck Marketing Ideas

• Marketing is Boosted with Toast

• FAQs

What is a Good Food Truck Marketing Strategy?

Effective marketing strategies are comprehensive and flexible. They serve as the starting point for all of your food truck’s branding and promotional decisions moving forward, encompassing both your short-term campaigns and long-term goals. 

Create a food truck marketing plan by gathering all your ideas, old and new. A thought you had a month ago when you planned out your marketing ideas may be irrelevant now, but that’s ok! Your strategy is supposed to adapt and change, corresponding with current events and industry-wide marketing trends. This is key for it to stay strong and sustainable. 

How Much Should I Spend on Food Truck Marketing?

Before you proceed with any initiatives, determine how much of your overall operational costs you can dedicate to marketing. Food truck operators and owners need solid planning skills to make sure they don’t go overbudget.

While your exact marketing budget will change depending on the location of your business and the scope of your strategy, know that the average business spends around 3% to 10% of sales on their marketing budget. I’d say your food truck spending and costs for your marketing ventures should be within this remit.

Fortunately, there are many free or low-cost marketing tactics you can use to craft a strategy within your budget. For example, you can hire a tech-savvy friend or neighbor to run your social media platforms, compensating them with free delicious food. Or, if you’re up to it, you can run your social media accounts yourself. The right viral TikTok can put your small business on the map!

Marketing Ideas for Food Trucks

As a food truck owner, you need to know how to market your food truck stand. This can include an email marketing program, social media marketing, word-of-mouth strategy, offering special food truck promotions, and keeping your website up to date. 

You not only need to know how to attract potential customers, but you also need to get them to return week after week. Food trucks simply can’t succeed on a strong grand opening campaign alone. To build a roster of loyal customers, you’ll need to dedicate time to ongoing marketing efforts.

Below, I’ve listed eight different food truck marketing ideas and strategies that you can use to keep your guests coming back for more and blow other food trucks out of the water.

1. Develop Your Truck’s Brand Identity

Your brand identity showcases your food truck’s ideas, values, and missions in everything you do.

Ask yourself - what makes my food truck unique? What sets it apart from the other local businesses in my community? And which kind of markets and customers am I trying to target? Answer these questions to determine your food truck customer demographics and which marketing campaigns will work best.

Your company’s voice should be clear and consistent throughout your communication channels, from your food truck’s website to your mission statement.

To develop your food truck’s brand identity, consider the following:

• Determine your target audience and ideal customer.

• Hone your food truck’s mission statement, priorities, and purpose.

• Establish a brand voice for your food truck that’s distinct and reflective of your mission statement.

• Continue to evolve your brand identity by analyzing the results of your marketing campaigns.

2. Jazz Up Your Website

Food truck enthusiasts know that any mobile food stand doesn’t exist unless it has a website and/or social media presence. An online presence is one of the best food truck marketing strategies for getting potential customers to discover your business anytime and anywhere.

As your business becomes more established, your food truck’s website should grow along with it. This means updating or redesigning your website as necessary. No matter what, always make sure there is a simple way to communicate with your food truck customers. 

Your website should include visible links to your online ordering and social media platforms. If you want to take your site to the next level, you can even install a live chatbot so that customers can have their questions answered immediately.

3. Increase Your Social Media Presence

Social media marketing is critical for food trucks. Since it’s a mobile business, customers often look to a food truck’s social media pages for the most recent updates. This means you must keep your location and hours updated constantly, whether on Instagram or Facebook. No one wants a disappointed customer who mistakenly went to the wrong location. 

Maintaining your social media presence also helps your food business stay competitive. Nowadays, if you’re not regularly posting new content, your business will not reach more potential customers. Even if you’re not on the road that day, never miss an opportunity to introduce new people to your food truck concept.

Here are some examples of amazing food truck businesses using social media effectively: 

• Bing Mi in Portland, Oregon

• Cookie Monstah in Boston, Massachusetts

• La Maceta 52 in San Antonio, Texas

What these establishments do well is that they post and engage with their audiences. To do this yourself, why not use Instagram stories to ask your followers where they want to see your food truck parked next? Be sure to take lots of photos of the new recipes and secret menu items you are testing, too.

Crafting a memorable online identity ensures that customers know exactly what to expect when they visit. We understand that the daily demands of posting can feel overwhelming, but social media is such an effective food truck marketing strategy that it can’t be ignored!

4. Use Email Marketing and Create a Loyalty Program

With Instagram and Facebook, why do I need email? While social media apps are used to find and attract new customers, email marketing materials engage your loyal, returning customers. When customers sign up for your email list, they trust that they will be the first to know about news and updates, such as off-menu items, new merchandise, and exclusive discounts. 

Your loyal customers will also help you build hype for your food truck. This makes email one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal because, in the long term, your most passionate customer base will do a lot of the marketing for you. 

5. Utilize Consumer-Generated Content

Including consumer-generated content in your market plan keeps your physical food truck connected to your local community. Reposting pictures and videos that guests have taken gives a true representation of the experience at your truck. 

This content can be used for more than just social media. User-generated content is great for email and traditional marketing methods too. Before you post, it is always best to ask for permission from the customer to ensure that they’re comfortable with you reusing their content.

6. Partner with Bars and Breweries

Bars that don’t serve food are always looking for ways to attract guests and keep existing customers drinking. Many of them partner with multiple food trucks and rotate them throughout the week. 

Breweries are excellent to join forces with as well. Many of them are located in industrial complexes further away from a city’s metro area, giving plenty of room to park your truck and get into some friendly competition with other food truck owners.

Here are some examples of food truck businesses that partner with bars and/or breweries: 

• Hot and Buttered, partnering with Tikila’s  in Houston, Texas

• Little Pizza Box, partnering with Ponysaurus Brewing in Durham, North Carolina

Don’t be shy to reach out to your favorite drinking hole or brewery to see if they’d like to add a new food truck design idea to their roster. Once you get on a regular schedule, the local brewery or bar-goers might just become new loyal customers.

7. Embrace Traditional Marketing Strategies

We may live in a digital world, but that doesn’t mean traditional marketing strategies are no longer effective. Geo-targeted online ads, ads in the local paper, hanging flyers in your neighborhood coffee shops, and mailing advertisements through your customers’ front doors are all still reliable marketing initiatives.

To guarantee your traditional campaigns are resonating with your modern target audience, your marketing materials must stand out. Research before you send anything out, taking into account trends in the food truck industry. Above all, make sure to infuse every single thing you send out with your signature brand. That is what will make your marketing memorable.

8. Create a User-Friendly Online Ordering Experience

The online ordering and food delivery industry is due to have an estimated revenue of $1.20 trillion by the end of 2024. Food trucks that are unable or unwilling to offer takeout/delivery to their customers are missing out on an opportunity to connect with new customers and strengthen current customer relationships. 

The best part is that high-tech, affordable online ordering systems exist. For example, Toast's Online Ordering System makes it easy for food trucks to increase their sales with minimal effort.

Tracking the Effectiveness of Your Food Truck Marketing Ideas

So, you’ve rolled out your food truck marketing ideas and have integrated them with your food truck business plan and branding. But how do you know which of them are producing the best results? 

Conversely, which strategies are underperforming and could use a tune-up? And are any of your marketing efforts going completely unnoticed by your target audience?

To measure your marketing effectiveness, constantly revisit your short and long-term goals, your predetermined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and any other success metrics you decided to track (like social media reach or new email subscribers). Once you have a refreshed understanding of your goals, you can begin measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies within the restaurant industry.

Don’t wait until the end of a campaign to assess the effectiveness of your food truck marketing strategies. By monitoring and measuring your current campaigns, you’ll be able to tweak your methods while it’s still in progress, reaping more rewards and helping your food truck make more money.

FAQs

What are the Most Common Food Truck Marketing Strategies?

When brainstorming marketing strategies for your food truck, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The most common marketing tactics are common for a good reason — they work! Consider using one of the following strategies:

• Build your online presence with SEO best practices to improve your online presence.

• Use social media and marketing trends to spread awareness of your food truck.

• Use email campaigns and hand out flyers.

• Personalize your marketing communications whenever possible.

What are Effective Marketing Strategies for New Food Trucks?

New food truck owners may find it hard to become known in an already crowded industry. The goal is to ensure that folks can find you when seeking out new eats in their area by making a good first impression with your outreach strategies. Here are some food truck marketing ideas you can try:

• Take the time to craft a unique brand identity.

• Be active on social media.

• Go all out for your grand opening to establish a welcoming reputation.

• Set up your Google Business listing and create optimized business profiles on sites like Yelp or Foursquare.

How Can I Increase My Food Truck Sales?

As a food truck owner, you need to employ effective marketing strategies if you want to boost your food truck’s revenue and sales. Research your local area to find out what people enjoy, what gaps in the market exist, and where you can stand out from the crowd. Then, establish a brand, offer special promotions, partner with local breweries, and implement social media and email marketing campaigns.

Related Food Truck Resources

• Food Truck Name Ideas

• Food Truck Licenses and Permits

• Food Truck POS Comparison Tool

• Best Food Truck POS Systems