6 Low-Cost Marketing Techniques for your Food Truck Business
If you’re looking for a business opportunity that has low barriers to entry and doesn’t confine you to a single location, there are few better choices than running a food truck. Food trucks have been a major part of the Aussie lifestyle for years, and there will always be a market for delicious, high-quality food.
Like any other business, a food truck requires a solid marketing plan to thrive. As a small business owner, the prospect of devising a marketing strategy can be daunting: after all, you want to draw as much positive attention to your food truck business as possible while staying within your budget.
Luckily, marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. Keep reading for six low-cost marketing techniques that will transform your dream into a thriving business.
1. Make Your Food Truck a Destination
The competition is high among food trucks in Sydney, which means that you need to design truck to be as eye-catching as possible to streamline your success. A great way to do this is by turning to a high-quality sign printing service in your area to help you design signage that’s sure to capture the attention of passers-by.
When designing signs and other decorative elements, it’s not enough to simply create aesthetically pleasing pieces. It’s also important that you effectively convey information like promos, discounts and opening times to potential customers. Alongside this, ensure that all your visuals are cohesive by incorporating key elements from your brand. By following these tips, you can turn your food truck into a top destination in the communities you operate in.
2. Build a Consistent Brand
We briefly touched on branding as it relates to in-store visuals, but crafting a consistent brand goes well beyond that. The first thing you should aim to do is lay out the key elements of your brand in a brand book/bible. Choose brand colours, fonts and key visuals that suit who you are as a business.
Once you have your brand perfected, make sure to use it consistently across all your channels, from physical, printed ads to social media pages. Crafting a memorable brand identity makes it easier to garner loyalty among your customers and helps you stand out in the market. It’ll also thread your business between various channels, so customers can spot you more easily in different media or physical locations. Being identified across channels also boosts your brand’s credibility because customers are ‘warmer’ when they interact with your brand a second time.
3. Improve Your SEO
SEO should be a key pillar of any marketing strategy, but many business owners don’t apply it to its full potential. ‘SEO’ stands for ‘search engine optimisation’ and refers to the practice of optimising your website to rank as high as possible on Google and other search engines. By implementing SEO best practices, you’ll be more discoverable without having to rely on more expensive promotional techniques.
Some SEO strategies to utilise include using relevant, high-volume keywords, structuring your web pages in the right way and optimising the technical aspects of your site. If you aren’t an SEO expert, we recommend working with an external agency or freelancer with the necessary tools and experience to help you rank.
4. Utilise Referral Marketing
The word-of-mouth effect is incredibly powerful in the food and beverage industry. Consider just how intensely and broadly people rave about the food they love. To increase your customer base, you need your current customers to recommend you to their friends and family.
There are several tried-and-tested referral marketing strategies that you should use for your food truck business. One is simply to serve excellent food. Another is to offer incentives like discounts, loyalty points and freebies. Referral marketing is a fantastic way to get your customers to help with promotion, saving you loads of money and building trust in the community.
5. Build a Social Media Presence
Building a community on social media is a fantastic, low-cost way to create a loyal customer base. Create a page on popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram and regularly post high-value content.
Social media should also be a way for customers to reach out to you if they have feedback or special requests. You can get the most out of social media marketing if you think of it as a two-way street: it’s both a way for you to communicate with your customers and to receive feedback from them that you can implement to improve your food truck business.
6. Email Marketing
In order to run a profitable food truck, you need to have solid customer retention. It’s common knowledge in the marketing world that it costs far more to acquire a new customer than to get an existing one to make a repeat purchase. If you’re working with a tight budget, you should definitely look into email marketing as a way to re-activate existing customers.
As a food truck business, there are plenty of ways to utilise email marketing. The simplest is to use your newsletter as a way to publicise promos, new offerings and other important news. You can also write longer-form content related to your business to build a deeper affinity between you and your audience. Customer retention marketing is a must if you’re looking to make the most out of your marketing spend, and email marketing should be at the heart of your retention strategy.
Cooking Up a Winning Plan
Starting a successful food truck requires a solid marketing strategy, so cooking up a plan of which channels you want to prioritise and how much budget you have to use is a great start. For many new businesses facing tight budgetary constraints, a big part of crafting this strategy involves finding ways to make a lot out of a little. Thankfully, creating brand awareness and getting people to flock to your food truck doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg.
In this article, we’ve gone over some low-cost marketing techniques that any food truck business can use. Implement what you’ve learned today to fuel your growth and establish your food truck as a powerhouse in your local communities.