When it comes to food truck marketing, there are a lot of different ideas that you can include in your 2023 restaurant strategy.
Some restaurants have food trucks for catering events and other promotions while others use food trucks as an addition to their brick-and-mortar business.
No matter what type of food truck marketing you are considering, these 11+ ideas should be included in your 2023 Restaurant strategy!
What marketing strategies should you include?
1. Social Media Promotion
Social Media is an engagement machine where you can build great content to increase your brand.
There are a few things that may need your attention if you want to attract customer eyeballs. Well, most restaurants have social media brands.
But not all of them create enough visual content – which grabs the readers’ attention more than just words on paper and makes it interesting for customers to scroll through their feed or posts online such as photos with food specials, coupons they can use at specific times in the day etc.
It’s true millennials these days seem to eat with their eyes first.
Be sure to include in your social media promotions:
- Call to action – This can be to an online ordering system or app
- Video Marketing – Video performs better than pictures and has a better chance of enticing your target customers.
- Creatives – Make your social media posts stand out by using stylish templates. With a number of free options available online, you don’t need to worry about investing in expensive design software and tools.
Ideas for videos:
- Behind-the-scenes and recipe videos of your favorite dishes.
- Videos of how your restaurant looks on special occasions.
- DIY videos.
Social Media Strategy
In order to maximize your brand’s reach, you should leverage social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. Here are the top 4 sites:
- Instagram – This site allows users to take photos of their food along with a short description or comments on what they feel about the restaurant making it easy for customers who love sharing pictures online.
- Pinterest – Restaurants can upload recipe videos that include step-by-step instructions allowing users an inside look into how dishes come together in real-time from start to finish.
- Yelp! – The most visited review site out there is also one of the best ways restaurants can market themselves through reviews written by previous patrons which then appear under every dish served at each location throughout Google search results
- Tik Tok- Blown up in recent times and a great platform to show off your food creations to a younger crowd.
2. Restaurant Loyalty Programs
A restaurant loyalty program rewards your customers if they make repeat visits to a single location.
An omnichannel strategy will give them incentives for visiting other locations too, instead of just making it more attractive to the current ones.
Now you can provide preferred seating and discounts on future meals when people come in during off-peak hours so that they don’t have any obstacles while returning back again with their families or friends later at night/weekends etc.
Some other ideas to reward your repeat customers are to:
Offer referral incentives – Give your customers benefits when they refer their friends to you and make them affiliates. Incentivize them so that they can tell everyone about the great experience at your restaurant!
Social Share Them for extra points -By encouraging customers to share their positive reviews on social media, you can both amplify your brand’s presence and promote a sense of community. Providing incentives for people who do this will encourage more sharing in the future!
Reviews that are shared by others provide valuable insight into a restaurant or business without requiring an individual investment from someone interested in checking it out.
3. Your CRM
SMS and email campaigns are great ways to engage your audience once you have access to customer information.
This can be beneficial for your food truck in the long run to attract repeat customers.
A few things to keep in mind with these campaigns:
Personalization – To make messages more relevant, try to put your customers into categories. For example, you could group high-value customers and twenty-year-olds together in order to increase message relevancy.
Timing of your campaigns– Sending messages a couple of hours before meal time to ensure success.
Tips to get more conversations:
special offers – send your customers offers in relation to special events, or festivals coming up
catch them early – entice your customers with the first 10 words being very attractive to get the most out of your campaigns.
4. Online Listings
An online presence can be a great way to find customers from all around the world.
A business should aim for getting listed on Google and popular sites with high traffic in order to get discovered easily by potential buyers who look up these websites every day.
Asking any digital marketing professional, they will tell you that an online listing is crucial if you want your business or brand name known globally!
Putting your business on these sites will allow your business to generate reviews, and testimonials as well as share pictures of your establishment.
Some platforms business should be listed on:
- Google my business
- linkedin company directory
- bing
- yelp
- Hubspot
- yahoo local
- Apple maps
5. Online Advertisements
If you’re looking to draw traffic and grow your online presence, paid digital marketing strategy is a must!
Digital advertisements are excellent ways for any restaurant trying to build its market online.
They help you showcase what your business has to offer by targeting prospects through ads on social media or search engines like Google and Bing.
You can also promote special offers and discounts at the same time as growing awareness of your brand with these types of advertisement campaigns!
The effectiveness of ads as a restaurant marketing channel can be easily measured. Your Google AdWords dashboards give you neat lowdowns on all the important numbers, like the number of clicks and traffic gained per month.
Be sure to:
- Provide value through your ads
- low content but high visually
- get creative to induce action
6. Influencer Marketing
Amplification is the key to success.
This means you need influencers and bloggers, who can help your restaurant grow through their reviews or word-of-mouth influence on social media platforms.
In the digital age, influencers are people who review your restaurant and share their experience with a large following on social media.
With today’s arrangement, they typically have active accounts where posts get lots of engagements.
This helps increase views and impressions of your food offerings online which is beneficial to reach beyond traditional channels like print ads or radio commercials in 2019 as part of a strategic marketing plan.
7. Newsletter
Customers will lose interest in your campaigns if you roll out too many aggressive CTAs.
If a customer doesn’t resonate with the CTA, they might not take action on it and instead opt for something else to do online.
Diverse content helps here. In order to create a good newsletter, it must be device friendly and have high visual appeal with call-to-action links throughout the design of your collateral so readers can place an online order or check out all that you have to offer on your website!
8. Build A Website
To have a successful restaurant, it’s important to promote your food on your own branded website.
However, these websites only allow you limited space for sharing photos of the dishes served at your place.
To overcome this drawback, having an online presence is more advantageous as there are no constraints in terms of content or visuals that can be used on the website which will help make more people aware of what kind of cuisine is being prepared at their establishment.
9. Have an Online Ordering App
The millennial generation is very tech-savvy, so it’s important to have an online food-ordering app if you want your business to be successful.
Apps are becoming more popular than websites among millennials because they don’t need a computer and can use their smartphone instead.
Online Ordering can help:
- Get direct orders- no commission to be paid
- Retaining customers
- Generate More orders.
10. Use Digital Menus
Online users are always looking for new restaurants to try.
In order to attract more customers, you have to make sure your online accounts reflect what’s going on in real life at the restaurant.
If there is a mismatch between what’s being served and shown online this will send negative signals about the quality of food that can be expected from your establishment.
Out-of-date online menus are the reason why customers won’t bother to visit your restaurant. Make sure that what you place on your menu is exactly what’s available for them at the moment.
In scenarios where you want to update your menu, it can be a real headache if the changes aren’t automatically reflected online.
To avoid this hassle, an automated setup that pushes live any new edits is ideal.
This will ensure both the website and app reflect these updates seamlessly so customers get a seamless experience when they check out what’s available on offer at your restaurant or cafe or food truck.
Sometimes updating menus manually across all channels takes time and effort which isn’t always practical for business owners who have several projects going at once.
In such cases, automating the process of pushing updated content online ensures websites and apps stay up-to-date with minimal input from users while also ensuring marketing efforts appear effective as well since their brand messaging matches other promotional materials.
11. Social Listing Participation
Social media marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are crucial touchpoints for your restaurant.
Customers spend a high amount of time there and engage more easily than on other platforms. With social listening capabilities, you can gauge public sentiment about your restaurant’s product or services with ease to help customers experience exceptional dining out at 5-Star Restaurants!
Social listening is the process of monitoring social media channels to find out what people are saying about your brand or products.
While this task can be tedious, it’s essential that you address any negative comments as soon as possible so they don’t gain momentum on their own.
You have multiple options when it comes to managing these conversations without doing all the legwork yourself: software tools like Hootsuite and Buffer make things easier by centralizing posts from different sources in one place where you can easily monitor them, but there are also companies dedicated specifically toward helping brands with social listening (such as Brandwatch).
12. Give Out Freebies.
You can give customers freebies in a variety of ways.
One way is to offer them as gifts, for example, if you’re celebrating an anniversary or birthday. Another option is to use it as takeaway food such as snacks and drinks from the bar at closing time which works well during special events like sporting games when people want something tasty after getting out of their seats but don’t necessarily have transportation home yet; this could also come early on before they get too hungry so that they stay longer (like half-time).
You can even treat your staff with treats by giving cakes away at break times instead of only making them available through dinner service – maybe make these little perks more visible than just putting desserts on display because nobody likes missing out!
Wrapping Up
Once you’ve identified your target customer and their preferences, it’s time to start thinking about the things that will keep them coming back for more.
That means that you need a marketing plan in place that includes these 11 ideas.
If there are any questions left unanswered or if you want help implementing some of these strategies, contact us today!
We offer full-service digital solutions with personalized attention from our talented team of experts who specialize in restaurant marketing.
