Your Food Truck Marketing Plan In Less Than 5 Hours A Week

Here are four time-saving tips to help you develop an effective food truck marketing plan while working on it less than 5 hours a week. How much time do you spend each week growing your food truck business as opposed to running it? If you’re like 99% of mobile food vendors, your answer is probably, “not nearly enough.”

Running a food truck is a huge job that can keep you busy from the start of your day until late into the night. So it’s no wonder you can’t find the time to focus on marketing strategies that can help you grow your mobile food business.

Your Food Truck Marketing Plan In Less Than 5 Hrs A Week

The good news is, an effective profit-generating marketing plan doesn’t have to take weeks to plan and execute. Today we’d like to share four time saving-tips to help you set up an effective food truck marketing plan that will help grow your business huge – working less than 5 hours a week on it.

… And yes, you DO have 5 extra hours a week to spend on your marketing, and we’ll show you where to find them.

Planning: 1 Hour a Week

The best time to do this would be every Sunday evening or early Monday morning, when most food truck business is slow. This allows you to create a schedule for the week ahead that identifies all the important tasks you need to accomplish and blocks off times when you can work on them.

We suggest that your planning hour is set at the same time every week, this way you’ll create a rhythm that maximizes your productivity.

Marketing: 30 x 3

In order to effectively market your business, you are going to have to stay on top of regular marketing communications tasks such as:

Updating your food truck website/blog
Responding to positive and negative reviews of your food truck on review sites such as Yelp
Creating graphics/posters announcing your upcoming special events
Creating press releases to promote upcoming events

The best way to manage this process is to schedule 30-minute blocks three times a week for yourself to work on these tasks. Again, if you schedule these 30-minute blocks for the same times each week you’ll create a rhythm that will help you to be more productive.

Facebook and Twitter: 30 Minutes a Day

Facebook and Twitter can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool for your food truck. Best of all, they’re free. It only takes a few hours to set up effective Facebook and Twitter pages for your mobile food business – and once they’re in place, you can rapidly grow a local audience and establish a strong connection with them.

The best part is you don’t have to spend more than 15 minutes a day on each.

We recommend you schedule your 15-minute social media break for the same time every day – maybe early in the morning when you first get to your commissary, or in the afternoon once the lunch rush is over.

During this time, here’s what you can do:

Send out a status updates or tweets telling everyone about your specials and locations for the day.
Respond to any comments, messages, or Friend Requests you may have received.
Write a status update letting people know how preparations are going for your next upcoming event. It personalizes your business at the same time as it reminds people about your event. comment that everyone can relate to, say, about the weather, or an upcoming holiday.

Have a Notepad and Pen With You

As a food truck owner, you spend a lot of time in your truck, dealing with your staff and customers. And all that time is time you’re not spending working on your marketing plan…or is it?

The truth is, when you’re in the thick of a busy day, the time listening to your customers and overseeing your staff can be when some of your best marketing ideas can come to mind. You might suddenly think up a status update you’d like to share with your Facebook followers. Or maybe you’ll come up with a great idea for an upcoming promotion or special event.

If you jot your ideas down as they occur to you, then you don’t have to bang your head against the wall trying to remember what they were when you finally have a moment to sit down. This will save you a lot of time and aggravation and will help you maximize your efficiency.

The Bottom Line

By implementing these tips, you can get an enormous amount of marketing work accomplished every week. All you have to do is create a regular schedule for yourself and then stick to that schedule. You’ll be amazed at how fast you’ll see results.

Do you have any additional tips for vendors building their food truck marketing plan? Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Facebook | Twitter