Food truck marketing has become second nature for the most successful food truck owners. For the less successful, it’s become a bit more difficult.

To help those of you struggling, we’ve compiled a list of the top four food truck marketing principles for you to use to get a better understanding and grasp of the marketing needed for your food truck business.

4 Key Principles Of Food Truck Marketing

Food Truck Marketing Has To Pay For Itself

The idea of a marketing budget for your food truck needs to be forgotten. Most food trucks define it as a percentage of their sales. [insert irritating buzzer sound] WRONG!

If you have a reliable way of investing $10 and getting back $20, how many of these ten dollar bills would you invest? (Hint: As many as you can get a hold of)

Then why would you cap your truck’s marketing budget at an arbitrary number? The simple reason most do is that vendors typically aren’t sure if a ten dollar bill invested in your food truck marketing can reliably return $20 or any money at all.

If you happen to fall into this camp, you need to change the way you approach food truck marketing. There is always a way to measure and to know how much money each marketing campaign is generating for your mobile food business.

The World Doesn’t Need Another Food Truck

I have started hearing this in some of the large food truck communities. Usually from people looking to maintain their market share in those communities. It is up to every vendor to prove this statement wrong.

To do this, ask yourself these questions:

1. What makes your food truck unique?
2. Why should a customer come track down your food truck all the other options consumers have in your market?

If you can’t answer these questions unfortunately, the world can do without YOUR food truck.

Food Truckin’ Isn’t Easy

Yes the mobile food industry is a tough one to master, however it can be simple if you follow the right formula. Have you created an operations manual for your food truck? If not, why not?  If you do, how often do you and your staff refer to it?

For how long can you afford not to be IN your food truck? Is that one shift? One day? One week? How about a month? If your food truck depends on you being there for every shift, or every catering event, you don’t have a food truck business. What you have is a food truck job.

Build Customer Relationships

You may be in love with the equipment you installed in your food truck kitchen, or with the truck itself. Or maybe you love your recipe book and the beautiful menu board your graphics designer created for you. This is all good. However, all that has very little to do with the real value of your business.

What you need to be in love with is your customers. You also need to become compulsive about maintaining an up-to-date list with all their contact information as well as birthdays and other important dates in their lives.

RELATED: Marketing Truths ALL Food Truck Owners Should Know

The Bottom Line

Although the industry is less than a decade old, the food truck industry is always changing. One aspect in that will never change is the importance of relationship food truck marketing.

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