Market Your Food Truck For Less Than $100

For large restaurant chains with big marketing budgets, several hundred dollars is a drop in the bucket. For food truck owners, every dollar counts. Investments need to pay off in real and immediate marketing ROI. Today we’ll discuss a marketing strategy that can be executed for as little as $100.

4 Ways To Market Your Food Truck For Under $100

The following article targets four ways to use $100 (or less) to market your food truck. These tips will help build a robust marketing plan that can help you grow your mobile food business.

Research your market

Cost: $0

The first step in our low cost method to market your food truck researching your ideal customer. The more time you can invest in identifying not only your target markets but the characteristics that would describe your ideal customers, the more you will be able to focus your marketing efforts and hone your marketing messages to attract customers.

Not only should you study your game plan, you need to check out what competitors are doing. Going head to head with a competitor (whether it’s a restaurant or another food truck) in areas where they are stronger will usually result in a loss. Alternatively, if you spend time analyzing the competition to find their weakness, you can discover opportunities where your food truck will have the best chance to grow.

Turn to email

Cost: From $20 to 50 per month (up to 5,000 contacts) via email marketing platforms such as Mail Chimp.

Email marketing comes in high on our list of recommendations for food trucks. Why? Simple, because it works. Vendors from across the country point to email marketing as the tactic that produces their highest return on marketing dollars invested.

Be social

Cost: $50 per month (depending on what’s left of your $100 budget!)

If you invest the remainder of your budget in sponsored posts on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you can put your food truck brand and menu items in front of members of your target audience (see number 1) each month. Even a small investment in social marketing can produce hundreds of new followers. Think of your followers as new and existing customers on these social networks. This can help increase web traffic, brand awareness and hopefully bottom line profits that can be traced back to initial engagement on social media.

Because of their popularity with consumers, social platforms have done food truck vendors a huge favor. Not only do they allow you to set a limit on the amount spent to boost a post or page, they have also built tools which allow you to drill down into demographics in order to put these ads and posts directly on the feeds of individuals who match your ideal customer criteria.

Build Community Partnerships

Cost: $0

The final step in our low cost list of techniques to market your food truck involves becoming a bigger part of your community. This will happen by building strategic relationships. We have consistently pointed out that strategic partnerships with other local businesses for the purposes of cross-promotion can be extremely beneficial to food truck vendors.

Sharing contacts and working with local business owners whose target markets overlap with your food truck’s could help you build brand awareness much quicker than you would if you were to do it on your own.

The Bottom Line

If you didn’t realize how easy it is to market your food truck inexpensively, you do now. Start following these cheap tips today and build your brand and increase your profits.

If you have any additional low cost tips to market your food truck, let us know. Share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Facebook | Twitter