Marketing Plan Mistakes You Want To Avoid

If you’re getting ready to start a food truck, your marketing plan is needs to be at the top of the list of documents you need to develop before you launch. And yet, new food truck vendors often stumble in their efforts to strategize on their marketing. Today we’ll discuss some common marketing plan mistakes I’ve seen vendors make over the years.

Common Marketing Plan Mistakes Food Truck Vendors Want To Avoid

Developing an effective marketing plan is an important step in growing your food truck business. After all, you want to get as many people talking about your menu or services as possible.

Not having a marketing plan

It’s mind-blowing how many food trucks have started without a marketing plan. In some cases it’s lack of experience and not knowing that they need one. In other situations, new vendors are over-confident that they can grow their food truck business without one.

Unfortunately, without a marketing plan, you can’t set goals and track results. Even if you’re using social media, advertising, or email, these are just actions without any real purpose. Having a plan helps you determine what you’re trying to accomplish, and guides you to actually achieving your goals.

Not being specific enough

Setting goals isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sure, every food truck wants more sales, that’s a given. But how many more sales? What dollar amount are you looking for? How many new customers a month or week do you want? Use dollar amounts, number of customers, percent growth in sales. Then track where you are now so you can track results over time.

Creating an inflexible marketing plan

Once you’ve finished your marketing plan, it’s set in stone, right? Wrong. Your plan should be a living document that will need to be modified to adapt to industry changes.

What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Because of this, it’s imperative that you must be willing to adjust your plan to accommodate current market situations and new technology. Also, as your competitors change their strategies, you’ll need to keep up to stay ahead.

Never review your marketing plan

How often do you actually refer to a marketing plan once you complete it? Most vendors I’ve spoken with stuff this document in a file cabinet or in a computer folder, never to see it again. But what’s the point if you’re not actually going to use it?

Give yourself a calendar reminder once a quarter to review that plan. Ensure that you’re still reaching to achieving these marketing goals, and to modify it to stay on track.

Putting all your eggs in one basket

Maybe you’ve seen great success with Twitter marketing, and so that’s pretty much all you’re doing to market your food truck. The fact that marketing and technology are always evolving means that one single strategy will not, over time, net the same results.

Diversify your marketing efforts to ensure that you aren’t overly focused on one tactic that may, in the long term, net diminishing returns. Branch out and try new marketing tactics and determine those that are no longer as effective for your food truck.

Not knowing your customers

Your customers should be at the core of all your marketing efforts. That means that you need to be using the social channels that they prefer. So even if you’re resistant to, Snapchat, if your customers spends time there, you can’t let your own preferences get in the way of reaching them.

If you’re not sure where your customers spend time online, it’s essential that you invest in finding out. You can do this yourself through customer surveys and digging into the analytics provided by social networks or your website.

The Bottom Line

The key to avoiding these marketing plan mistakes is to realize how important this document is for your food truck’s success. The other reason is to ensure that it’s a part of your truck’s growth strategy.

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