How To Test Marketing Promotions Before You Bust Your Budget

So you’ve come up with a great idea for a promotion at your at your food truck, or a new menu special to attract new customers. As exciting as it may be, don’t rush to implement your new food truck promotion too quickly. For food truck owners who have time and resources, there a few options to test marketing promotions. They will help ensure that your next promotion will fill the line at your food truck.

How To Test Marketing Promotions For Your Food Truck

Like any idea, food truck marketing promotions should be refined and tested before you invest your marketing budget toward promoting it. But how do you determine what promotions are most likely to succeed? How do you know if a promotion will break even, make money, or end up costing you in the long run?

A/B Testing

In order to market test your promotion, you must first realize that the promotion itself is only one part of the puzzle. Other decisions, such as how you phrase the promotion and on what channels you market the promotion, playa a bigger role in determining its success. With this in mind, learn how to reach your audience via social media, email, and other digital marketing channels by running A/B tests of similar promotions.

Let’s say, that you want to offer your signature menu item at a discount, and you want to attract new customers with this promotion. There are two basic ways of phrasing this promotion while offering a discount. Reducing the price on all menu items, or a “Buy 1 entree, get one free” type of offer.

Invest in two separate Facebook ads targeting the same demographic. One offering a discount and the other offering a free side dish after a certain investment. Instruct customers to bring in the ad to qualify for the discount (to make this work, maybe make the discount or offer more substantial). This way, you can collect ads and see what type of phrasing speaks more to your existing customers. Going forward, you can frame your promotions around this particular phrasing.

Offer More Value

Let’s say that you really enjoy doing themed food truck nights, or partnering with bars or bands. These types of promotions are always fun in theory. However, if you don’t attract more customers to your truck you’re looking at an overall loss each night you attend an event.

In order to succeed with event-based promotions, don’t scale back – offer more value. Partner with a bigger name band, or a bar with fancier specialty drinks. When customers know that you are offering something more valuable to them, they are more likely to make the trek and track down your truck. However, all this investment will be wasted if you do not communicate this greater value to your customers in your marketing.

Get Feedback

Promotions online, and via email cost time and money; but utilizing signage at your service window is free. Test marketing promotions with signage so your customerss can rank and react to your promotions and offer feedback. You can turn it into a fun distraction or game to engage more customers.

For example, you can run a poll. Advertise three different options for an upcoming themed specials. Now ask your customers to tweet or leave a comment at your Facebook account to express which one they’d prefer. This kind of feedback is quick, easy to collect. It also can help you avoid investing in a promotion that doesn’t connect with customers.

The Bottom Line

Test marketing promotions is essential to maximize your food truck’s sales potential. When you test different options, you’ll be able to select the one that can give you the best ROI. Not testing can limit sales, increase your risk of losing profit, and more. The expense involved in properly testing your promotion campaign is money well-spent, and can save you from marketing losses later.

Try out these strategies to test marketing promotions before you spend a lot of your hard earned money. Do you have any additional test marketing promotion tips? Share your thoughts on this topic on social media. Facebook | Twitter