8 No Cost Marketing Tools For Your Food Truck
by Richard Myrick for Mobile-Cuisine
Savvy marketing tools and techniques can attract more customers to your food truck or food business and more viewers to your website. By building your presence without paying for advertising, you’ll have extra cash to invest in other areas.
Put your URL on all documents and packaging
There's no added cost to include your URL on every single piece of collateral that leaves your food truck or food business. For example:
* Truck wrap
* Business cards
* Letterhead
* Invoices
* Receipts
* Catering presentation folders
* Take-away menus
* Press releases
Be sure your URL appears in all of your advertising and social media. And of course, include it on all forms of packaging: cartons, labels, bags, and any other containers you use.
Include your URL in your email signature
Email programs such as Outlook allow you to create a signature block that appears on every email you send. In addition to your name, title, food truck name, address, phone number, social media accounts, include a link to your website.
Get on tracking applications
List your food truck on one or more of the existing food truck tracking applications such as Roaming Hunger or Food Trucks In. These apps are free marketing tools designed to help consumers find you when you are on the road.
Use calls to action in your website copy
Calls to action are words (such as buy now, save, register to win) that encourage your readers to take a specific action while they are on your website. The word free, as well as a text link, is an implicit call to action. Use links and calls to action to help visitors navigate your site and to let them know what you’d like them to do. If you don’t tell them, they won’t know!
Collect customer testimonials
Whenever customers spontaneously offer praise, ask for permission to include their testimonials on your website. You don’t have to identify each person in detail, but you need to provide something more than “anonymous” as your source. You can collect testimonials from email or letters you receive, or comments on your blog or social media accounts. Scatter the testimonials throughout your website rather than place them all on one page.
Link to relevant sites
Inbound links from other websites not only bring you targeted traffic from other sites but also can improve your ranking in Google’s search results. This can be time consuming but it’s a free marketing tool to bring visitors to your site that could end up at your service window. If you make a practice of looking for ten links each week, this won’t seem as difficult a task.
Share with friends
A Share button gives your website visitors an option to share your website through social media and email. Most website developers can install free script to handle this function. Be sure to include a link to share with a friend in a common sidebar or on each of your blog posts so that visitors can quickly recommend your site or your menu to someone they know. There’s nothing like word of mouth!
Google and Yahoo!
Both Google and Yahoo offer free marketing tools in local listings tied to their map sites, allowing users to search for businesses within a specific area. Local listings are valuable for every food truck even if they don’t show your truck’s current location. Besides the listing, Google lets you offer a coupon and include your logo. Free is a great price for advertising to bring customers to your food truck service window.
Editor’s Note: If you have other no cost tips and tools to keep your food business top of mind for your customers, please share by adding a blog comment.
