Chapter

17

Expanding Your Marketing Efforts

In This Chapter

Using layered marketing to promote your truck

Expanding your reach with social media

Working with a professional or doing your own PR

Advertising within your community

The biggest myth about food businesses is that once you’re open the customers just show up, as if by magic. People love to speculate about how much money a truck owner or restaurateur must be making when they see a big line or all the tables filled. They’ll pat you on the back, smile, and say “Business must be pretty good,” as they calculate your truck profits in their heads. But that’s like thinking that football is easy because you see the players dancing in the end zone after they score a touchdown. The truth is that food trucks don’t have lines all the time, and football players spend countless hours training before they score a touchdown.

The food truck business is a marathon, not a sprint. Like football, it’s about teamwork, planning, and how many great days, aka victories, you can put together in a row. In this business you aren’t a champion until you’re consistently profitable over a long period of time.

In previous chapters I talked about how to set up, launch, and start your truck, but once you’re operating, how do you keep the lights on and the money flowing in? It takes great marketing combined with a consistent product. Sounds simple, but what happens after you aren’t the new kid on the block anymore? Once everyone has tried your tacos and four brand-new taco trucks arrive in the neighborhood? What do you do then to differentiate your product and attract customers?

In the past that was a mystery. Some trucks advertised, some gave out frequent buyer cards, and others discounted. But the truth is there is a formula. None of these methods work alone, but when combined, magic happens.

The Compounding Cycle

The key to unlocking the power behind your food truck brand is using a layered marketing approach. I call it the Compounding Cycle. It combines public relations, advertising, social media, experiential follow through, and personal relationships to reinforce a singular message to the target market. I call it compounding because it’s similar to compounding interest: the marketing message and momentum get exponentially more powerful with each repeat of the cycle.

Definition

Layered marketing is a method in which multiple marketing techniques are utilized in one campaign to reinforce the brand’s message and intentions, thereby generating tangible results.

Determining Your Message

The first and most important step in the process is determining your message. And there’s no point in drilling a message into the minds of consumers unless it’s the correct one.

Let’s say you’re selling meatballs. Is your message that you have the best, the highest quality, the cheapest, or that you’ll deliver your meatballs the fastest? All of those are potential marketing messages. The question is, which one will work? And how do you determine the answer before you spend thousands of dollars on a campaign?

Figure out who your consumer is and what motivates him when he makes a buying decision. If your truck is parked on a college campus the price and taste of your product will usually be more important than the nutrition. But if you’re in a hip downtown business district, nutrition and quickness may be your customers’ main concerns. Identify, to the best of your ability, what motivates your clientele and then tailor your marketing message to those factors. You’re looking for the point where motivation meets marketing.

Truck Tales

In the 1970s and 1980s, Domino’s Pizza built their brand on speed. Domino’s promised they would deliver your food in 30 minutes or less; if not, you got your pizza free. Domino’s realized that when their customers were hungry they wanted their food quick. They focused on that motivating factor and built a billion-dollar business on it.

The Campaign

Once you’ve determined your marketing message, you need to design an effective campaign around it. That means packaging the message into flyers, e-mails, social media messages, and consumer experiences that encapsulate it. The goal is to make the information in your materials as easy to consume as possible, motivating your customers to make a buying decision. Unless you’re an artist yourself, creating your marketing materials will involve hiring a graphic designer to take your words and present them alongside your truck brand.

For instance, if you’re selling the highest-quality beef hot dogs at the best possible price, your slogan might be “Artisanal quality at artist prices. Who says an artist has to starve?” Then you’ll integrate your slogan into every aspect of your business. No one should make a purchase from you without being aware of that slogan.

The Steps

Once you have your message and your slogan, the Compounding Cycle really takes effect. You must constantly repeat the program outlined here to reinforce the message and grow your customer base:

1. Distribute the promotional materials for your event or promotion via e-mail, social media outlets, your website, and other methods of direct contact with your customers.

2. Reinforce your marketing message through trusted sources: television news, newspapers, magazines, and other reputable communication outlets. Most consumers believe what these sources tell them because they don’t seem to have ulterior motives. The value of press coverage from a trusted food blog or association with a notable personality can lead to much more business than an e-mail blast or Twitter message on its own.

3. Make your promotion come to life with experiential follow through (see Chapter 9).

4. After any successful promotion, you must thank your customers. They’re your lifeblood and, like your mother, father, girlfriend, or husband, they want to feel appreciated. Make sure you send an e-mail, Tweet, or post a sign on your truck thanking your customers. And your thank you should be personal. The extra effort you make with a phone call, e-mail, or handwritten note will come back to you tenfold.

The Compounding Cycle is about generating repeat business by forming consumer habits related to your brand.

Let’s assume you’re planning to offer a special green hot dog for St. Patrick’s Day. Create digital and print flyers and distribute them through your communication outlets in as close a time frame as possible to when your customer will be making his buying decision. You don’t want to send out a St. Patrick’s Day food truck promotion two weeks ahead of time. No one decides what they’ll eat for lunch that far in advance. It makes more sense to distribute flyers two to three days before the holiday and then send an e-mail message the morning of St. Patrick’s Day.

The best way to ensure press coverage is to make friends with local writers or employ an effective public relations firm. Another way to get a trusted source on your side is to purchase advertising. That magazine or newspaper ad space purchase might include editorial coverage or the sponsorship of an event as part of the package. Getting a magazine to co-promote your truck will greatly enhance the message you’re sending to customers.

Tip

When partnering with media outlets or notable personalities, make sure they represent the image you want for your brand. Many times businesses partner just to create buzz but wind up creating the wrong kind of buzz, which could end up with your brand being less trusted than it was before.

Let’s say 1,000 people show up for green hot dogs and you only have 300 to sell. That’s bad experiential follow through. Good experiential follow through involves being prepared by gauging the demand, setting up a system to get out the green hot dogs quickly, having entertainment to distract the waiting customers, and making sure the green hot dogs taste better than any hot dog you’ve ever served before. Now you have the opportunity to turn this into an annual St. Patrick’s Day promotion. People will talk about the promotion and look forward to it every year.

Tip

Never over-promise. It’s always important to under-promise and over-deliver in the hospitality business. Your marketing efforts should be enough to motivate a buying decision, but not too much beyond that. If you promise the best meatball in the world or your money back, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It’s inevitable that someone’s going to be disappointed. Manage expectations so that you can comfortably surpass them and your customers leave thrilled, not disappointed.

The best advertising in the world comes through word of mouth. You can’t buy it, you have to earn it. Repeating the Compounding Cycle hundreds or even thousands of times is the only thing that leads to long-term success in the hospitality business. Some people will tell you otherwise, but they either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re lying. Great hospitality businesses are a combination of meaningful marketing that speaks to the customer and great experiential follow through. Rinse and repeat.

Social Media

In Chapter 9, I gave you a basic breakdown of how you should utilize social media to start your truck business. Here I elaborate by giving you some examples of successful food truck social media campaigns.

Doubletree CAREavan

Doubletree is a famous hotel brand owned by Hilton. They’re known for giving out chocolate chip cookies—almost 21 million a year. For the 25th anniversary of the brand, Hilton created the CAREavan, a food truck that’s mission was a “10 week, 10,000 mile, 50-city journey to deliver hundreds of thousands of smiles to weary workers, tired travelers, and local charities across the country through the pleasant surprise of a chocolate chip cookie treat.”

Social media played a massive role in the execution of the campaign and its eventual success. The Doubletree Facebook page featured an application that tracked the location of the truck in real time, as well as videos, tweets, and an entry form for a CAREavan contest to win free hotel rooms. The Doubletree Facebook page vastly increased the number of “likes” they received after the campaign was launched.

Doubletree used Foursquare to update the location of the truck and teamed with Topguest to offer Hilton rewards for checking in. On Twitter, they offered a contest in which followers had the chance to win a delivery of 250 cookies for using the hashtag #sweetbreak when posting. Finally, they used YouTube to capture “Cookie Confessionals”—people talking about why they love cookies.

The campaign was multilayered and blanketed the Internet with a very clear message: Doubletree is welcoming, hospitable, and accessible. They got all of that out of combining social media with a simple cookie.

Made for Mexicue

Seasonal items are a great way to encourage visits from your clientele. One summer, New York truck Mexicue started a “Summer Market Special” contest in which customers submitted recipes for an item to be featured on the truck. The promotion became so successful that the boys decided to continue the promotion every season. Using a Facebook app, Mexicue announces a different seasonal ingredient every couple of months. The truck accepts recipe submissions and posts them for Facebook users to vote on. The winner receives a gift card to the truck, and Mexicue features the winning recipe on its menu the following season. The campaign is a great way to engage customers in the brand.

Chil’lantro BBQ

Chil’lantro BBQ is Austin, Texas’s version of the venerable Korean taco truck. The owner, Jae Kim, is an avid fan of Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and Foursquare for communicating with customers and marketing the happenings of his truck. His most successful social media campaign happened during the South by Southwest festival. Kim teamed up with mobile payment system Go Payment, an iPhone credit card processing company, to offer tacos at a greatly reduced price to customers who signed up to follow the truck on Twitter and paid for the tacos with their credit card. It turned out to be a huge motivating factor for the customers at the festival; many were technologically savvy and weren’t carrying much cash.

What made this an awesome campaign was the way Kim matched his desire for more Twitter followers with the target market’s desire for cheap eats and fondness for paying through credit. Jae Kim listened to his customers and was rewarded in the process.

Beep! Beep!

Beware of becoming overly dependent on social media. There’s no replacement for a sound business plan, personal relationships, and great planning. Social media is part of a good marketing plan, but it isn’t a good marketing plan on its own.

Publicity

Using public relations properly will lead to a positive perception of your food truck in the blogosphere, local community, and media.

In order to do proper press outreach for your truck, you’ll need to prepare a press kit, which should include information on the key players, photographs, and a general description of your truck, menus, and possibly a special promotional item related to your business. I’ve seen press kits delivered by butlers and include chocolates shaped like the logo of the business. You should do whatever it takes for the media to have a positive connection with your product. Place your information in a clean folder made from high-quality stock with your logo on it. Make sure your business card is prominently placed on the front of or inside the folder.

Tip

In the digital age, many press kits are PDF files rather than hard copy because they’re easily e-mailed to press outlets. That’s fine for a truck to use for secondary press outreach. During the first press push, it’s better to print something and mail it. Writers tend to delete e-mails, but they’ll be more hesitant to throw away something that was clearly created with care.

When it comes to publicity, there are two ways to go: handle it internally or hire an outside company. It all depends on your budget. I suggest hiring a professional for your first three to six months of operation at no more than $2,500 per month, and then go it alone. If you can’t afford to hire a publicist, don’t worry; you can make it on your own. The main advantage of putting publicity in the hands of an expert in the beginning is that it will allow you to focus on refining your operations during those critical first months.

Handling public relations yourself can be very effective, as long as you live by one rule: avoid being negative. As I’ve said before, like attracts like, and negativity will only attract more negativity. Never say anything bad about your competition, the authorities, or anyone else for that matter. As far as you’re concerned, everyone is spectacular and you’re happy to be part of this great industry.

The upside of doing your own publicity is that no one knows your business better than you. You created the project and no one will talk about it with more passion than you. The downside is that you won’t have the benefit of working with a professional who has experience and an outside perspective. Interview several PR firms even if you don’t plan on hiring one; it’s a great way to generate ideas and make connections. Don’t worry about wasting someone’s time. As long as you’re relentlessly positive and cordial, something good will come out of the meetings.

Community Outreach

Your publicity will form the public’s perception of your truck and you. My advice is to make a positive contribution to your community. There’s no better way to generate positive PR than doing good and sharing. By positively contributing to your surrounding neighborhoods, you’ll generate goodwill for you and your business.

Your food truck should be involved in as many charity events as possible to build relationships in the community while enhancing your brand image. Use these opportunities to let people try your grub, sampling what you’ve worked so hard to create. The people you’re helping will become word-of-mouth advertisers, espousing the virtues of you and your business. You should spend a minimum of a few hundred dollars a month on sampling your product through charity functions. If you become super successful, I recommend using up to 10 percent of your income on assisting the community. I promise you it isn’t something you’ll regret over the long haul.

It’s one thing to donate your assets and those of your employees; contributing your own personal time to the community will be even more meaningful. Volunteer for the local chamber of commerce, food truck association, or other groups. An even better option would be to join a group your customers admire or that has a high-profile image within your community. As a leader in the food truck or hospitality community, you’ll have a forum in which to promote your views and protect your business.

Tip

PR firms generally work on a monthly retainer, though some will work on an event basis as well, meaning you don’t have to pay them when you have nothing in particular for them to promote. For a start-up business like a food truck, paying on an event basis is a great way to work with a PR professional without making a major commitment.

Advertising

Advertising isn’t generally useful for food trucks because of the cost. It’s very difficult, especially for a small business, to gauge the performance of an advertising campaign.

If you do choose to advertise, you need to be focused. Taking ad space in The New York Times doesn’t make sense for a food truck. You’d have to sell thousands of falafels or hot dogs to pay for just one advertisement. However, if there’s a food festival going on in downtown Manhattan and that’s where you park, you could advertise on the ticket or program. The cost will be relatively reasonable and the exposure is targeted to people who love food and will be near your truck.

Tip

Sponsorship is a great way for food trucks to advertise. Local athletic teams and charity events will give you maximum return and generate community goodwill at a comparatively low cost. There can also be opportunities for you to sell your product by parking at the games or events.

When you’re a new food truck operator, your primary objective should be to create awareness within your target market. Your advertisements should include all the relevant information about your truck and a call to action. Before running an ad, make sure it covers the five most important aspects of your business:

Name

Type of product

Why it’s special

Website address

Twitter hash tag

Customers can’t take action if they don’t know what they’re looking for. Mystery makes for great books, not great advertising.

The Least You Need to Know

Use layered marketing—combining public relations, advertising, social media, experiential follow through, and personal relationships—to effectively market the message of your brand.

Promotional campaigns involving Facebook, Twitter, and other social media work very well for food trucks.

The idea behind publicity is to promote a positive perception of you and your truck. You can hire a professional, but don’t forget that no one knows your business better than you do.

Advertising can be very expensive. Be focused to get the most bang for your buck.

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