5 Tips To Grow Your Food Truck Business
Food trucks are one of the hottest trends in the food and beverage industry. You could say that food trucks already moved beyond cool, and are now just as much an established restaurant concept as buffets, fast food or fine dining are.
Food trucks started to grow a huge following thanks to shows like The Great Food Truck Race and today, many aspiring restaurateurs are looking into starting a mobile food business instead of a traditional sit-down restaurant. Some of the benefits of food trucks include low cost and low overhead but on the flip side, competition can get pretty tough these days because when there there’s demand, there’s supply. To help you win the war for the hungry customers wallet we have compiled five tips that will supercharge your food truck.
- Turn visitors into loyal customers with a mobile stamp card.
Stay ahead of the curve and grow customer loyalty with your very own mobile loyalty card. Loopy Loyalty allows you to design a digital stamp card in minutes and puts your food truck alongside your customers’ credit cards in Apple Wallet and Google Pay without them having to download an app.
You can even send targeted messages straight to your customers’ smartphone & lock screen or automatically trigger location-based notifications when your truck is near a customer’s location.
2. Take orders anywhere with Square
Take orders from customers in line, online, and at your window with Square for food trucks. The app will simplify your food truck point-of-sale operations with everything from mobile payment tools and next-business-day deposits to invoices and online pre-orders. Let your customers place takeout orders online so you can have their food hot and ready when they get there. The app also allows you to set up custom menu items for every dish to make your line go faster and makes tipping easier for all your customers. Seriously, what’s not to like?
3. Publish your menu online, offline and above the line!
If you wish to attract new customers and keep them coming back, it’s best to keep an updated menu on both your website or social media. Facebook, for example, lets you conveniently upload your menu to your business page. But did you knew that you can also improve your truck’s presentation by using digital display screens for menus that can be mounted to the side of your truck? Companies such as ElectroMenu or ScreenCloud make it all possible.
4. Get listed on the major food truck locators apps.
Your number one goal should be to be found by hungry customers. There are a ton of apps and websites for locating food trucks and we suggest to get listed on as many as possible or at the very least the major ones for your geographical area. Some of the most popular apps in the US include Food Moves and Roaming Hunger but we definitely recommend a quick Google search for “food truck finder + your city” to find the ones that matter most for your home turf.
5. Automate marketing with Truckily.
Truckily is designed from the ground up to manage your food truck’s digital presence. The software allows you to update your location on-the-spot or schedule a route weeks in advance. Each time your location changes, Truckily updates the map, plus your Facebook Page, Twitter, Foursquare and more, saving you tons of time while keeping your customers informed of your current location. The best thing? It’s completely free.
