Article

How 1 Central Florida food truck quickly attracted 800 percent more visitors to their website

Ribshack Foods had the unique challenge of promoting both its sauce and chips product lines as well as developing an instant local following for its three Central Florida restaurant locations. The company turned to social media as its primary line of marketing.

Photo courtesy of Ribshack Foods.

July 12, 2017

By Samantha Schwartz, public relations consultant

All food truck brands today, no matter how small or large, are dependent upon their online presence and identity. While that may seem daunting, it is actually empowering. Brand creators can control how their brand should look and the kind of communication it should engage in.

Ribshack Foods had the unique challenge of promoting both its sauce and chips product lines as well as developing an instant local following for its three Central Florida restaurant locations. To compete, Ribshack turned to social media as its primary line of marketing.

Ribshack started its promotional campaign by building a new website. While the new website was an important step, it naturally suffered low search engine optimization rankings.

Developing recipes sustainable enough to be made in a truck and delicious enough to create a loyal fan base is hard enough. Achieving online presence is equally difficult. You need strong content to garner web traffic.

Social media serves as your research platform and your advertising platform. Finding trending hashtags is finding topics of interest. Finding popular shared posts creates an aesthetic people are likely to respond to.

Social media is especially important to the food industry since it already relies heavily on visual aesthetics.

With Valentine's Day approaching, Ribshack created timely, value-driven content to advance its SEO rankings. 

We did this by creating an expert-driven round-up post and social media campaign. Here is the process we followed.

1) Utilize industry experts

Devolving substantial SEO is a circle of interdependency. Everyone is looking for a higher ranking domain through higher influx of traffic. Knowing we needed exposure, we sought out connections with people who already had high performing websites and gave them a good reason to link to our content quickly.

We took the lead by linking to their sites first. Giving them an honorable mention and place on our site created a mutually beneficial relationship.

Help A Reporter Out, known as HARO, is the most popular sourcing service in the English-speaking world, connecting journalists with relevant expert sources to meet journalists' demanding deadlines and enable brands to tell their stories.

In under five minutes, we sent out an inquiry through HARO, asking BBQ experts worldwide to share their "Best Romantic Valentine's Day Recipes Fit for the Grill."

In less than two days, we had more than 20 submissions to work with and a wealth of expert content on the subject.

2) Collect results that fit the mold of your desired content but have variety

Ribshack provided seven Valentine's Day recipes.

Because Valentine's Day is a personal holiday subject to personal preferences rather than tradition, we wanted to make sure our Valentine's recipe blog was full of content applicable to any reader. Luckily for us, barbeque does not have much of a set demographic; it's an open invitation to all!

Through one roundup blog post, we received step-by-step recipes for traditional to alternative takes on grilling; from ribeye to vegan sloppy joes, a restaurant's famous pulled pork mac and cheese, and even a barbeque inspired coffee blend.

Our team received answers and recipes from all over the country: cookbook authors, restaurant owners, barbeque foodie blog owners and even master chefs. 

3) Repurpose the blog content for social media to create meaningful and engaging posts for Twitter, Facebook and more

While our blog was the best place to host the round-up content, we also knew social media was the best place to promote that content quickly.

Social media promoted the content.

So, we identified their Twitter handles and thanked them via Twitter for being part of our post. 

We also followed our post contributors on Facebook and added relevant hashtags to our posts that gave both ourselves, and our featured chefs and authors, added exposure.

The results

After publishing Ribshack Food's Valentine's Day blog, "A BBQ Love Affair: 7 Valentine's Day Recipes for the Grill," we saw the following results:

• Organic traffic increased by a whopping 800 percent compared to the month before.
• Pages per session increased 52 percent.
• Average session duration (the time visitors spent on the site) increased by 446 percent.

The effect was similar on social media, where traffic increased by 444 percent as a result of our blog's publishing and consistent social posts. The graphic shows the incredible gains we made in all areas of new traffic acquisition: direct, social, organic and referral traffic.

In fact, Ribshack's social media following had doubled in followers since January, including Orlando's prominent newspaper, The Orlando Sentinel.

With followers like that, we can encourage local, prominent food bloggers to not only visit a Ribshack location, but also review it and therefore promote it from their own social media accounts.The best part about imparting meaningful content through your brand onto the web is that is there forever. Yes, that initially sounds daunting, however an "an existing library of content" gives reasons for traffic to continuously flow to your site.

Food trucks have to engage the "everyman" through relatable, timely content.