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6 ways to market your food truck with Instagram

Instagram offers an excellent marketing tool for food trucks because of the quality of the pictures, which are critical when presenting food to customers

Image courtesy of iStock

October 23, 2019 by Ashley Halsey — writer, freelancer

If you operate a food truck business, either in a permanent location or as more of a pop-up style business, then Instagram should be your perfect marketing tool. Not only does its social media channel have an incredible reach, but it's visual too, which means it is made for promoting food. After all, we eat with our eyes. Here are six fantastic ways you can market your food truck business with Instagram:

1) Post visually compelling content

This is a simple place to start, but as a purveyor of food, what better way is there to entice new customers and followers than with alluring pictures, or even short videos, of the dishes that you serve up?

"Develop a consistent style to your posts in terms of theme and personal branding, post regularly to maintain interest, but be careful not to overkill, and then let your food to the talking with visually stimulating images," recommends Marsha Keating, an Instagram marketer at Writinity and LastMinuteWriting.

2) Use giveaways

People love a good contest, so give the people what they want by hosting contests where the prize is a free meal from your truck. Of course you don't want to be giving too much away — you need to make money after all — but by running occasional competitions whereby users on Instagram have to swipe on the picture to enter the free draw, you are gaining yourself potentially hundreds of new followers on the medium who can then be influenced by all the other techniques on this list. It's all about building up that Instagram following.

3) Use hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to promote your business through the sharing of relevant topics, often created by you to promote your brand. However, you can also piggyback onto trending hashtags which are relevant to your business, such as local food days, or of course seasonal events such as Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If you create brand-specific hashtags, which is also a smart approach, then encourage those who follow you on Instagram to share those same hashtags — you could even build it into one of the contests that we have already spoken about. Consider running a weekly or biweekly drawing whereby users can claim a free accompaniment by sharing your hashtag with those in their social media contact groups. But remember that everything you do has to make economic sense.

4) Use your location

If you are a pop-up business, then it absolutely makes sense to use your changing location as a means to entice and engage users on Instagram. Take fantastic pictures of your location, and combine them with hashtags which encourage your users to share.

"You could even run competitions where you give visual clues of your whereabouts, and those who correctly guess where you are can claim something free or enter a free draw for a slightly more economical version of the same contest. Using your location makes smart sense, and can enable you to engage with that local community," says Trent Hastings, a tech editor at DraftBeyond and ResearchPapersUK.

5) Use automation

Automating your social media posts means that you can post regularly, and connect to all relevant seasonal events and happenings which are likely to trend on the likes of Instagram. You can also build up marketing themes and stories where following your brand online becomes like an event — this is a great way to engage a larger audience.

The best thing about automation is that it enables you to design and execute a social media strategy without the need to be working hard on Instagram every single day. After all, you've got a food truck to run.

6) Use engagement

That said, the personal touch on Instagram can make a huge difference, so start to reciprocate posts with responses, and follow those people and businesses that follow you so you begin to build your online community.

These things take a little more time, but are always worth the effort because in this way you show appreciation for your users and customers. And just as valuable, by following and engaging them, you learn more about your audience. With this information you can further build upon your Instagram marketing strategy to ensure greater success in the future.