Mobile food trucks are very popular in urban area these days, having become a staple of urban downtowns, be it Chicago or New York. Businesses like Fire and Rice (@eatFireandRice), a mobile food service truck based in Washington DC, have leveraged social media to connect with customers.
Mobile food trucks like Fire and Rice in Washington DC have become popular. These businesses have an unique opportunity to leverage analytic reports to better connect with customers.
But launching a restaurant of any kind is not easy, even if that restaurant has four wheels for the kitchens and plenty of outdoor seating.
Food service businesses can be a muscle-achingly consuming effort to run, so analytics needs to be super simple to execute. In this case reporting can best impact if it reveals where customers can be best attracted
If you are running a food truck service, here are a few ways to capture a few customers and manage the effort with measurement.
- Set up a website page dedicated to provide key information about where your trucks serve. set up a conversion report in your analytics and set tags in a tag manager for specific downloads, such as a menu or coupons in a pdf.
- Announce locations using a hashtag phrase to let customers know where to look (Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram and Twitter).
- Consider offering coupons via mobile device. Have a dedicated page that your team can reference in the field, or create a coupon at a particular social media platform to build followers. Again, a tag managed with a tag manager can be used to track how coupon campaigns are shared in social media.
- Adding photos for Pinterest, Instagram, Google +, Facebook should set the expectation of how the business is doing, how customers are experiencing the food, and can convey the atmosphere - what awaits customers who arrive to your truck. Other newer platforms such as Vine can show short videos that show customers. Another, Snapchat, can be used for "special messages" that disappears after a second.
- Geographic maps in analytics can confirm interest from a region. They are not useful for drilling down into comparing traffic from every neighborhood, but useful if sales are spread outside of a major city. A report covering New York City, for example, would not cover Prospect Heights from Washington Heights traffic exceptionally well, but it could reveal consistent visits from towns in New Jersey, Westchester County, and Long Island. These may be worth the drive or investigate the opportunity to spend time.
- For nuanced reporting in analytics, use multichannel reporting to understand which social media is assisting "conversion" - a call to click button for pre-orders for example. You can do the same kind of analysis for social reporting, if your team is more interested in which social media platform is bets supporting your participation, as well as demographic reporting to see if your food service is attracting a certain demographic.
What a great article. This reminds me of a restaurant in Quebec, FAIT ICI, that I read about in "No Bullshit Social Media" they were able to build a community of followers prior opening using some of the tips you suggest here so that when it was time for them to open they already had a large following eager to try their restaurant.