Creative and Innovative Food Truck Social Media Marketing Campaigns

With a high demand for convenient, inexpensive and delicious meals, gourmet trucks have won over cities across the world, delivering specialty treats such as cupcakes, grilled cheese sandwiches, snow cones, and more. The recipe for success for these food trucks also includes creative and innovative social media marketing campaigns.

 

Below you’ll find our top favorites of creative and innovative social media campaigns created by Food Trucks! To catch some of these trucks check out the NYC Food Truck Roll Call for daily updates.

 

1. DoubleTree CAREavan: Celebrating a Milestone

Each day DoubleTree by Hilton gives out roughly 60,000 chocolate chip cookies, which amounts to over 21 million cookies annually. In honor of their 25^th anniversary in 2011, DoubleTree decided to celebrate by going on 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 sweet chocolate chip cookie treat”.

Prominently driven by social media campaigns, their strategy consisted of the following:

• Facebook: The DoubleTree Facebook page featured a real-time map app of where the CAREavan would be. It also hosted relevant tweets, an entry form for free stays at the hotel sweepstakes, as well as YouTube videos with related promotions. Since the campaign launch on May 26, the page experienced an increase of 89% via Facebook Likes!
• Foursquare: With updated location on Foursquare, the CAREavan’s whereabouts were found here as well as a special to promote its free cookies as well as their partnership with Topguest.
• Topguest: Members of Topguest received 50 Hilton HHonors Bonus Points as well as 25 Virgin Elevate points with each Foursquare check-in, bridging the two social media channels together.
• Twitter: Giving followers a chance to win a “sweet break”, DoubleTree ran a contest on Twitter where the truck team chose tweets using #SweetBreak and hand-delivers 250 chocolate chip cookies to each of the winners’ offices. Additionally, Twitter also displayed the location of the CAREavan to its followers giving updates each mile along the way.
• YouTube: Fans posted “Cookie Confessionals” of why they love chocolate chip cookies and posted them to its YouTube channel helping to capture users in the video fanbase.

So although DoubleTree is not primarily a food branded company, they are known for their delicious chocolate chip cookies that you would think your grandmother made you when you went to visit her. For more information read on about Hotel Check-In’s.

 

2. Mexicue: Crowdscourcing Recipes on Facebook

Utilizing a Facebook App, BBQ Truck, Mexicue is working to bring seasonal offerings to its menu to inspire and build a bigger market. The summer of 2011, Mexicue ran a Summer Market Special Contest where one winner would be chosen to have their recipe featured on the menu for one month. Via the Facebook App, Mexicue prides themselves with “working with a different farm and seasonal ingredient and run the contest around that” each season, as owner Thomas Kelly indicated. “The creator of the winning seasonal recipe wins a $50 gift certificate to Mexicue and a Manhattan Messenger bag courtesy of Lexdray and the second and third place prizes are $25 and $10 Mexciue gift cards, respectively.

Mexicue really found a way to engage a community as well as inspire aspiring cooks to craft recipes to be featured on the menu.

 

3. Ninja Snowballs: Building Excitement During a Dead Time: 

To beat the slumping sales in September and October, snow cone truck, Ninja Snowballs, all the way from Baton Rouge decided to run a flavor contest, which asked their customers to create a new flavor combination for the truck. Bite and Booze blogger, Jay Ducote partnered with Ninja Snowballs to run the social campaign, where entries could be submitted and monitored via Twitter and Facebook.

So while the truck was able to vend a few extra weeks than normal, the contest details page generated an extra 1,500 visits the summer into fall of 2010, with a lot more buzz when the top 16 flavors were being tasted for judging. Votes were casted by how many people ordered each snow cone. “Lemon Fluff”, the winning flavor featured a medley of sweetened condensed milk and fresh-squeezed lemonade.

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We also wanted to highlight KogiBBQ for being the first to rein in the food truck industry out in LA for tweeting their locations to customers to draw attention – Read on for the full story! Below you’ll find a photo of what some of their tweets look like to followers. 

With social media marketing, Food Truck Campaigns are becoming increasingly smart by running campaigns to generate and stimulate fans through particular efforts, deals, or events. Their effective use of Facebook, Twitter, and Real-Time Apps, have skyrocketed their earnings as well as popularity all across the world. So if you’re hungry, stop in for some real good food!

 

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