How to boost your food truck sales by having a contest

How to boost your food truck sales by having a contest

Boost Food Truck Sales With A Contest

Food trucks have a major benefit over their fixed-space, brick-and-mortar restaurant brethren: they can change their location to put themselves right in front of the crowd. Food trucks can park outside of subway exits, near theater doors, and in the middle of high-rise-choked city centers. They can go where the foot traffic is, and that gives them a pretty big advantage when it comes to driving sales.

But even the most strategically placed food truck occasionally needs help boosting business and profits. One way for them to do that is to have a contest.

Why Contests Work

Food truck contests aren’t really about giving away free food and prizes. They are about attracting attention to your truck and getting people to try you for the first time. Contests work because they bring in people who hadn’t heard of you before as well as people who have seen your truck but haven’t tried it.

There’s a secret to turning the temporary business boost provided by a contest into a permanent increase. That secret is to exceed customer expectations with amazing food. So before you get started with your competition, remember that the results will only stick if you give the people who are attracted to the contest a reason to come back when the contest is over.

Food Truck Contest Ideas

There are an overwhelming amount of ideas you can try, such as:

-Hosting a food eating contest

-Holding a monthly drawing for a free meal

-Providing free coffee or snacks to an office

-Having a menu item naming contest

-Designing a sandwich or combo creation contest

In designing your contest, remember to use your mobility to your advantage. For example, if you have a contest awarding free drinks to the staff of an entire office, you can move your food truck to their location and stay there, so the employees might try your food and snacks throughout the day, even after getting their free drinks.

Also, if you have a fun competition-style event, like a food eating contest, let the media know. The more attention you can bring to yourself, the better!

Before you start your contest, make sure your branding is done so that everyone who enters the contest has a strong brand element to remember and has unique ways to describe your truck to other people. For help with branding and food truck design, visit California Cart Builder.