Birmingham Food Truck Marketing

My church arranged for a fleet of local food trucks to serve our congregation a fun lunch after a recent Sunday service. I’ve only had the opportunity to enjoy a meal from a food truck once before so I was really looking forward to this experience.

I wanted to be fully prepared for this lunch so once I learned which trucks would be on site, I scouted the web for their menus. I was able to find the information I was seeking as all four food trucks have a website. That each truck has a website is impressive but I was intrigued by the way some of the trucks utilized their site. I’ve listed some of my observations below:

OFF THE HOOK - www.ryouhooked.com

I appreciate the fact that Off the Hook posts their hours of operation right off the bat. Their menu page leaves a lot to the imagination without any photos but boy was their food good! I noticed that they rely on Facebook and Twitter to communicate their whereabouts to hungry patrons. I would bet lunch that Twitter serves them much better in this regard.

SPOONFED GRILL - www.spoonfedgrill.com

This site is little jumbled but all of the info you need is there. Twitter seems to be the social media platform of choice for Spoonfed but I was really impressed that they also rely on Flickr, Friendfeed and StumbleUpon, in addition to Facebook. If you can’t find the Spoonfed truck, it’s your own fault!

MELT - www.meltbham.com

Melt does a lot for their SEO by proclaiming to be a “grilled cheese food truck in Birmingham, Alabama” on their homepage. I like that. This site isn’t very busy and provides quick access to Melt’s Facebook and Twitter pages and they step up the social media game big-time by encouraging visitors to use the hashtag #meltbham. Not a bad site at all.

CANTINA ON WHEELS - www.cantinaonwheels.com

Big, colorful photos of Cantina’s truck and dishes great you as soon as you hit their page. And I love the weekly calendar that shows when and where they’ll be each day. Facebook and Twitter seem to be as important to Cantina as the other trucks as far as informing customers of their location but the Cantina site also encourages visitors to sign up for weekly emails. I think this is what you would want out of your food truck website.

THE RESULTS

These four trucks use a nice combination of websites and social media to communicate their locations to customers. To keep their customers coming back, they need to provide tasty food.

So how did they do at my church? I sampled everything from shrimp tacos to Buffalo chicken sandwiches and I’m here to tell you that they all passed the test! They were all awesome!

UPDATE: A few months after writing this post, I came across this 2013 article in B-Metro. It provides some great insight into the Birmingham Food Truck Boom.