We’ve covered a lot of different approaches to market your food truck in this series. Some of them are free others are paid services, but a very affordable.
In this post we will be covering Pinterest for marketing your food truck. If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it began as a free online scrapbooking service and attracted mostly female users.
The Concept behind Pinterest is whenever a user found an image they liked while browsing a website, they could “pin it” to one of their Pinterest boards and share it with others.
Making Pinterest a social network that features images instead of text. If an image that is shared is popular, it can be re-pinned by other users and go viral in the process.
At the time of this post Pinterest has a reported 250+ million users, which includes 77.4 in the United States. It reaches 83% of US women ages 25-54.
There are some businesses that have a hard time using Pinterest to promote themselves but food trucks aren’t one of them.
Because it’s an image platform it fits perfectly with the approach we discussed about posting food pics with write-ups on your website’s blog. When you pin pics and video to your Pinterest board you will not only be giving others the ability to find your food images and pin them, you are also creating a back link to your website and that improves your authority ranking and bolsters your website Search Engine Optimization.
Creating the names for your “Boards” where you would like your pics to show up is something you want to do before you start pinning images.
Boards are the name of the collection of images, think of it as a category or a folder, so you will want to make sure it makes sense, that way Pinterest users can easily identify if your board is of interest to them and follow one or all of your boards.
Here’s some examples Board Names for our fictitious food truck Jimmy’s Taco Truck:
Jimmy’s Taco Truck
Cool Food Trucks
Street Eats
Street Food
Taco Tuesday Everyday
Miami Food Truck
Miami Lunch Scene
Having the list ahead of time doesn’t mean you have to use them all right away, create the board when you have images on your website that make sense, and then add to the board from that point forward.
Remember, you are allowed to include a description when you pin an image, try to be as detailed as you can when you add your text. When you add detail (which should be descriptive using keywords that people would search for) it increases the chances the person follows your board or clicks through to your website.
Food Truck Pinterest Tips
As with other social accounts you have already set up, you should try to use your food truck name as your profile name. If you have already set up your account and didn’t do that (at the time of this post) you can go back in a change your profile name. This is important because your profile name will be used in the direct web access to your Pinterest page. For Jimmy’s Taco Truck it would look like this: Pinterest.com/JimmysTacoTruck
Filling out your About section when you edit your Profile is very important also, the text you provide will show up under your photo on your Pinterest page. This is useful because it allows users to learn more about your business and the topics you are interested in, this is another great place to insert your website link.
Quick tip: When adding your Pinterest page link to an email or in a blog post remember to start it with https:// for it to be an active link.
Another cool thing about Pinterest is it allows you to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to your profile. When you connect those accounts the icons for each will show up under your profile image and link to those other pages.
To help maximize your reach and exposure to the Pinterest community you will need to pin consistently, and what you are pinning doesn’t always have to be your own images, I suggest mentioning others in your pins.
For instance in our list of board titles above we named one Miami Lunch Scene, that is a great place to support other food trucks and pin some of their food images. So when you do this make sure to use their profile name like this @username (for example Jimmy’s would look like this: @jimmystacotruck)
When you mention others it not only builds good will and strengthens the local food truck community it also provides you with more content and helps create more exposure for your boards and in turn increases your followers. So always pin to promote your images first and mix in others images where it makes sense, taking into consideration what images belong with each board title.
You can pin videos also! So if you have a Youtube channel you can pin those videos, the cool thing about pinning a video is it is so different from a pic it really stands out, and can get you noticed.
Pinterest Food Truck Marketing Wrap-up
To wrap up this post I want for you to get creative and make this approach your own. I suggested some board titles, but you know your business better than anyone. Create boards that are fun, make sense, and inform in an entertaining way with your spin, and your brand’s personality.
You have so much content to pull from, you can feature boards that spotlight employees, the different locations your truck visits, all access behind the scenes pics and video like sourcing ingredients or creating new dishes, merchandise like T-shirts and hats, special events and even catering gigs.
An open mind and a creative eye combined with the popularity of Pinterest is a powerful tool to use in your marketing approach.