Own a restaurant or food truck, but aren’t sure if you should take time to publish a blog? The reality is if you’re operating any type of food business finding the time to sit down and write a blog post or record a video won’t be easy. After all, you’ve got a business to grow and customers to serve.
Truth be told, if you own a restaurant and are trying to decide what type of marketing tactic you should invest your limited time and effort into, we don’t recommend blogging as the first option. There are plenty of other ways that are going to get you a faster return by driving more customers to your business.
Some faster ways to increase awareness of your business online include focusing on generating positive reviews for your restaurant on websites like Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook. Consumers use these websites to discover new places to eat and decide where they want to dine. Other strategies such as offering coupons or limited time discounts work well to drive more immediate traffic to your establishment. Both ideas will bring diners to you faster than a blog ever could.
Is Blogging Right For Your Food Truck Business?
The Benefits of Publishing a Blog
After reading the first section of this post, it might feel like we don’t believe in blogging. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Assuming you have the time and ability to publishing entertaining or helpful content regularly, it can deliver an astronomical return on investment. The point is you aren’t going to realize the benefits today, this week, this month, or even this year if you’re just starting out.
But if you can push through a couple years blogging and come out the other side, you’ll realize some incredible benefits like massive awareness and increased loyalty. Essentially, you’ll have a digital magazine that people enjoy consuming regularly.
We’ve found our blog to be extremely helpful in educating food truck owners about running a food truck and answer frequently asked questions about operating business. Consistently blogging has helped us grow our business, but it didn’t happen overnight.
Blog Ideas You Can Start Writing About Now
Of course, simply setting up a blog or not putting much effort into the posts you publish isn’t going to get you far. Getting traction with your blog will have a lot to do with your consistency publishing and quality of content. The easiest way to ensure consistency is to set a schedule for yourself. For example, you could make a commitment to publish two blog posts per week for the next two years. This sort of commitment will take a lot of time, but it’s what’s required if you want to see results. Due to the length of time required to get any results is why we recommend other marketing methods first.
After you’ve got a schedule in place, it’s time to come up with a list of ideas to write about and publish on your blog. Keep in mind that you could publish all sorts of multimedia content on your blog including text, audio in the form of a podcast, images, or video. In fact, the more ways you can include video and imagery the better your posts will be.
Below is a list of topics ideas you can use that work well for both a restaurant, food truck, or any type of food business really. These ideas are intended to be interesting and or helpful to the right person. More than half of the restaurants trying out a blog get their content wrong initially because they only write about themselves or what they write is extremely boring. Don’t expect to get any results with boring content. It won’t work. You can start with these ideas below to get started the right way.
Cooking Demonstrations: Whether you operate a food truck or restaurant, you’re going to be in the kitchen cooking different meals all the time. Why not use this time to demonstrate to prospective customers how you make the food? This is the ideal way to generate high-quality blog content while being productive in the kitchen. You may even find a certain chef or yourself has a great personality and works well on the camera. These individuals are perfect to feature.
Notice I said you could record a cooking demonstration. You won’t need any special equipment for this as most cell phone cameras are good enough to pull this off. From there you can upload the video into YouTube or Facebook and embed the video into a blog post on your website. Follow this process and you’ll have an effective way to develop blog and social media content.
Test Menu Items: You should also be coming up with exciting new menu items for your restaurant. Testing out new items, even if you don’t plan to put them on the menu is the ideal type of content for a blog. People love to give their opinion on almost anything and testing out new menu ideas and getting feedback from your audience on if you should keep it is a great way to encourage people to participate and get involved in your brand. You could even create a “secret” test menu for hard-core customers.
Interviews: You shouldn’t only talk about yourself in a blog. In fact, it will help you out a lot of you feature other people and businesses. One way to generate content while featuring other businesses is to conduct interviews of other people. We recommend publishing either print or recorded interviews with chefs or other restaurant owners in the area. Asking for an interview is an effective way to start a relationship with someone you’ve never met and help to build awareness of your spot among influential folks in a market. The more local relationships you can build in your market the more opportunities will generally be sent your way.
Promote Events: Any time you serve a corporate catering event, work with a non-profit on a fundraiser or attend a local event like a fair it’s an opportunity to publish a recap about the event on your blog. Other businesses or event promoters love it when you help you promote their stuff on social media or a website. Doing so can also be interesting to attendees and it’s yet another opportunity to produce content of interest to a local audience.
In conclusion, blogging serve as the publishing focal point for your restaurant or food truck. But you’ve got to be willing to put in the time and effort before you will see all the positive results even with a list of content topic ideas.
