Catapulting a social strategy for a local Greek food truck empire
The Challenge
How do you make a food truck stand out on social channels in a small town where the competition is fierce and new favorites are popping up every month?
The Approach
We did a deep dive on social strategy and established a cohesive brand look to project a purposeful presence across platforms and prioritized growth to help drive sales.
Spreading Greek cuisine along the Gulf Coast.
Greek’s Catering was born in 2015 as a catering and concessions company by Stelios and Cristin with a desire to share their love for Greek cuisine with their community in Pensacola, Florida. Since then, the company has grown to offer full catering capabilities and four food trucks, one that travels “On the Go” and three other stationary locations.
Like many businesses that enjoy exciting amounts of growth, the marketing and social media had fallen to the wayside as operations took up the majority of the proprietors’ time and energy. They reached out to us at HatchMark Studio to help manage their social media to take a big rock off their plate so that they could stay focused on running the business.
To kick off our relationship, we met with the Greek’s team to dive into the gaps in their communications and social strategy, and how we would solve them. We identified what they were doing well, what they could be doing better, and what they needed to start doing. From there, we recognized that there was a specific need to create consistency in both overall look and feel of the posts and develop a cadence. Food trucks are an in-the-moment game on social media. When people are hungry, they want to know what you have going on. Now.
Together, we put together a multi-channel strategy that spanned both organic and paid that would ensure Greek’s is at the top of locals’ minds when hunger strikes.
In-the-moment posting is always going to be a key piece for food and beverage social media. But that doesn’t eliminate the need for well-thought-out, monthly social calendars with strategy and the latest trends brought to life. Furthermore, staying a month ahead on the social calendar meant that we had an opportunity to plan out the entire grid aesthetic, giving first-time visitors a clean, buttoned up experience upon interacting with the brand that was equal parts professional and mouthwatering.
To support the designed elements for social, we knew that top-flight photography and short, snappy videos for trending reels was going to be key in creating a dynamic social calendar. We worked alongside the entire operations team at Greeks’ to coordinate and shoot content that showcased the menu items, Greek’s lifestyle, and offered a peek behind the curtain to see how all of people’s favorite items are made in the kitchen. The result is a social feed that is content diverse and jumps off the screen with plenty of opportunities for engagement.
Throughout our entire portfolio of social media management clients, we’ve found overwhelming success through the power of the partner giveaway. And with Instagram’s new collaborator feature, we have opportunities to reach an even larger audience than ever before.
The Greek’s team was enthusiastic about partnering with select vendors to create several can’t-miss giveaways that ignited their engagement and continued to grow their online following. Additionally, Greek’s was able to broker a partnership with a local pizza food truck called Flourish to collaborate on a limited-time offer, creating excitement and cross-promotion between two loyal followings.
Even though a powerful organic strategy is the foundation of every successful social account, leveraging paid is a proven way to add the icing on the cake. With a monthly budget in place and continuous monitoring, we are able to take real-time data to determine which posts are performing best through A/B paid testing and supercharge posts through Meta Ads.
We regularly review what is performing, what is falling short, and add any upcoming promotions to the mix. For example, an impending holiday season means a big push for catering orders. We run both general awareness ads for the food truck, paired with catering ads with a strong call to action to drive interest for high-volume orders.
