Hiring a marketing agency for a food truck: what to check

Mid-February is when truck owners start thinking about marketing. In the North the truck is parked and the owner finally has an evening free. In Florida, Texas and Arizona the truck is working and the spring event calendar is not filling. Either way, the agency pitches land now.

Most of those pitches were written for a business with a front door. A truck has no address to show, a schedule that changes daily, two kinds of customer who decide in different ways, and a permit that limits where it can sell. Miss that, and the plan looks fine in a proposal and fails on a Tuesday.

Here is what we would ask from your side of the table, including of us.

How would you set up my Google profile, with no storefront?

This question sorts agencies fastest. Google’s Business Profile guidelines do not mention food trucks. Whitespark, which studies local search, pointed that out in March 2025: Google’s local results are full of trucks, and there is not one line in the guidelines written for them.

So the setup has to come from the general rules. Google says a business that serves customers where they are, with no storefront open to the public, gets one service-area profile and should hide its address. A shown address needs permanent fixed signage, which a commissary kitchen or your driveway does not have. Service areas are set by city or postal code, up to 20 of them, within about two hours’ drive of the base.

A good answer: a service-area profile with the base address hidden, service areas that match where your permit lets you sell, seasonal hours handled properly, and a link to a page on your site that says where the truck is this week.

A worrying answer: “We will verify it at your commissary and show the address so you rank.” That is the setup most likely to get a truck’s profile suspended, and you would be the one rebuilding it in May.

Where will this week’s stops live?

Instagram Stories are where most trucks announce today’s spot, and they disappear after a day. Google cannot read them, and neither can the AI assistants people now ask for local recommendations. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, published last week, found 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, against 6% a year earlier.

Whitespark’s advice for trucks is to link the profile to your website “for a full description of wherever your truck is located” and to use Google Updates (Posts) and social media for timely location news. In practice that means one weekly schedule, posted every Monday to a page on your site, to a Google Update and to Facebook and Instagram.

Location posts can even be official. Los Angeles County requires trucks to file a route sheet with the address and arrival and departure times of each stop, and it accepts a Facebook post or a post on Instagram, Yelp or similar as an approved way to submit it. An agency that treats your posts as filler has not looked at the trade.

Ask who writes the weekly schedule and what happens the day the truck breaks down.

What would you do for private and office bookings?

A street stop is bought in two minutes by someone hungry and nearby. A booked event is bought weeks ahead by an office manager, an apartment community manager, a couple or a planner. In our experience, these buyers want to see four things before they reply: proof of insurance and a current health permit, a menu with the dietary options marked, photos of the truck at an event like theirs, and some sign that you answer quickly.

Ask the agency what your booking page will contain and what the inquiry form will ask. A useful form asks the date, the headcount, the venue type and whether the host pays or guests buy at the window, because those two kinds of event are worth very different amounts to you. A plan with no booking page is a street-only plan, and the street is the part you already handle yourself.

How will you get reviews, and what will you refuse to do?

In the same BrightLocal survey, 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20, and 74% only care about reviews written in the last three months. For a Northern truck that last figure has a sting: by April, last summer’s reviews are already more than three months old.

The Federal Trade Commission’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials took effect on October 21, 2024. It bans incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment. A “free drink for a five-star review” sign taped to the window is exactly that. The answer you want: every customer and every event host gets asked, nothing is offered for a rating, and complaints are answered rather than filtered out.

What would you sell me that I cannot use?

• Local Services Ads. Google’s category list has no food truck entry. Its dining pilot covers sit-down restaurant types in five cities, and Google says the Google Verified badge is unavailable for dining. An agency that pitches Local Services Ads to a truck has not checked.
• Ads in cities you cannot serve. Health permits are local in most states, so an ad that sends customers to a city where you are not licensed wastes money and invites trouble. Texas is changing: under House Bill 2844, passed in May 2025, Texas trucks need a single state license from the Department of State Health Services from July 1, 2026, in place of a license from each local health department. Until then, and outside Texas, ad targeting should follow your permits.

Paid search can earn a place, mostly for event bookings. WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2025 benchmarks, covering April 2024 to March 2025, put the median Google search click in Restaurants & Food at $2.05 and the median cost per lead at $30.27. Those are restaurant-wide medians, not truck figures, and a good agency says so.

What the first ninety days should look like

A sensible plan puts being findable first: the profile fixed, the schedule page live, and the same name and menu on Google, Yelp, and Facebook and Instagram. Then the booking page and a review routine, then a follow-up to every past host. Inquiry tracking by source should run from the first weeks, not arrive when the season is over.

What to do this month

• Open your own Google profile and check whether it shows an address. If it shows your house or the commissary, plan to fix it before spring.
• Start a weekly schedule page on your website, even a plain one, and link it from the profile.
• Write down your proof for event bookers: insurance certificate, permit, menu with dietary options, three good photos from past events.
• Count your Google reviews from the last three months. If there are fewer than a handful, start asking every customer now.
• Ask every agency you talk to the five questions above, and note who answers with specifics.

If you want to see how a truck’s profile should be built, our Google Business Profile page walks through it, and the food truck marketing page covers the season, the booking side and the rules that shape both. Our approach to an honest review routine is there too.