Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Posted on October 2, 2023April 22, 2024 by Sarah

Educational

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing

If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically changed from the era of catchy jingles, newspaper ads, billboards, and TV commercials. Today, the name of the game is experiential marketing, and user-generated content (UGC) it sparks is the key to its success.

UGC is any content consumers create that features a brand, usually posted on social media. It helps build trust, encourages authenticity, and allows customers to get to know your brand through their peers.

So, since UGC doesn’t come from spending late nights at the drawing board brainstorming TV ads, a la Mad Men, how do you get customers to use the power of their platforms to promote your brand?

The answer is simple: create experiences people want to share with the world.

Create an Experience that Drives UGC

Promoting UGC is a two-way street: You provide consumers with a fun, memorable experience, and they provide you with content that helps boost your messaging. Very few people are likely to interact with a run-of-the-mill ad (seeing an ad on Instagram isn’t really an experience, after all), so one of the best strategies for achieving this dynamic is to create live, interactive campaigns for people to engage with.

Take a look at a few examples of campaigns that generated a wealth of UGC:

- Laneige x innisfree Glow On The Go Tour: FTP built a custom truck that went on tour to promote two of K-beauty’s biggest brands. Glazed donuts, scratch-off tickets, and many selfie opportunities gave people plenty of reasons to post.

Gisou Honey Glow Pop-Up Truck: Between the honey lemonade, product samples, and customization station that allowed guests to bedazzle their own lip oil, this campaign made it almost impossible for consumers not to want to spread the word.

Loungefly’s Minnie Mouse Glass Truck: Nostalgia was at the heart of this campaign, celebrating one of everyone’s favorite childhood icons. Polka dots galore, complementary pastel boba lemonade, and multiple photo moments led to people posting, unleashing their inner child in droves.

Many people view social media as a form of escapism (we know we’re guilty), which is why people are so likely to post and engage with content that transports them to another world. Whether it’s feeling like a kid at Disney World, letting creativity flow with an art project, or getting to indulge in a sweet treat, experiential marketing brings people out of the ordinary world into an extraordinary experience.

Tips for Integrating Experiential Marketing and UGC

If you’re ready to start leveraging the power of experiential marketing, FTP has a few tips and tricks that will help your brand inspire consumers to create and share authentic content. Take a look:

Make Posting Easy: Posts are more helpful when the creator tags your brand, so it’s crucial to make doing so easy. Create a catchy hashtag, use QR codes, and ensure your social handle is highly visible.
Provide Incentives to Post: As we said, UGC is a two-way street, so it’s helpful to provide consumers with tangible reasons to create content. Contests, drawings, and giveaways that require a tagged post for entry are good strategies.
Bring Influencers on Board: Enlisting the help of an influencer can create social media buzz around your campaign that often translates into consumers posting their own content.

Keeping these tips in mind as you conceptualize your experiential marketing campaign will help make the UGC element of the experience feel natural.

Get Ready to Harness the Power of UGC

When it comes to valuable marketing tools, UGC is an MVP. Not only will harnessing the power of UGC get the word out about your brand, but it will also help you expand your network of loyal consumers. When you use experiential marketing as the foundation of your UGC approach, you’re showing the world that your ultimate goal is to connect in a way that’s memorable, fun, and based on bringing people joy.

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

It’s been a big year here at Food Truck Promotions. With the holidays on the horizon and the new year quickly approaching, we’ve been looking back

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically

Rendering of a Barbie themed pink airstream with a water slide a pool and people enjoying the event.

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype

Sensory Marketing: Exploring How Our Taste Buds Sell Us

Posted on January 18, 2023April 24, 2024 by Claudia

Educational

What Is Sensory Marketing?

Sensory marketing is a tactic that brands employ to stimulate and engage different senses— sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch— in order to leave a positive impression on customers. It’s based in the idea that when you appeal to a consumer’s senses, it’s easier to capture their attention and create an emotional bond, opening the door to a wide range of business opportunities and potential marketing campaigns.

Think about it: hardly anyone can think of Abercrombie without thinking of the distinct smell of cologne that fills the store. At first, this may seem insignificant, but when you examine the retail choice more closely, you realize that it leaves a visceral connection between consumers and the Abercrombie brand.

Along with smell, sensory marketing can be aimed at any or all of the senses, like taste. Below we discuss the benefits of sensory marketing at large, and more pointedly, how our taste buds sell us. Let’s dive in.

The Benefits of Sensory Marketing

Appealing to sight is the oldest and most obvious from of sensory marketing, with visually appealing commercials, billboards, and magazine ads dating back to as early as the 1940s.

Since then, many companies have discovered the benefits of sensory marketing, and today, sensory marketing is widely recognized as a critical tool for strengthening the connection between brand and consumer by stimulating all the senses and generating emotions.

Over the years, companies have been able to create more complex and out-of-the-box ways to produce multi-sensory experiences for their consumers. For instance, Kit Kat commercials began not just appealing to our visual side, but including a unique ‘crack’ sound for buyers to associate with their product:

In the same vein, Victoria Secret began playing classical music in their stores to invoke a feeling of exclusive, elevated shopping. Through different approaches to experiential marketing, you can also design a hands-on activity that appeals to touch, like a branded game or merch to take home.

What businesses have discovered is that better than any other marketing strategy, sensory marketing can strengthen brand-to-consumer connections in both the rational and emotional parts of the brain.

Sensory branding also taps into the subconscious parts of decision-making and behaviors, which motivates much more of people’s behavior than scientists used to think. Some studies even say that as much as 95% of our buying decisions are made in the subconscious mind!

Appealing to Buyers' Sense of Taste

Taste marketing would soon enter into the cultural zeitgeist with Pepsi’s “blind-taste test” campaigns that have been routinely featured since 1975. But still, when it comes to sensory marketing, taste is the most overlooked of all five senses.

The lack of marketing strategies geared toward this part of our cognitive and emotional behavior paves the way for your brand to do something that no other business seems to be doing: using taste to affect consumers’ perception, judgment, and buying behavior.

As you might imagine, employing sensory marketing to appeal to the sense of taste comes easiest when you’re a food or beverage company. For instance, if you’re an ice cream brand, something as simple as producing a pop-up that gives away free ice cream in the summertime can drive up sales by a considerable amount.

However, it’s important to note that incorporating taste into experiential marketing events can be done across all industries. From fashion brands to tech companies, appealing to buyers’ sense of taste proves to be an extremely effective way to create positive brand affiliations.

This is because like with all senses, you can tailor tastes to be relevant to your audience. If you’re a fashion brand promoting a holiday collection, for example, you can hand out seasonal drinks that aligns with the spirit of the holiday season and your line.

Time and time again, sensory marketing proves that the best way to consumers’ hearts is through their stomachs. To prove it, let’s look more closely at how both food & beverage brands and brands in other industries have incorporate taste buds to sell their customers.

Successful Taste Marketing Events By Food & Beverage Brands

Fever-Tree

In 2022, Fever-Tree went on a mobile tour, stopping in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Austin to get their mixers directly in the hands of consumers through free, specialty crafted mocktails. For a brand like Fever-Tree, using product sampling is a clear and effective way of gaining brand awareness and loyalty; after all, digital marketing— no matter how catchy the commercial jingle or memorable the social media ad— simply can’t show consumers whether or not your product is worth buying in the moment. Instead, a live, product sampling event proves to consumers that you believe in the quality of your product through a direct, face-to-face experience.

GoPuff

GoPuff is another example of a food & beverage company that appealed to taste using experiential marketing. Rather than just producing a billboard or doubling down on their digital marketing efforts, GoPuff thought out of the box: what if we encouraged app sign-ups by handing out some of the products that people can order for delivery one they have a subscription? And the products they chose were strategic: New York staples that were sure to pull on New Yorkers’ heartstrings, like Serendipity ice cream, Carbone pasta sauce, and hot cocoa (a seasonal favorite) from the GoPuff kitchen. This teaser was the perfect way to encourage consumers to associate the brands they love with GoPuff and to see more of what GoPuff had to offer by downloading the app.

Forager Project

Forager Project’s vegan ice cream made its way to nine different locations across San Francisco in a fully-stocked branded food truck that gave people the opportunity to sample Cookies & Cream, Chocolate, and Vanilla. The priority of this campaign was getting Forager Project’s delicious product in as many hands as possible, from the biggest fans to the biggest critics of dairy-free ice cream. For maximum effect, guests had the choice of signing up for the Forager newsletter or following Forager on Instagram to get their choice of an ice cream sample and a coupon code to buy the delicious, dairy-free product in-store.

Taste Marketing Campaigns By Brands In Different Industries

Even though sensory marketing geared towards consumers’ sense of taste is more straight-forward when you’re a food and beverage company, brands in any industry can find creative ways to use tasty food or drink to amplify their brand name.

Let’s take a look at three stand-out examples.

Olly

Handing out samples of Olly‘s new Immunity Supplements wasn’t enough to highlight the brand’s holistic approach to wellness; that’s why our agency also used the mobile pop-up to serve specialty matcha lattés, a beverage that stayed on brand with Olly’s health and wellness theme. The complimentary café service was an excellent way of using sensory marketing to warm up consumers up on a cold winter day and foster loyalty to Olly’s brand name.

Instagram

Instagram made a splash during Latin Week 2021 by serving free ice cream right from the beach! If a branded ice cream truck parked right on the beach isn’t attention-drawing or ‘Miami’ enough, the promotion also featured appearances from artists like Farruko and Manuel Turizo, which attracted an even bigger crowd of beach-goers to grab free ice cream! This is one of many examples of how meshing a marketing campaign with the sense of taste can boost a brand on social media or otherwise.

Chanel

Chanel utilized taste marketing to produce a pop-up that cleverly served ‘Hot-Coco’ after their world-renowned designer, Coco Chanel. The rich and creamy Hot Coco entertained guest with a luxury treat on a cold winter day, cultivating thousands of new relationships and strengthening old ones.

Sensory marketing is a tactic that brands employ to appeal to buyers’ senses to create lasting brand-to-consumer connections.
Taste is the most over looked of all the senses in terms of sensory marketing, which gives your brand a huge opportunity to stand out from competitors.
Companies in all industries- not just food & beverage- can use taste marketing to sell their products or services via pop-up shops, cafés, mobile tours, and more.

FTP – Sensory Marketing Experts

Here at Food Truck Promotions, we are well-versed in sensory marketing & taste marketing. Contact us today to learn more and get started!

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

It’s been a big year here at Food Truck Promotions. With the holidays on the horizon and the new year quickly approaching, we’ve been looking back

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype

Everything You Need to Know About Mobile Marketing Tours

Posted on November 23, 2022April 29, 2024 by britney

Educational

Brands are always looking for new ways to get noticed and win over their target audience. Thankfully, one of the best ways to accomplish this is through mobile marketing tours. So, what is this marketing strategy and how can you use it to your advantage?

In this blog, we will discuss everything you need to know about mobile marketing tours, including strategies and examples.

What Are Mobile Marketing Tours?

Mobile marketing tours are a form of experiential marketing, in which a brand creates an interactive consumer experience in multiple locations within a state, country, or even internationally.

Held in public areas like festivals, concerts, fairs, stadiums, malls, parks, on city streets, mobile tours can take place anytime of year, with summer being the most popular season given the higher concentration of consumers spending time outdoors.

Usually, they will take place from a branded vehicle and incorporate elements like a prize wheel, product sampling, free giveaways, and anything else to appeal to your target audience and keep them engaged with your brand for a significant period of time.

Why Use Mobile Marketing Tours as Your Marketing Strategy?

The reason mobile tours are so attractive is because they allow you to create a larger footprint and spread your message in multiple markets, while still delivering an intimate, one-on-one experience.

When a mobile tour is done right, it can be extremely cost-effective and successful. Especially when you’re presenting new products, product sampling tours display confidence in what you’re selling and goes a long way in earning consumer trust!

It’s definitely worth knowing that mobile tours are great for driving up sales in the short-term, but really, the greatest advantage of this experiential marketing strategy is the long-lasting relationships you’ll create.

Below you’ll take a look at the success we’ve had with brands across all industries.

Examples of Experiential Mobile Tours

Fever-Tree

The Fever-Tree Mixer Truck has already made stops in New York, Austin, and Los Angeles, with Miami last on the brand’s list! From the truck, guests all over the country have been able sample delicious Fever-Tree flavors in refreshing mocktails! Plus, all guests have taken home a complimentary four-pack in tote bags!

Rose Inc

Rose Inc promoted their skin serum by teaming up with Food Truck Promotions to create an international mobile marketing tour, hitting major cities like London, Los Angeles, and New York. First, guests were educated about the micro-encapsulated makeup collection, then they received a complimentary hot cocoa and an exclusive gift from Space NK and Sephora.

Gerry’s Partisan Pizza

RepresentUS and Food Truck Promotions partnered up to create the “Gerry’s Partisan Pizza” mobile tour, traveling to five states and nine gerrymandered cities, serving pizza with a side of education. These locations included everywhere from Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina, Annapolis, Maryland, Tallahassee and Orlando, Florida, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and finally, Appleton and Madison, Wisconsin.

Aerie

What screams ‘breakfast in bed’ more than Aerie’s cute and cozy ‘Waffle’ clothing line? To get the word out about the launch, Aerie served tasty branded Belgian Boys waffles on an impressive US mobile tour, hitting multiple cities like New York City, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, and DC. These big stops were the perfect destinations to grow awareness about Aerie’s new look, so in an extra effort to stay in theme and draw attention, Food Truck Promotions wrapped the truck in a one-of-a-kind waffle design that suited the tour perfectly. On top of the complimentary Belgian Boys branded waffles, the mobile tour offered Aerie socks and Aerie coupons to redeem in store or online to drive up store traffic.

Alpha Foods

Teamed up with Alpha Foods, we fully customized a food truck and turned it into a product sampling pop-up to create buzz around the brand’s delicious vegan options. We visited seven different college campuses across Los Angeles and New York, including NYU, Cornell, Columbia, FIT, Fordham, USC, and UCLA.

College students had the option of choosing between breakfast sandwiches, spicy maple BBQ chick’n nuggets, chick’n fajita burritos, or steak ranchero burritos, all of which were meatless and mouthwatering. As they waited for their food, guests had the opportunity to sign up and enter for a chance to win a fully stocked Alpha Foods freezer!

Westgold Butter

The brand drove a food truck around southern California and created a 12-day, one-of-a-kind mobile butter bar to launch their butter in the USA. In addition to sampling Westgold butter, guests were welcomed to an interactive photo-booth moment, given bounce back cards and tote bags, and invited to enter an exciting raffle!

The raffle winner was awarded the ultimate gift: a kitchen supply set accompanied by a whole month’s worth of butter! With all of these elements sewn together, there’s no doubt that southern California was left knowing just how delicious Westgold Butter really is.

Nespresso

In 2019, Nespresso partnered with Food Truck Promotions for a six-week cross-country, mobile tour, promoting the brand’s “Nordic Limited Edition Coffee.” With a branded mobile showroom showcasing their new flavors and coffee and espresso machines, Nespresso traveled to New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami. By offering complimentary samples of both hot and iced coffees, Nespresso brought their products directly to a diverse audience and gave them a taste of their luxury coffee.

Useful Mobile Tour Tips

Prep time. Allow enough time to prepare between pre-production and the launch of your mobile tour so that you can seriously and thoroughly consider all of the logistical elements of a moving activation like this.

Implement a call to action. If your plan is to present or sample products, make sure you’re able to turn samples into sales with bounce back cards, promo codes, etc.

Scout locations. Location is so important, and you want to consider two main factors: 1) foot-traffic 2) target audience. A place with high foot-traffic is great, but it’s only optimal if it’s a destination you’ll be sure to find the consumers you’re actually going after.

Get Started on Your Mobile Marketing Tour

If you’re on the hunt for a marketing campaign that sticks, a mobile marketing tour should be at the top of your list. To discuss mobile tour possibilities at greater length, get on the phone with our team!

Top 10 Best Pop-Ups of 2023

It’s been a big year here at Food Truck Promotions. With the holidays on the horizon and the new year quickly approaching, we’ve been looking back

Creating Experiences That Drive UGC

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing If you are interested in modern marketing, you already know that the advertising world has dramatically

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Market!

There’s no doubt about it — Barbie is back. Everyone’s favorite childhood dream girl is hitting the big screen on July 21, and the hype

How You Can Use Marketing Vehicles to Drive Growth

Posted on November 8, 2022April 29, 2024 by britney

Educational

Let’s say you’re a makeup brand looking to get your newest product in the hands of consumers. Most marketing strategies (social media ads, commercials, and traditional billboards) can’t accomplish this, so what do you do? Well, many brands will attest that the best answer is to turn to experiential marketing, and specifically, to mobile experiential marketing via marketing vehicles!

So, what are marketing vehicles? Marketing vehicles are anything on wheels— buses, cars, trucks— that are branded in a company’s colors/logo and designed to provide a specific brand-to-consumer experience.

To continue with the situation outlined above, product sampling in and of itself isn’t a new phenomenon, and many companies will opt into sampling stands in malls or a storefront. However, the more cutting edge version of getting consumers to engage with your blush or lipstick takes place via promotional vehicles.

For a makeup brand, this experience might take the form of a makeover from a branded truck window, but for businesses in other industries, this might mean a mobile café and showroom, a temporary clothing shop that’s located inside a branded bus, and so much more. Because promotional vehicles are so customizable, the possibilities are truly endless.

Why Opt In to Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing at large is a unique, convenient, and dynamic way of pushing your business goals forward, offering a more interpersonal alternative to traditional advertising methods. Simply put, a face-to-face experience leaves a much greater impact than one of the hundred ads you scroll past on Instagram.

Especially with so much noise on social media and in the digital space, experiential marketing is one the marketing industry’s hottest trends in 2022.

But, again, it’s worth knowing that within experiential marketing, there are even more benefits associated with marketing vehicles and mobile marketing. Below you’ll learn more about the benefits of using promotional vehicles specifically, and find out which vehicle makes the most sense for your brand to utilize this year.

Benefits of Mobile Experiential Marketing Versus Other Experiential Marketing

Why are promotional vehicles such a valuable sub-tool of experiential marketing? Well, a mobile activation is a great alternative to a traditional pop-up shop for a handful of reasons. First and foremost, branded vehicles are inherently attention-grabbing, so they get brands noticed quickly. There’s nothing like seeing Chanel’s iconic rouge plastered onto a luxury tuk tuk, just take a look at the photos below!

At the same time— different from a traditional storefront— the mobility of a truck allows you to occupy unconventional and exciting locations. This results in an extra ‘wow’ factor, as walker byers stop to check out a promotional vehicle in an unexpected location.

In the case of the recent pop-up we produced for Simon Schuster’s release of “It Starts With Us” by Colleen Hoover, we were able to surprise guests by activating near the iconic Rockefeller Center.

Plus, if your marketing campaign goes beyond just one day, then the transportability of a promotional vehicle means you can reach a wider audience, which results in a bigger bang for your buck than a traditional, stand-still pop-up.

A Guide to Different Promotional Vehicles

Promotional vehicles across the board can help accomplish similar goals— brand awareness, sales increase, product release— but they also each possess unique characteristics that are important to know when you choose which your brand will use.

Some of the most common promotional vehicles are trucks, carts, double decker buses, vintage citroens, tuk tuks, glass trucks, and trikes. Let’s talk about what each of those vehicles are, and why they may or may not be the right fit for your brand promotion.

Food Trucks

Trucks, and specifically food trucks, are excellent promotional vehicles for many reasons. Via a food truck, your company can design a variety of appealing culinary experiences, like one where consumers are guided to sign up for your app in exchange for free ice cream or panini.

Or, if you happen to be a food and beverage brand, the food truck offers you all the equipment you need to serve your own product and make people fall in love. Compared to other vehicles, food trucks are also the best for heading on a mobile tour. In the case where you might be looking to target different markets, this vehicle makes it easy for you to get from point A to point B in style.

Food Cart

Food carts are smaller than food trucks and offer different advantages. The two main pros of using a food cart are the window display and parking flexibility. From the window display, you can show off a certain product or brand merch that instantly catches people’s eyes. The parking flexibility can be a real advantage, too, when you are activating somewhere like New York, with crowded and small sidewalk spaces. Keep in mind though that food carts are not as transportable as food trucks which means they might not be the best vehicle for mobile tour use.

Double Decker Bus

The double decker bus is one of the most dynamic vehicles you can use. The spaciousness of the vehicle— with the interior, exterior, and rooftop floor— allows you to implement so many different features that add to your interactive brand experience. When we worked with Laniege to promote their Water Bank Hydration Collection, for example, the brand was able to incorporate everything from a prize wheel and photo booth to a sampling station and candy wall.

If you’re looking for a truly dynamic and extensive brand promotion, this vehicle definitely suits you; however, if you’re looking for a simpler and more cost-effective approach, then a double decker bus may not be necessary to accomplish your business goals.

Trike

Also known as a bike cart, billboard cycle, ad bike, or vending tricycle, trikes are experiential marketing bikes that allow direct consumer engagement while also being environmentally sustainable. When you want to give your brand visibility in multiple, outdoor locations per day, trikes are the perfect way to do it. Some of the perks to trikes is that they don’t require a permit, they’re cost-effective, and they make the perfect accessory vehicle.

Vintage Citroen

If you are looking to exude luxury and elegance, then the vintage citroen is the obvious choice for your upcoming branded promotion. These vehicles have a truly distinctive appearance that inherently generate buzz and inspire photo-ops for social media, and are conducive to an in-person experience just as impactful. Depending on your budget, this vehicle may be the perfect choice to elevate your entire brand experience.

Tuk Tuk

Full of character and cutting edge, tuk tuks have been a high demand vehicle for many brands, especially for those within the fashion industry. Whether you want to activate indoors, at street-level, or head on a mobile tour, these charming three-wheeled electric carts are perfect for when space is limited, but you still want to turn heads.

Glass Truck

Glass trucks are valuable for high product visibility, travel, and interior design. The glass truck is one of our larger vehicles, and there’s no doubt that the openness of this vehicle creates immersive experiences that guarantees customers fall in love with your brand. Bacardi used our glass truck to create a holiday pop up shop in the heart of Times Square that featured celebrity appearances, a flash mob, and so much more.

Achieve Your Goals with a Marketing Vehicle

When you consider using the experiential marketing approach, remember the incredible value of marketing vehicles.

Promotional vehicles like the ones you learned about above can be a really helpful way to interact with your target audience and drive your company goals forward.

If you want to get in touch with your sales team and discuss your creative direction more extensively, contact us! We look forward to helping you bring your brand to life.

Why UGC is a Key to Successful Modern Marketing

Create an Experience that Drives UGC

Tips for Integrating Experiential Marketing and UGC

Get Ready to Harness the Power of UGC

What Is Sensory Marketing?

The Benefits of Sensory Marketing

Appealing to Buyers' Sense of Taste

Successful Taste Marketing Events By Food & Beverage Brands

Taste Marketing Campaigns By Brands In Different Industries

Key Takeaways

FTP – Sensory Marketing Experts

What Are Mobile Marketing Tours?

Why Use Mobile Marketing Tours as Your Marketing Strategy?

Examples of Experiential Mobile Tours

Useful Mobile Tour Tips

Get Started on Your Mobile Marketing Tour

Why Opt In to Experiential Marketing?

Benefits of Mobile Experiential Marketing Versus Other Experiential Marketing

A Guide to Different Promotional Vehicles

Double Decker Bus

Achieve Your Goals with a Marketing Vehicle