How Technology Is Changing How We Treat Unique Street Marketing

Posted on October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Claire Kelly

Experiential Marketing

With the world of tech growing exponentially, new technology has revolutionized the way we connect with new customers. While more common tactics are falling by the wayside, unique street marketing strategies allow for brands to stand out amongst the pack.

If you want your brand to survive in this competitive business landscape, you’ll want to understand just how important technology is to various forms of unique street marketing.

What is Unique Street Marketing?

Unique street marketing are novel forms of traditional guerilla marketing strategies. These traditional marketing strategies can be as simple as putting up posters, passing out flyers, or commissioning art displays bearing your brand’s name. While these strategies can be effective, they rely on outdated methods of customer connection. As our society enters the technology age, so must our marketing.

How Does Technology Play a Role?

Unique street marketing uses every new form of media at our disposal to advertise a guerilla marketing promotion. Cutting edge marketing tactics like experiential vehicles not only use modern tech to design a customer experience, but ensure high-levels of foot traffic through social media promotion.

These vehicles, along with other forms of experiential marketing, are only possible through the advancements we’ve made in modern technology. Innovative service displays, interactive product demonstrations, social-media boosted promotional events, none of these forms of unique street marketing would be possible without these new kinds of technology. It’s these new advancements that make unique street marketing one of the most effective ways to grow your brand’s image.

What are the Most Effective Forms of Unique Street Marketing?

One of the best ways to ensure your brand garners those valuable activations, and converts promotion attendees into long-term customers, is with experiential vehicles. This type of unique street marketing involves several different variations, including branded food trucks and mobile pop-up shops. So what do these promotions entail?

Branded Food Trucks

Branded food trucks are a way for your brand to connect with customers through the universal language of food. By setting up a positive environment where you identify an issue (hunger) and offer a solution (food), you subconsciously establish your brand as a problem solver.

As brand ambassadors help facilitate this connection, customers begin to associate your brand with those good feelings. Using technology like QR-codes to gather more information, these ambassadors hook the customers in with free samples and special promotions. Before you know it, you have a stream of new long-term customers from a single promotional event.

Mobile Pop-Up Shops

You’ve probably heard of pop-up shops: these temporary store fronts allow customers to experience a brand’s product or service, while allowing them to feel the exclusivity that a limited time promotion offers. Well what’s more exclusive than a store-front that will be gone by the end of the day?

Mobile pop-up shops offer the feeling of a traditional pop-up, while allowing you to pick out several spots populated by your key demographic. Not only that, but as your promotion moves through a city, the noticeable branding will act as a moving billboard. Think of how many activations you could get from just a few stops!

Where can I find a high-tech experiential marketing company that specializes in unique street marketing?

Food truck promotions are the leading marketers in the experiential marketing industry. Our unique street marketing tactics have helped big name businesses like Chanel, Adidas, Arizona Ice Tea, and Dior successfully advertise their brands. Our specially designed promotions help brands personally connect with their key demographic, and create long-term and lasting activations.

Your brand has something to offer the world that no other company does. Don’t let the public miss out on the benefits of your product or service, and contact Food Truck Promotions today!

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Sensory Marketing: Who is it right for and how to set up your campaigns

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Claire Kelly

Experiential Marketing

What makes a memory? When you feel the rough texture of wool, what makes you think of winter? When you smell fresh cut grass and the playful aroma of daffodils, what brings you back to spring? How can the smell of chocolate-chip cookies remind you of the laughter of grandparents? The answer is sensory memory.

Sensory memory is one of the more powerful ways our brains associate thoughts and emotions with a memory. Memories are most commonly associated with what a person sees, closely followed by what one can hear. The marketing industry has nearly reached the limits of what it can do with these two senses, and those efforts are what makes up the majority of traditional marketing strategy.

But what about the others? What about engaging potential customers and clients with other senses, like taste and smell? The true depth of sensory marketing has only begun to be explored.

The Science of Sensory Marketing

In recent years Sensory Marketing has been extensively studied by the country’s top research scientists to see why the senses are such a powerful advertising tool. What they have found is that our brain’s unconscious desires and innate decision making can be powered by something as simple as the temperature of a beverage, or the scent of a room. With sensory marketing, you have to look at details previous generations wouldn’t even think to tinker with.

The best part of these subtle choices is that they aren’t seen as marketing at all. You wouldn’t enter a building that smelled of chocolate and become annoyed by the obvious olfactory sales pitch. You’d be delighted by the aroma of cocoa beans, maybe get lost in the memory of some family vacation where your parents bought you a delightful bar of chocolate, and before you know it, you’re walking out with a pound of fair-trade confections.

That’s the power of sensory marketing: you aren’t smacking consumers over the head with a bulky advertisement, you’re allowing them to enjoy a taste of nostalgia in a comforting environment. The way to do this is to engage those less focused on senses. Let’s start with the one that is often overlooked: your nose.

Scent Marketing: Why it works, and how you can use it

When you think of senses, smell is often an underrated feature of the human experience. There is great importance to seeing, hearing, and feeling something, but what about our noses? With more and more studies showing that people’s sense of smell plays a large role in how they develop and solidify memories. A close connection has been found between the sections of the brain that dictate emotion, memory recall, and our olfactory senses. What does this mean? Basically, a smell can not only bring you back to some cherished moment in the past, but how you felt when you were there.

The chocolate example above does well to service this point, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Scent Marketing, or Aroma Marketing, is about choosing a fragrance that puts the customer in that buying mood. Depending on your product, you have to strategically set up what scent environment works best for that particular item.

With businesses like a candle shop, this may be more obvious. If summer is around the corner, having an apple-pie scent wafting from your shop will draw in customers with memories of pies cooling on window sills. But with other products, it may not be that simple.

If you run a car dealership, smell may be the last thing on your mind. You want to show potential customers the car’s features, the benefits of an extended warranty, and the safety rating of a given vehicle. But by creating a pleasant scent in your dealership, you can increase the amount of time car-buyers spend in your shop.

The longer they stay, the higher chance they will make a purchase. An enjoyable aroma causes those walking the showroom floor to positively associate that smell with your brand, giving them an overall better experience inside your business.

Taste Marketing: Tip of the Tongue Tips

Along with smell, taste is not always thought about when developing sensory marketing campaigns. For food brands, taste marketing is the name of the game . Having a unique flavor that your consumer can associate with your brand is paramount to establishing a connection with those all important memory centers in their brain.

Classic examples of these connections exist throughout popular culture: a certain soda brand conjuring images of childhood birthdays, the crunch of a french fry leading us back time and time again to the golden arches, the list goes on. Positioning the taste of your product to invoke that valuable nostalgia present in all consumers is important.

But what if you don’t have a food related product? Can you still utilize taste marketing in your campaign or strategy? Absolutely! Let’s look at a common practice you’ve probably seen in auto body repair or tire stores, and never thought twice about: Popcorn machines.

Car tires have absolutely zero to do with taste, but somehow brands like Les Schwab have found a way to associate the delicious salt and crunch of popcorn with their brands. Customers get the comfort and enjoyment of a tasty snack, and are subconsciously drawn back to that shop when it comes time to buy a new set of tires.

Examples like this show that Taste marketing can be approached from a number of angles. Whether it’s offering samples to get those hooks into customer’s taste buds, or having fresh brewed coffee available for any who come through the front door, taste is one of sensory marketing’s strongest tools.

The future is Sensory Marketing

The world of marketing is a constantly shifting and changing landscape. Keeping up with new trends is difficult, but absolutely vital if you want to remain ahead of the game. Newer forms of sensory marketing are growing at a rapid pace, and the need to employ these tactics for successful campaigns is becoming apparent. If you want your brand to succeed, and your product to reach the masses, the answer is clear: Sensory Marketing is the future.

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How to Develop an Experiential Marketing Strategy That Wins

Posted on September 28, 2021June 25, 2024 by Claire Kelly

Experiential Marketing

These days, traditional marketing strategies just don’t cut it. With common advertising techniques yielding suboptimal results, it’s clear younger demographics aren’t as receptive to the strategies of yesteryear. Print, radio, and even television marketing have consistently declined in R.O.I, and social media advertising has grown to the point of over-saturation.

That’s why you need to adjust the methods you use to reach potential customers. The best way to do this is by developing an experiential marketing strategy. Experiential marketing is a cutting-edge guerrilla marketing tactic, designed to engage consumers and form a long-term emotional bond with your brand.

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing, is a strategy that utilizes direct contact with a customer as a means to establish a strong connection between that customer and your brand. This contact acts as a way for the consumer to experience how their life could benefit from your product or service, and encourages organic growth of brand-awareness.

The way this growth comes about is by providing an experience so engaging, the customer wants to share it with other people (either in-person or via social media). In this way, you get far more bang for your buck than with traditional marketing. If you can have someone associate positive feelings with your brand, to the point where they feel compelled to tell others, that effect will multiply and result in further brand activations.

HOW IS AN EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING STRATEGY EFFECTIVE?

Experiential marketing allows customers to see the human element behind a product or business. This has shown to be quite effective in fostering an emotional connection with a brand, and these tend to outlast the more shallow connections formed through traditional advertising. A smiling face, sincere enthusiasm, and real physical interaction with a product can all make a huge difference in creating long term, loyal patronage.

The way you go about designing this brand experience depends entirely on what your product or service is, how you want to be seen by the public, and what your activation goals are. While the possibilities are endless, there are a few tried-and-true experiential marketing strategies you can use as the foundation for your campaign.

Different types of experiential marketing strategies

There is a wide range of different avenues to explore when developing your experiential marketing strategy. Here are several different types of strategies, and how they can function to boost brand activations.

Pop-up shop: The most commonly-known form of experiential marketing, a pop-up shop allows you to market your brand while also making a small amount of sales. A purchase can be a powerful way to connect with a consumer, as this allows them to take a piece of your brand home with them. One drawback to this method is that while most consumers are willing to participate in a free event, some may not be interested in spending money right there and then.

Branded Mobile Tour: A branded mobile tour involves the use of a vehicle, bearing a visual representation of your brand, traveling to areas and allowing potential consumers to engage in a tailor-made brand experience. A secondary benefit of this tactic is the passive advertisement resulting from your branded vehicle. Your brand vehicle should include links to social media or more information about stops in the tour, so you can increase the foot traffic once you stop and set up.

Brand Booth: Often seen at conventions and fairgrounds, a brand booth should function as a microcosm of your entire brand image. Think of this as a more focused version of your mobile tour; since you will only be setting up in one location, you can really go all out on the brand experience. The best brand ambassadors, the cleanest product demo, and a slick social media tie-in are all the building blocks for a successful brand booth.

How do I develop a winning experiential marketing strategy?

The way you develop your experiential marketing strategy relies heavily on the image of your brand. You need to fully understand who your customer base is and what they want. Designing an experience that plays to these desires can help foster the emotional connection you are shooting for. You want a potential consumer to experience how their life could benefit from a relationship with your brand.

Let’s take one of the above methods, and apply it to a fictional coffee brand to see how it would function.

STRATEGY EXAMPLE: COFFEE BRAND

If your coffee brand is looking to create an experiential marketing strategy, a good choice would be to create a pop-up café.

As a lower-cost item, coffee is an easier sell than a piece of technology or clothing. While a high-end fashion company may benefit from a brand booth, most customers are willing to shell out a few dollars to try a new brand of coffee. Allowing a customer to smell and taste the product in a coffee shop type setting will create that positive experience you are aiming for.

Having a temporary storefront, with eye-catching visual branding drawing people in, is a great way to get your product into the hands of potential long-term customers. Then, when the pop-up shop is gone, this customer will naturally look for your brand in stores to recreate those feelings of positivity.

This is just one of a nearly infinite number of possibilities for combining your unique brand with a complimentary experiential marketing method. The ability to tailor the brand experience you provide to consumers is the largest benefit of developing an experiential marketing strategy. That, and many other reasons, are why it should be a primary technique in your marketing campaign playbook.

Experiential Marketing with FTP

One of the major reasons experiential marketing is so effective is because these kinds of face-to-face campaigns are completely customizable. If you’ve never developed your own brand activation concept, don’t worry. Our team can help you brainstorm an experiential marketing campaign that is tailored wholly to you, considering your desired target audience, budget, market, and other preferences you may have.

Learn more about our experiential marketing agency and contact us today to get started.

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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

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Static Vs Mobile Pop-Up Shop Rentals: What You Need To Know

Posted on September 21, 2021November 15, 2021 by Claire Kelly

Experiential Marketing

When renting a pop-up shop space, it’s important to understand what your options are. Choosing between a static and mobile pop-up shop rental means gathering a comprehensive knowledge of both, and knowing the advantages and disadvantages of each.

While a pop-up shop can be the cornerstone of a solid experiential marketing campaign, choosing the correct format can make or break how effective your particular campaign will be.

What is a static pop-up shop rental?

A static pop-up shop rental is a stationary and temporary storefront that your brand can utilize for a set period of time. These are the more traditional version of pop-ups, and are usually part of an existing building or structure. These can also take the form of a branded pop-up tent, usually set up in high-traffic areas.

While a static pop-up shop can be helpful in building brand awareness and increasing sales, it only does so in one small area. This lack of mobility can lower the quantity of brand activations your pop-up shop achieves, and be a drain on valuable marketing resources.

What is a mobile pop-up shop rental?

A mobile pop-up shop rental simply takes the concept of a static pop-up shop, and puts it on wheels. These can take a variety of forms, depending on the brand they represent, and the product or service that brand offers. Food trucks are an excellent mobile pop-up for food and beverage brands, while clothing companies may offer a walk-in vehicle where consumers can try-on and purchase different garments.

No matter what form of mobile pop-up shop rental you choose, you’ll likely have a better experience and higher R.O.I compared to their stationary counterpart. There are countless benefits to choosing a mobile pop-up shop rental, and each can be a massive boost to brand activations and recognition.

What are the benefits of a mobile pop-up shop rental?

A mobile pop-up shop rental has several distinct advantages over more traditional advertising techniques. This cutting-edge form of experiential marketing is a great way to allow a customer hands-on experience with a product or service, and an experience that will get them to talk about your brand to their friends. This creates organic brand awareness, and can help spread your name far beyond the scope of a print or television advertisement.

Ability to target high conversion areas

The ability to identify highly-populated areas containing your brand’s key demographic, and target those areas with a mobile brand experience, can be an invaluable boost to consumer engagement.

Once you know where the highest percentage of your potential customer base resides, you can make sure your mobile pop-up shop rental is directed to these areas. This decreases the chance of wasting valuable time with consumers who aren’t interested in the product, and increases the volume of positive brand activations and sales.

Physical interaction

In an increasingly digital world, physical engagement can make the difference in forming long-term emotional connections with potential customers. Having brand ambassadors there to guide a consumer through the brand experience, answer any questions, and help them to actually use the product or service, is invaluable.

Younger demographics are also more likely to form a connection to a brand if they can physically interact with their product or service. Getting to test out what our brand offers directly lets them more clearly understand what the benefits of that product or service are.

Mobile passive advertising

A mobile pop-up shop rental will be distinctly marked and painted to represent your brand. These eye-popping visuals are designed to ensure you draw the attention of not only those passing by the pop-up when it’s parked, but while it’s moving through a populated area.

Because you are in or near a place populated by your key demographic, everyone who sees this vehicle pass by will have their curiosity piqued. This can lead to more foot traffic once the pop-up is stationary, and more connections made to the brand itself.

Pop-up shop vendor checklist: What you need for your mobile pop-up shop rental to be successful

There are several steps to take to ensure that your mobile pop-up shop rental is successful. From choosing how it looks outside, the experience contained inside, and where it’s headed, each step is vital to securing the brand activations necessary to increasing awareness.

Choose the look of your mobile pop-up

The first thing potential customers will see is how the outside of your mobile pop-up shop rental looks. It only takes seven seconds for a person to form an impression when they meet someone for the first time; imagine how quickly they will judge your brand.

There are many different styles you can go with when choosing a mobile pop-up shop rental. Your mobile pop-up shop aesthetic should align with the demographic your brand targets. If you are trying to tap into nostalgia, you can go for a “old-timey” feel to your vehicle. If you are trying to show off the cutting-edge of technology, you’ll want something sleek and futuristic.

Remember, first impressions are everything, and if a potential consumer doesn’t like how your pop-up looks on the outside, they are unlikely to care what is on the inside.

Craft a consumer experience that represents your brand

Designing how the customer will interact with your product or service is arguably the most important decision of your campaign. What mobile pop-up shop ideas you use depend on what experience best represents your brand. Here is an example of a brand specific experience you could use for your mobile pop-up shop rental.

If you are an outdoors or camping brand, you’ll want to have demonstrations of how your product would work in a wilderness setting. A camping trailer, equipped with astroturf and the scent of cedar, can make a potential consumer feel as though they are already in the forest, utilizing your product.

You want the consumer to feel as if the purchase is already made, by allowing them to envision the life they could have if they choose your brand. Try to understand the smell, touch, taste, and feel of what your brand embodies, and pour that sensory data into the experience your pop-up shop facilitates.

Finding the best pop-up shop space

You’ll need to know how to find a pop-up shop space that includes as many members of your key demographic as possible. Each stop you make with your mobile pop-up shop rental should be filled with people likely to not only understand your product, but directly benefit from a connection with your brand.

Events with high foot traffic such as conventions, fairs, and other well-populated events are great choices for a stop in your mobile pop-up shop tour. If you choose spots in large cities, try to get as close to downtown or near business centers as you can. The more people who pass, the more chances you have to make those brand activations and sales.

Using this information, it should be easy to design how exactly you will use your mobile pop-up shop rental. Using this experiential marketing strategy, you are certain to drastically improve brand awareness, and give potential consumers an exciting experience in the process.

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 to Find the Best Brand Ambassador for Your Mobile Tour

Posted on September 14, 2021September 15, 2021 by Claire Kelly

Experiential Marketing

When it comes to crafting an experiential marketing strategy, mobile tours are a high-efficacy tool guaranteed to help expand the reach of your brand. One of the most important steps to take when planning an experiential marketing mobile tour is making sure you choose the correct mobile tour brand ambassador. But what exactly is mobile tour marketing, and how can it work for you?

What is mobile tour marketing?

Mobile tours are an experiential marketing tool that lets you advertise your brand to thousands of people in a key demographic area, while also allowing potential consumers to experience the benefits of your product or service first-hand. With many advertising strategies, the customer can only imagine what their life could be like if they went with a certain brand. With a mobile tour, they don’t have to imagine, they can live it.

There are countless advantages to employing this strategy, especially when you utilize the expertise of mobile marketing tour companies. When a mobile tour vehicle is driven through a city, separate impressions and connections are made with each person it passes. These mobile brand activations are valuable, but only a small part of what mobile tours have to offer.

Once the tour reaches one of it’s intended stops, this is where the real engagement begins. Mobile marketing tour companies carefully choose spots containing members of your key demographic. This means that you have a higher rate of conversion with mobile tour activations. A mobile tour vehicle unfolds into a multi-tiered piece of experiential marketing, allowing potential consumers to be enveloped in a fully interactive brand experience.

But all of this hinges on a very important factor: choosing the best mobile tour brand ambassador.

What is a mobile brand tour ambassador?

A good mobile tour brand ambassador is the foundation for all high-quality experiential marketing mobile tours. If you want the highest return on investment for your marketing dollar, you need to make sure you employ the absolute best ambassador you can find. To do this, you need to know exactly what an ambassador does.

The role of a mobile tour brand ambassador is to put a face to your brand, and help guide a potential customer through the brand experience packaged in your mobile tour. These are the staff you have working the booth, interacting with customers, demonstrating what your brand has to offer. These individuals are there to make sure your key demographic establishes an emotional connection, increasing the chances they will become loyal customers.

Mobile brand tour ambassadors can be regular staff members, or social media influencers in your industry. Whichever type of ambassador you go with, it’s important they have a distinct set of qualities.

How to find the right mobile brand tour ambassador

Now that you know what a mobile tour ambassador does, you need to know how to find the right fit for your unique brand. These will be the people wearing your logo and displaying your products or services: in essence, they will be representing you. You need to make sure that the connection potential consumers make is a positive one, and encourage these consumers to further spread your brand name through social media and word-of-mouth.

Let’s go over the qualities that any mobile tour ambassador must have, regardless of brand. You need to make sure that your ambassador is:

Engaged: They need to be excited about your brand, and establish a connection with the product or service. The advantage of experiential marketing mobile tours is that in person engagement: if your ambassador is genuinely excited, the customer will be too.
Friendly: A smile is an experiential marketer’s most powerful tool to bring in potential consumers. Studies have shown that not only are smiles contagious, but that the mere act of smiling can put you in a more positive mood. If the consumer associates your brand with a positive mood, you’ve laid the foundation for future brand loyalty.
Knowledgeable: a mobile brand tour ambassador needs to know your products or services inside and out. If someone has a question, they should be able to answer not only quickly, but accurately. Consumers are far more likely to trust an expert, and through that have more trust in your brand.

Tailor Your Ambassador to Your Unique Brand

Now depending on what your brand specifically offers, you will want to tailor your mobile tour brand ambassador to the experience you want consumers to have. If you can, try to find well-known members of your industry that can help represent the goals of your marketing strategy, and the ideals of your brand.

Social media influencers are usually open to sponsorship, and can be a vital asset in expanding the reach of your campaign. When you choose these individuals, or any ambassadors working directly with the mobile tour, you need to choose people who are perfectly tailored to your brand’s message.

If you are a health food brand, you will want to make sure the ambassadors you choose are healthy and fit. If you are a brand that deals with men’s products, you will want someone who fits the stereotypical archetype of a “man’s man”. You want your ambassador to be the embodiment of the benefits of your product or service: make the potential consumer look at that person, and say “I want to be them.”

If you follow these steps, you will be sure to choose the correct mobile tour brand ambassador for your brand. Once that important piece is in place, you can ensure the success of your mobile marketing campaign, and get the name of your brand out to countless potential consumers.