Experiential
Mobile Tours

Top 10 Effective Strategies for Mobile Marketing Tours

Are you interested in elevating your brand to the next level? Consider implementing experiential marketing tours that will give you the opportunity to increase brand awareness and get closer to your target audience.

Christian Jurinka

Published On:

November 11, 2024
November 11, 2024

Updated On:

November 11, 2024
November 11, 2024

Table of Content

  • What Are Mobile Marketing Tours?
  • Top 10 mobile marketing tour strategies
  • Mobile marketing tools for best performance & tracking
  • Some of our experiential marketing examples
  • How to use these strategies successfully
  • Our tips and best practices for mobile tour marketing
  • FAQ

What Are Mobile Marketing Tours?

A mobile marketing tour is a form of experiential marketing, where brands execute out of home campaigns to showcase their products. Your brand is taken into the world with branded vehicles, customized merch, and a story to tell. This gives brands the opportunity to interact with their customers where it matters most - in real life. You can promote your products, give out samples, and perform immersive demonstrations that will leave lasting impressions.

Top 10 mobile marketing tour strategies

Think about applying one or more of these top strategies to ensure your next marketing tour will be a huge success.

1. Location Targeting

Location targeting is an effective strategy for several reasons such as enhanced relevance, maximizing impact and cost effectiveness.

  • Enhanced relevance: With location targeting you can choose your locations and target them specifically, based on previously done market research. This will also help tailoring your brand message and make the campaign as relatable as possible.
  • Maximizing impact: Choose high traffic areas like city centers, shopping malls or popular events. The larger the number of traffic, the larger your pool of potential customers.
  • Cost effectiveness: Making sure you're speaking to the right people (i.e. your target audience), will help hitting sales targets. You're not wasting time talking to the wrong crowd and simply focus on areas with high concentration of the target audience.

2. Include Interactive Experiences

Interactive experiences are a powerful way to engage an audience. They're designed in a way that grips the attention and leaves meaningful memories. There's multiple ways to bring these activation ideas to life, think about the use of:

  • Interactive touchscreens and storytelling stations:
  • Gamification;
  • Personalization stations;
  • 360-Degree photo booths;
  • Hosting workshops.

Keep in mind this list is not exhaustive. You can be as creative as you want and twist it into a fun interactive experience.

3. Use Sampling and Giveaways

Research has shown that 35% of people who try samples, will buy that product within the same shopping trip. Giveaways and samples - in a mobile tour - increase engagement and conversions. It encourages participants to interact with the brand and try out the product. This gives brands the opportunity to collect real-time, valuable customer data that can be used for future marketing efforts such as building a database for future targeted email campaigns or facebook ads targeting.

4. Integrate Social Media 

According to recent studies, the social commerce market will hit a total worth of a whopping $8.5 trillion by the end of 2030. By not being involved with social media, your brand is missing out bigtime. Integrating social media in your marketing tour will help spread brand awareness, and hold onto the engagement for longer.

Don't be afraid to show humor or be cheeky with your messaging. It's shown that 91% of people want brands to be funny and will choose a humorous brand over a dull one! Especially if your target audience identifies as Gen Z, ensure your communication style is up their alley. They're not afraid to unfollow you if you're boring!

To integrate social media in your campaign, think about creating experiences that encourage participants to share the activity on their socials. This can include photo booths, branded backgrounds, or certain challenges that require posting on TikTok, Instagram or other popular channels your audience uses.

5. Themed Environments

Themed environments can be used for a fully immersive experience. Participants can explore areas that have been designed to represent the brand. A fantastic example of this is the Stranger Things Experience, where attention to detail has resulted in a captivating themed environment. Using sound effects, decor and props in the right way, can result in happy customers and creation of online buzz - which then reaches wider audiences.

6. Live Demonstrations

Offering live demonstrations gives brands the opportunity to showcase the features and benefits of their product. A live demonstration will make your experiential campaign much more interactive and memorable. Depending on the product you offer, you can decide to simply display your product and explain its usage and characteristics, or set up a workshop where participants are encouraged to use your products.

It's much easier to convince your audience that your products are amazing, when they get the chance to form that opinion themselves through experience.

7. Contests and Competitions

Almost 55 million Americans participate in these sweepstake-style online contests on a regular basis. Including a contest or competition in your mobile tour will attract an additional audience that you otherwise will not reach. The easier it is to sign up for the contest, the higher the engagement and conversion rates. 

8. Branded Vehicles

Branded vehicles play a crucial role in tours. These experiential marketing vehicles can be customized to the brands' wants and needs to a T. The reason why branded vehicles are so useful in these campaigns is for:

  • High visibility and brand awareness: These vehicles drive from A to B, with your logo plastered on them! It's literally a moving billboard.
  • Targeted reach: Brands can move the vehicle to different locations such as events, festivals, or popular city spots, based on where their target audience is located. Resulting in high flexibility and a better targeted campaign.
  • Content creation opportunities: An eye-catching branded vehicle can do a lot for your social media presence. Simply look at the annual Coca-Cola Christmas Truck Tour, need I say more?

9. Customized Merchandise

Customized merchandise is a tangible benefit for participants, turning your audience into walking advertisements (e.g., wearing your t-shirts, hats, or wristbands). This boosts brand visibility and fosters consumer loyalty.

The merch not only extends your reach but also creates a positive brand association. High-quality, useful merchandise can enhance the perceived value of your products and make your brand more desirable.

However, this strategy can backfire if your merchandise is seen as low-quality or meaningless!

10. Partnerships and Collaborations

Partnering with local businesses, influencers or even other brands will increase your credibility. Inviting well liked influencers and celebrities, will create extra buzz around the event. Do extensive market research in each area you're planning to target, to avoid inviting the wrong public figures.

Mobile marketing tools for best performance & tracking

Now that you’ve found the best strategy for your mobile marketing tour, let’s have a look at the tools you can use to track campaign performance.

CRM software

CRM software enables you to manage all your interactions with current and potential customers. Tools you to consider using are Salesforce or Hubspot. The goal of these systems is to build lasting relationships with your audience and grow your business. 

It’s a critical part for your tour as it will help track all the interactions and data that is collected during the campaign.

Mixpanel

This tool is perfect for tracking customer behavior. Mixpanel was specifically built to help companies understand user behavior. Their app can help provide insights into your product usage and can give you a better understanding of different types of users, such as trial users and paying customers. An alternative to Mixpanel is Firebase Analytics which can track interactions with mobile-friendly content or QR codes.

Mailchimp

Once the mobile marketing tour has ended, you’ll want to use that customer data you’ve collected along the way. If you’ve applied the right strategies, you now have a vast database of potential customers. Platforms such as Mailchimp can facilitate email campaigns, including data such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening tool that notifies you if your brand is mentioned online. This tool analyzes conversations across multiple online platforms. This allows companies to gather, analyze, and utilize conversations across the web to boost their engagement. Alternatives to Brandwatch are Hootsuite or Sprout Social.

Verizon Connect (branded vehicle tracking)

Verizon Connect GPS tracking system helps with fleet management. This can help reduce fleet costs and increase productivity. A GPS tracker on the vehicle receives a GPS signal and sends its location back to a fleet management system. This is usually used for delivery services, but can be used to monitor movement and location of branded vehicles.

Medallia

Medallia is a handy tool that lets companies collect customer feedback and analyze it in-depth. It’s similar to Qualtrics, which is just a survey and form building tool. Using these tools can help you gain a better understanding on how the experiential campaign was for the participants and get feedback on your product.

Some of our experiential marketing examples

Not convinced about mobile tours yet? Listen to some of these success stories:

Nestle Nesquik

Aiming to rekindle childhood love for chocolate milk among 25-35 year old men, a single-city mobile marketing test grew into a successful multi-year campaign in over 10 cities, consistently outperforming other mediums with strong YOY sales growth. Attack!, in collaboration with Nestle, deployed mobile sampling teams with branded vehicles, along with celebrity sightings and photo ops with the Nesquik Bunny. Thousands of local sampling events delivered millions of bottles of Nestle Nesquik to eager consumers.

Carvana


To support their partnership with legendary NASCAR driver Jimmy Johnson and his transition to Indy Car racing, Attack! collaborated with Carvana to oversee the tour. The tour featured an Indy Car, a giant toy car vending machine, and other crowd favorites, along with live Indy Car trivia to engage the audience and generate leads for the brand. The tour covered 14 Indy Cup races and 14 Carvana corporate locations, traveling over 5000 miles in 9 months and generating over 18,000 leads.

Poppi

Summer fun with the hottest prebiotic soda! Attack! delivered with impactful mobile vehicles, trikes, beach umbrellas, and the Poppi Challenge, pitting Poppi against traditional soda. Poppi aimed to elevate their field marketing for a memorable summer. Their focused efforts achieved remarkable results: over 89,000 cans sampled and over 146,000 interactions that left a lasting impression on customers!

Become the next success story and plan your next mobile marketing tour with Attack!

How to use these strategies successfully

Now you know what strategies to implement for your next mobile campaign, don’t forget to beef out the plan by developing a mobile event marketing plan by following these 4 steps:

1. Define Your Goals and Objectives

Before you start planning, write down what your goals are and think about what you want to achieve with this campaign. To ensure your goals and objectives are clear and feasible, use the SMART-method (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound). An example is, "Increase conversions by 30% in the next 3 months."

2. Understand Your Target Audience

If you don't already have previous market data on your targeted demographic, start gathering data on your target's age, gender, location, and interests. This will make it easier to select areas to target during the mobile tour.

To narrow your demographic down even further, it is helpful to create personas that represent the ideal user of the product. This step helps to understand your audience even better in terms of decision making, pain points and motivations.

3. Choose the Right Tactics

Based on your audience's preferences, select the right strategies for your event activations using market research to make informed decisions.

To ensure your audience knows you’re touring, promote your tour through effective mobile marketing channels such as social media, SMS, or in-app advertising and use the right, unique event activations to meet their expectations.

4. Track Performance and Iterate

When the tour concludes, use analytical tools to track performance based on your KPIs (conversion rates, ROI, user engagement). For multiple campaigns or tours, regularly analyze the data to identify what's working. Especially with mobile tours, use the data to see which areas were more successful and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Our tips and best practices for mobile tour marketing

  • Find the right location;
  • Understand your audience and tailor the messaging;
  • Devise engagement strategies;
  • Strategize your stops;
  • Choose the right staff for the event;
  • Don’t forget to create buzz around your event;
  • Use proven effective strategies and tactics to optimize your campaign.

FAQ

What are mobile marketing tours?

A mobile marketing tour is a marketing campaign that allows brands to travel to different locations with branded vehicles to showcase and demonstrate their products. This is usually done in a fun and interactive way to attract more participants and create buzz on social media. Such campaigns often increase engagement, brand awareness and conversions.

How do I improve my mobile marketing tour strategy?

To improve your creative advertising campaigns strategy it’s critical you do extensive market research before you start planning your tour. Base your decisions on your analysis for the best results. To further refine your strategy, try implementing a combination of at least three of the following tactics:

  1. Target the right location;
  2. Include interactive elements into your tour;
  3. Give out samples or do a giveaway;
  4. Leverage your social media presence;
  5. Create themed environments for an immersive experience;
  6. Do live demonstrations;
  7. Invest in branded vehicles;
  8. Give out customized merchandise or include a personalization stand in your event.

What are the advantages of mobile marketing advertising?

There are multiple advantages to a mobile marketing tour, the most significant are:

  • Direct consumer engagement: You’re getting face-to-face contact with your potential customers. This creates real connections and it offers a chance for dialogue.
  • Targeted reach: These tours allow you to travel to places that are most frequented by your target audience. Meaning you’re directing your marketing efforts at the place where it is most effective.
  • Content generation: When doing a fun and interactive marketing tour, your (potential) customers will share pictures and videos of your brand with their friends and family on their socials. This is ‘free’ content generation for your brand!
  • Sales boost: Since you’re targeting your marketing efforts at the place where conversions are expected to happen, you can expect to see a nice sales boost after your mobile marketing tour has concluded.

What are some common challenges for mobile marketing tours and how can they be overcome?

The biggest potential challenge is logistical complexity. The larger your tour, the more challenging coordinating logistics will be. Planning routes, securing permits and managing the fleet can be time-consuming and demanding.

Other common challenges are budget constraints, permits, regulations, and other unpredictable factors like weather conditions and traffic.

How can a mobile marketing tour be integrated with other marketing channels?

A mobile marketing tour can easily be integrated into:

  • Social media: Share live updates and engage with your online audience - even after the tour!
  • Email marketing: Build a database of consumer info during your event and follow up with announcements, information and calls to action.

Public Relations (PR): Issue a press release to announce your tour and generate extra publicity.

Further reading on the Attack Marketing blog:

Christian Jurinka

20+ years
of experience
About the author

Christian Jurinka serves as the CEO and oversees the business development and strategic vision for the agency. Attack! connects brands with consumers, driving loyalty, purchase and velocity through comprehensive, ROI-focused field marketing services.

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About the author

Christian Jurinka

15 years of experience