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.
Think about applying one or more of these top strategies to ensure your next marketing tour will be a huge success.
Location targeting is an effective strategy for several reasons such as enhanced relevance, maximizing impact and cost effectiveness.
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:
Keep in mind this list is not exhaustive. You can be as creative as you want and twist it into a fun interactive experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
Not convinced about mobile tours yet? Listen to some of these success stories:
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.
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.
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!
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:
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
There are multiple advantages to a mobile marketing tour, the most significant are:
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.
A mobile marketing tour can easily be integrated into:
Public Relations (PR): Issue a press release to announce your tour and generate extra publicity.
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