Street team marketing is a highly effective guerilla marketing technique that allows a team of brand ambassadors to engage with consumers where they live, work, play, and shop. This creates lasting impressions and turns potential consumers into customers.

Street team marketing is a great way to engage your target market face-to-face while turning experiential event staffing into a success. However, creating a professional, engaging, and successful street team takes planning and management.  

This post covers some of the main points you need to consider when planning to start a street team marketing program. 

Planning Your Promotion

With so many moving parts to a street team program, there will always be hurdles, challenges, and obstacles. To be adequately prepared, you need to follow some pointers to guarantee that your program runs smoothly with a clear plan for success. 

Integrate early and often 

With any marketing endeavor, there are many cogs to the system that require seamless integration. From print and social media to technology and the human factor. All these need to be fused with your experiential event staffing. 

It would be best to begin the integration planning process as early as possible. Make sure you start with your key performance indicator (KPI) in mind. Whether it is a market survey on a tablet, social media hashtags, or simply a photo opportunity, the more you can link media technology and consumer interaction, the better success your program will achieve.

The Experiential Network President, Clare Wynne, recommends, “Don’t forget to do your homework on where to guerilla that won’t get you in trouble for trespassing or loitering. This can be done by reaching out to a County or District authority and finding out the rules around public gatherings and solicitation laws...especially if your street team is going door-to-door”.

Establish Tracking and Reporting Benchmarks and Performance

The infrastructure of the program is dependent on the numbers and reporting processes established in the planning stages. Defining your tracking and measurement metrics upfront while establishing the infrastructure to support the reporting and the desired results will allow you to make the right adjustments during the promotional program to keep you on track.

For example, building a tasting survey to accompany a beverage sampling program would require procuring and programming tablet devices to collect and report the survey results. If your surveys are too few in one area, you can re-locate your team to another more promising area. 

Creative Integrity Throughout

Creativity is the key to capturing the imagination of your audience and owning a share of mind in any marketing campaign. This becomes especially crucial when traditional and interactive media are integrated with experiential campaigns. People are visual. They take purchase cues from past experiences. 

If your street team is driving consumers to a product in the grocery aisle, it is crucial that the brand point-of-sale (POS) and packaging are in alignment with the program that got them there. Visually link each of your marketing touches from beginning to end. 

Your campaign becomes familiar and impactful when you have well-thought-out creativity with consistent color, design, theme, and identity. This also includes how your brand ambassador is dressed. Ensure they have branded apparel, coupons, and transport (carts, messenger bags, vehicles, bicycles, etc.) if necessary.  

Brand Ambassador Training

You can’t run a successful street team program if your brand ambassadors don’t know what they are doing. However, recruiting and training new brand ambassadors is not an easy task which is why most people prefer outsourcing the service to an experiential staffing agency like The Experiential Network. 

Such companies offer an on-site or fully online platform that makes it easier to train the brand ambassadors in a tone that is in line with brand and company objectives. They allow you to completely customize the training curriculum to fit your company’s needs. Most of them also have dedicated teams to help you with: 

• Recruitment 
• Training
• Street team marketing practices 
• Performance tracking
• Dedicated client support     

Open Up Cross-Discipline Communication

Well-crafted street team programs must have clear open lines between internal and external departments on the brand and agency sides. This, above anything else, could be the hallmark of success in your experiential efforts. 

On the agency side, define ownership roles in communication touchpoints, maintain a contact list, and provide a platform for open communications. Event staffing agencies have a lot of experience doing what they do. If not for your vertical or brand specifically, then at least one or two steps away from what you are offering. 

Map the Complete Process and Experience

It might sound basic, but make sure you map out each step of the consumer experience in detail to ensure all elements of the integrated plan works with each other. 

What does the consumer see or engage with first? What is the desired step for each engagement? What happens when they engage in the middle of the process? How is data captured at each step? How is the desired behavior rewarded? How is each engagement followed up? How does the program live on beyond the final planned engagement?   

Knowing the answers to these questions now makes for engaged participants down the road.

Recruiting and Training Your Brand Ambassador Program Members

Experiential staffing agencies have existing relationships with established, experienced brand ambassadors. Make use of their valuable resources to save 

your team time and budget resources. Think of consumer engagement as a live advertisement. While a headline can be crafted, edited, and rewritten, the people engaging with the consumers are answering questions on the fly and must be highly credible. 

Remember, street team marketing involves being out there on the street and meeting face-to-face with potential customers, consumers, and partners of your brand. For that program, they are your brand and should be competent, credible, and engaging.   

Look for Allies

As the marketing or brand manager, you must carefully choose partners, agencies, resources, and internal influencers. Internally, appoint people who believe in and understand the value of face-to-face marketing and how it positively influences the behavior of people. 

Start by finding an advocate, someone who is high-level and supports your cause. When engaging agencies, check their references, confirm their tenure in the business, and ask specifics about the programs. You need to know that they can deliver, that they are the right partner for you, your brand, and your organization. 

Conclusion

Street team marketing offers companies and brands of all sizes a cheap, efficient, and easy way to reach their consumers where they live, work, and play. Unlike event staffing or trade show staffing which is confined to a dedicated space, street teams are completely mobile, giving you more flexibility to reach a wider audience. 

Incorporating street team marketing into your marketing strategy is ideal, especially when looking to increase awareness for your brand, launch a new product, or simply want to get your brand noticed in an exciting and memorable way.

Clare Wynne adds, “From a strategy standpoint you can even get post blitz mapping of where the street teams activated via GPS, then you can gauge where customers came from to purchase your product or visit your store”.

“During COVID we didn’t go anywhere, touch anyone and often were barely seen...now the demand for live bodies giving you sips, snacks or even solar panels has exploded for The Experiential Network and M2W Inc.

I honestly think it’s because everyone was so cooped up and are now ready to buy the latest designer beverage, a yummy (even not so healthy) snack and something for our homes. Sampling and brand education by a living, breathing, smiling and knowledgeable Brand Expert is back and here to stay.” – Clare Wynne, President, The Experiential Network and M2W staffing. 

The Experiential Network has 23 years of experience with street teams. They can design a program and deliver the results, leaving your marketing team to focus on other clients or projects. Contact Clare Wynne at clare@thexpnet.com to get started.