What is street team marketing?

Street team marketing started off as a grassroots movement mainly by record labels turning right to the source of music listeners in the streets to promote artists, singles tours , merch and shows.

Street – Where people often are found in city environments ( really they are on sidewalks more but lets just call it the street )

Team – The active bunch of people that are out and about promoting a specific category.

Marketing – That thing that you do to get people to look at you for the reason you want them to look at you and then hand over their data , opinion, impression or money.

Today street teams have been a staple and go-to marketing strategy for brands of all walks.

Soundhere.com founders started off in the music industry some 20 + years ago working record label artists and promoting various shows. We get it and from the roots level, we know how effective it can be to connect the end users , customers and prospects to the web.

Street teams are one of the most effective ways to market a target demography & focus valuable marketing energy and concentrate on getting more results or end points.

• Give your brand or Company or Product / Service a human interactive presence
• Put a smiling face and good attitude attached to a Brand for more human interaction
• Bring the promotion directly to your target audience
  Create buzz or awareness and educate
  Engage your target consumer face-to-face and generate leads
• Create a valuable call to action and collect more sales data
• Research and survey what the audience wants and get valuable feedback that will help improve the product, brand or service being promoted.
• Test the market before dumping sunk costs into other advertising.

Yeah, ok, I’ve read that elsewhere but What is a Street Team?

Street Teams are comprised of groups of fans that gather together to help expose their favorite things to friends and others in their own niches and cliques in their hometown areas and then there is the team of promo hype people that are out on the streets doing their best to hustle the next big thing.

Street Team professionals ( like us ) use  promotional tools like Sample packs, Stickers, Video, Flyer distribution , Posters, keychains, hats and other hot items to give away to people.

What do I have to do as a Street Team member if I decide to join the team?

Be real. Be effective. Be passionate. Know what it is you are marketing. Follow our guides and training. Be punctual. Don’t be a flake. Be with it. Don’t be without it.

Where are some good places to give away promo materials?

This is really more so ALL about who your actual target is and who needs to get the materials the most. The people that are less likely to throw the flyer away or on the ground and litter. The people that are really who you cater to.

We break our efforts in our marketing strategy to be more of a focus on the who then that usually tells us the where to go .

How much a campaign costs can be in many different variable that include who we are targeting, where we have to go and how many people it will take to be effective and how often we need to saturate the materials .

If it’s a super niche market, then we may have an additional private property venue fee that will have to be paid and that puts us more into the Brand Ambassador category of marketing.

Postering Telephone Poles, Corkboards, Message Boards, Lockers, etc.

We only post up Flyers and Posters where we have permission to hang them up!

Marketing Feedback and Street Research:

Feedback is the backbone to any street team efforts. The Call to action is what will drive results and the reporting and logging of activities is what separates a crapshoot company from a real one. At Soundhere.com we are all about making sure we document everything and give you a story of how the efforts went. Good or bad. We will never sell you the moon on our activities and make it sound like that we will generate you a million dollars the next morning after you pay us. We are REAL and down to earth and give you the REAL answers about what happened with the people.

We do not sugarcoat efforts. We let you know if people loved or hated it.

We do not fluff our numbers. If 1,000 people sign up or if 5 sign up we let you know the results and give you the reactions.

Some quick Street Team Marketing case studies.

1. Insurance Company.  – Our team effectively visited over 500 businesses door to door and left branding materials behind. This helped reinforce an postal mail campaign and created a good alliance of connecting a brand that was based online without physical local retail brick and mortar locations to a smiling and friendly face of human touch.

Because we own the print shop we sewed up and embroidered custom branded high end polo shirts, affixed logos and decals to rental vehicles and made the whole campaign an experience with mixed marketing to be most effective in the credibility of our client.

2. School street team visits for a touring pet oriented show – Our team visits local schools inviting staff out to come to the event and attend for free. This tactic works very well with the local areas and puts a face with an invite that cannot be paralleled to effectiveness.

3. Our team promoted a nationwide attention to more love and unity for a tourism campaign for a city that needed to show that it wasn’t the backbone for racist america. This effort not only brought forth a very welcoming city wide approach for well being but was open received by national news , generating a huge amount of PR.

4. Festival showcases and film releases – Our team plastered and postered and re-postered the downtown area of Austin TX during SXSW with over 20,000 posters bringing more awareness to events that were going down.

5. Sleep Study awareness – Medical research clients needed more awareness for a campaign being put out. Our team posted in many different locations and got the word out by targeting nearby college campuses.

6. Bounce back cards for a restaurant – We focused on several target markets to encourage more redeems at local store fronts and promoted more growth for email and text list sign ups.

7. This does not complete our list. We have promoted thousands of campaigns over our 18 year span of life and have seen and done many different types that have worked and unfortunately not worked for our clients.  Why didn’t they work? See the answers below for when street team marketing is not the right way for a company to invest.

When is street team marketing not a good idea for a promotional campaign?

1. Your call to action is not well thought out. After all , at the end of the day when we distribute flyers. Its just paper. Not any one giant volume of printed material is going to be effective unless the call to action is concise and clear.
2. Your website is still under construction and there is no real good rehash-ability to be able to cultivate the outreach made.
3. Your product is still in it’s testing phase and not ready for mass inception. The only exception to this rule is product sampling that is for sampling prototypes or short runs of your product , music, film , service or whatever else is being promoted. This is where the campaign moves from a lead capture or generating scenario to a research campaign that will help business owners make valuable decisions on fine tuning future strategies in campaigning or event making adjustments to the final product to make it the best.