Street Sampling Blog

[magneticexperiential]

While not all businesses are suited for what we do here at Street Sampling, there are some forms of “word of mouth” or experiential marketing you can do on your own.

Consider the “magnetic sign” for your online business needing exposure. Magnetic signs immediately attract attention. With the right message, they reinforce your business brand name, phone number, and even website address (be sure it’s short and catchy) as you drive around town.

Magnetic experiential marketing signs come in several varieties, and several price ranges so be sure to shop around (or get recommendations from others) on the best services to use.

Although signs sound like a “simple process,” do consider them your personal work(s) of art. Put planning and effort into your design, make the words readable! I’ve seen some crazy lettering out there too hard to read to understand what is being advertised – what a complete waste of time and money.

The use of billboards has been around for a long time, and those enterprising individuals who take these “portable billboards” with them through busy city streets can find they produce some amazing results.

For more information and ideas on ways to expand your own experiential marketing just visit our website.

Related articles for experiential marketing

• Guide: A Brand Strategy Checklist (thecauseisthehabit.com)
• Lower the Capital Costs of Your Next Marketing Campaign While Simultaneously Increasing the Power (streetsampling.com)
• Cricket Wireless Experiential Marketing (streetsampling.com)

[wordofmouth]

Word-of-mouth advertising is a highly-valued concept to product and service marketers as it is traditionally the best and flexible promotional strategy. The “common folk” on the planet are more likely to be moved by word-of-mouth than by more formalized selling systems.

Put simply, if you can get folks talking about your service, product or message in a particularly positive way, you can bypass lots of other selling strategies – and their similar expenses.

The reason is very simple…  Read the rest of this entry »

[InnovativeWordofMouth]

Innovative marketing, often called experiential by nature, relates to a combination of methods to entice buyers. It is highly-valued because historically it is the most versatile, effective promotional method.

Innovative by nature, taking your marketing to the streets with brand ambassadors is highly effective. Types of marketing strategies defining word-of-mouth marketing include:

o Viral marketing
o Buzz marketing
o Blog
o Media of the social variety
o Interacting with the man on the street
o The use of brand ambassadors to interface with your potential customers

Experiential marketing means favorable reactions as brand ambassadors meet your client where they live and work. And, of course, your marketing must always maintain that narrow focus of gaining a new customer and getting the sale. Creating buzz nowadays is much more flexible than years gone by.

This take-it-to-the-street approach also works to some degree in cyberspace with places like Digg, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as solid examples. However, it is important to meet your customer head on – on the sidewalks and busy street corners where they live, work and play.

[experiential/buzz marketing keyword tool]

I’ve been holding onto this website for a while, not because I didn’t want to share it, but because I wanted to make sure when I did, it made sense in the context of what we do… experiential marketing.

The tool I uncovered is called Wordle.com.

One mistake many people make in writing their ad copy or website material is not enough thorough keyword density research. Sure you need to know are they looking for what you think they are looking for, but you also need to know have you used the word(s) consistently enough to even make a difference.

Wordle makes your work a whole lot easier. For example, in our February 18th post, I grabbed one of the paragraphs:

Word-of-mouth communication tends to make people feel that they are being told the truth without any ulterior motives. Honesty is perceived and the receivers of messages are moved to perform the intended call to action at significantly higher rates than when approached by various other communication techniques. This is true because there is no perceived reward for the person that is speaking positively about the product, service or message at hand.

I then head out to Wordle, paste that paragraph into the box for text on the site and presto! up comes a cloud tag clearly showing me the strongest to weakest words within that text.

You can also use this directly with a feed, print the results, randomize your results, open it in a new window and, if you create an account, save it to their gallery.

Keywords are so important, online and offline, when it comes to effectively marketing. Creating buzz about your program or service means weighing, analyzing, evaluating, and adding useful terms. This tool will also help you weed out the useless, space-hogging keywords that do little to further your marketing efforts.

Give Wordle a go for yourself and then be sure to drop me feedback on the tool. I’d love to know what you think.

Let’s get creative!