Leverage Brand Advocacy with Street Teams

The earlier your customers know about new products and news from your company the better, right? Try “leaking the information” to a specialized team of brand advocates. Let word-of-mouth power your news and releases.

Brand advocates allow you to release news about your company and products and then they advertise it for you. This is an inexpensive (frequently free) way to market yourself at ground level, where you are almost out of the picture. How many times have you gone to a new restaurant based on a friend’s recommendation instead of a commercial?

We’re talking about using street teams. Street teams are merely teams or groups of brand advocates. These are people who know, use, and trust your products and organization. The music industry has been effectively using street teams to promote new artists and new albums for decades now. Many urban periodicals that focus on art, nightlife, the social scene, and the club scene have also begun using street teams.

The Pitch (a Kansas City area urban life periodical) uses street teams to aid in gathering news and stories for publication. They simply have members (who elected to sign up) tell them about their nights out; where they went, what was fun or not fun, where the hot spots are. These are people who are already going out, already talking about it. The Pitch has just found a way to let their readers feel important about what they are already doing, while they gather free news.

This idea holds true for innumerable types of businesses. Aren’t your customers and clients already engaging in some sort of behavior like this? Do they talk about your business and your competitors with their colleagues and friends? Of course, the key is to determine how they are talking about it and who is talking in the best circles.

4 Steps to Starting a Street Team

Identify People To Be Organizers And Street Team Supervisors – These are frequently your PR manager and others that they delegate from the PR team.

Recruit Street Team Members From Your Customer Base – Advertise on your website or via email if you have a mailing list already in place.

With Your Street Team In Place – Plan promotional activities with certain events in mind. Promote a new product, informational seminar on an industry related topic, or whatever creative your PR team can come up with.

During The Event – Have your street team hand out promotional materials advertising your website, give away inexpensive items, have contests to win free products, collect names for your mailing list and help sell your other merchandise. Personal interaction with your customers/clients can help push along the sale of merchandise and possibly even recruitment of new street team members. You might be surprised how well this works.

Branding doesn’t have to come just in the form of media. The more you can spread your brand the better. And with the rise in social media and social marketing online…it seems to make sense to be applying the same ideas to the physical world. See for yourself what brand advocacy can do for you and you too could benefit from others bringing word of mouth back to the street