Street Teams

STREET TEAM

Street teams are a great marketing tool to utilize fan bases. Popularized by bands decades ago, the street team allows you to communicate with your core audience and expand your reach towards their network. 

Objective:

To support and strengthen our fan events around the world and to amplify our notoriety outwards from the core circle of fans to wider circles and to create hype and word of mouth in order to support the release of a film or album.

Proposal:

All Fan events will be organized between the organization and a local distributor. In order to play all our cards and to utilize all our available resources we want to involve the core fan base. With the excuse of the Fan premieres that we will organize around the world we can begin creating excitement among our fans. An event can be a physical event but may also mean the release of an album or a film. 

In relation to PR / Marketing we will then have the local distributor promoting through their local media contacts, our organization from an institutional level through our own media contacts and the street team helping boost this all from a grassroots and word of mouth level. The expectation is that we hope these actions will increase notoriety which should trigger an increase in the box office or sales in whatever it is we are doing.

Fan Premieres

Fan Premieres are events where the product will be premiered exclusively for fans around the world. These premieres could take place in selected cities across the world. The cities hosting the event will be selected on certain criteria: 1. Existing deals with distributors and/or sponsors 2. Number of premiere tickets that have been pre sold; 3. Fanbase interest in territories according to social media, newsletter, etc. Fans have the option to request a fan premiere in their city, these will be analyzed individually. Alternatively, fan premieres could also be done digitally in case you are releasing an album for example. 

The Street Team

The Street Team is a volunteer based team rooted in the pre existing fanbase. The goal of the street team is to create hype through credible peer-to-peer interactions and viral word-of-mouth influence marketing while helping increase our fan base and ultimately our sales or box office revenue.

How to join the street team?

We will communicate through our social media channels that we are looking for volunteers for the street team. There will be a call to action where the interested parties will be able to apply by submitting a form. In order to qualify them we will ask them what will they do to help make the fan premiere in their city successful. The organization will then have the option to choose in case there are too many candidates or to use the volunteers in case there little of them.

What we need specifically from the street team?

There are requests that can be made to the entire fanbase and others which are specific to the street team.

From the entire fanbase:

Proposed locations for the event.

Proposals for ideas to make the event better.

Local sponsors.

Word of mouth.

Contacting media outlets to ask them to run stories on our organization and our event.

From the street team:

Proposed locations for the event.

Local sponsors.

Word of mouth.

Hit the streets and promote.

Social media posts

Handing out flyers

Placing stickers and posters in their communities

Bringing friends to the event

Convincing friends to buy merchandise

Posting to forums, threads, bulletins, etc

Arrange anything that might make the event more interesting. (they might know a band, or a club of cosplayers or anything of that sort)

Etc

What do the street team volunteers get?

Street team volunteers should be rewarded for their efforts. What we have to offer should also be something that serves our goal, so their reward should be in the form of merchandise that can increase our notoriety: stickers, t-shirts, etc instead of giving them merchandise that will be locked in their apartment. We would also need to offer them preferred seating, maybe VIP treatment at the premiere, free of charge and maybe limited edition merchandise.

Operational Mechanics

We would also need to establish a goal and a measuring system by which we can have an idea of the amount of work they have achieved. With this in mind if they reach their goals they would receive more free stuff from us. A way to do it might be to assign points for specific actions, these points could then be exchanged for merchandise or we could produce special items just for them. The points would need to be validated, the way to do this might be to ask them to send a video, picture or a screenshot of the action in the case the actions can be photographed. This content could be shared to increase notoriety and could also be monetized to increase revenue. In the case actions cannot be photographed, for example if their friends buy tickets for the events, we would then need to establish a referral system to make sure the street team volunteers get their points. It is also important that we increase the visibility and make it a competition of sort between cities. This should trigger the teams to get more involved as they would be in a friendly rivalry to see who had the best fan premiere. The sharing of content is great for this since it should increase the creativity and the quality of the actions. For example if the street team in Berlin does a flash mob that looks great, the street team in Paris might try to up the ante and make something better. This will result in a friendly competition in which the real winner is the brand.

Street team leader profile:

It can be anyone as long as they are over 18.  It should be consulted with a lawyer whether people under 18 can be used. Teenagers are usually the best for these types of actions.

Ideally our candidate is a “tastemaker”, “prescriber” or “influencer” who has contacts with the groups of people that share interests aligned with the brand. If they have a background in media it is much better.