Top 5 Cities for Your Mobile Marketing Tour

Top 5 Cities for Your Mobile Marketing Tour

When it comes to building brand awareness and forging immediate, face-to-face connections with consumers, mobile brand activations are tough to beat. Brands tend to put a lot of creativity and cash into creating incredible, memorable experiences, and with good reason. More important, however, is choosing the right cities.

Location characteristics such as demographics, population density, climate, and income levels make all the difference in the success or failure of a roadshow. So instead of laser-focusing on creating an innovative activation or pop-up, experts say, brands should focus more of their planning time and energy on identifying markets that offer the best access to their target audience. “After all,” says a recent post on swcpartnership.com, “there’s little point in producing an incredible, never-seen-before activation if people will quite literally never see it, right?”

What’s Special About Cities

While a smaller city or more targeted location might be the best fit for a particular brand or product, large cities offer many advantages for brand activations:

High foot traffic: Business districts in large cities typically have high foot traffic, which means a brand activation has the potential to reach a massive audience, potentially boosting brand awareness and engagement.

Diverse demographics: Large cities tend to have diverse populations, including people from different cultures, backgrounds, and age groups, allowing brands to target a wider range of audiences while still tailoring the activation to specific demographics.

Media presence: Newspapers, magazines, television stations, and online news outlets can help generate buzz and media coverage for mobile brand activations, further amplifying their reach.

Entertainment hubs: Many large cities are cultural hubs with a thriving arts, music, and entertainment scene. This can provide opportunities for unique and creative brand activations that resonate with the local culture.

Social media environment: Large cities often have a high concentration of social media influencers and content creators.

New York City

New York City is naturally a hugely popular site for brand activations. With a population that’s diverse in every conceivable way, the city has distinctive demographic features and cultural influences and a mix of high foot traffic and public transportation. “Hitting NYC on your mobile marketing tour will guarantee a significant reach for brands in all industries,” says Promobile Marketing “One of the many perks of choosing NYC as a tour destination is that it’s the most diverse city in the US, so you will undoubtedly connect with whoever your target audience is.”

Capturing and holding New Yorkers’ attention long enough to connect with your brand is challenging, as is choosing the right location, but brands make it work by pairing the right message with the right location. Brands who’ve made a splash with NYC activations and Promobile include Trojan, MAC Cosmetics, Bobbi Brown, and Klondike.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles is another top choice for brands’ mobile activation tours. It’s not just the proximity to Hollywood — it’s the overall creative vibe. “Many brands choose to bring their brand to LA because they know that LA is home to whatever’s next: if your brand can make an impression here, it’s only a matter of time until the whole country is talking about your brand or products.”

Notable activations and pop-ups created by Promobile include Tazo/Cafe Collective, Lemon Perfect, and Sunscoop x Supergoop.

Chicago

Chicago is a vibrant city with a thriving arts and culture scene and the third-largest city in the U.S., making it a prime location for brand activations. Massive arts events like Pitchfork Music Festival and Lollapalooza create a major platform for mobile activations and pop-ups. Sure, the winters are rough — but that just makes the spring and summer better. “With the extreme and anticipated change in weather, there is never a lack of foot traffic when it finally gets warm out. Bustling streets open the door for your brand to produce an activation that resonates with your target audience.”

Dallas

Dallas is an excellent city for brand activations due in large part to its status as a thriving financial and business center. And while Austin gets all the art-crowd cred, Dallas has a truly remarkable cultural scene, including world-class museums and the longest contiguous arts district in the United States — a whopping 118 acres. Everything really is bigger in Texas, and that’s one of the city’s most distinctive characteristics: the Dallas-Ft. Worth area is huge. “In order to rack up brand awareness, it’s important to have a message people see and remember,” says speedpro.com. The city is also a popular destination for conventions, expos, trade shows and more, thanks to its huge hospitality industry and top-tier convention spaces.

Miami

Diverse cultures, a tropical climate, striking architecture, and beautiful scenery make Miami a popular destination for tourists and brands. Miami hosts thousands of events each year — music festivals, art festivals, sporting events, auto racing, culinary events, and cultural celebrations — all of which create stellar opportunities for brands to reach targeted audiences with activations, pop-ups, and other experiential marketing events. It’s not unusual for numerous brands to crop up around a single event, each celebrating different aspects of the experience while connecting firsthand with consumers.

One example: Beauty brand Amika called on Miami as a stop on its anti-frizz mobile tour, launching a product targeting frizz, a haircare challenge common to humid climates like Miami’s.

Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing agency based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile Marketing has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Get in touch to discuss your next project.