How to Utilize a Promotional Staffing Agency -

Want to leverage the power of in-person, relational, and conversational brand ambassador marketing? Use a promotional staffing agency to hire a temporary team of enthusiastic brand representatives, and get your company in front of the people you want to reach.

What is promotional staffing?

Promotional staffing, event staffing, brand ambassador marketing — these terms refer to many of the same things.

When you want to run an in-person marketing campaign such as at a trade show, live event, or through nearly any form of guerilla marketing, you can make a much greater impact by hiring a team of promotional staff.

Benefits of hiring promotional staff

The well-trained workers you’ll engage to represent your brand will achieve much more than you could on your own. They’ll make your campaign come to life and accomplish its sales and marketing goals.

Brand ambassadors:

Know the local scene
Engage people in a sincere and enthusiastic manner — on behalf of your company
Reach all sorts of people in miscellaneous, free-flowing environments
Aren’t afraid to strike up conversations with passersby

Plus, trained brand ambassadors deliver a far more cost-effective strategy for conducting the actual work for an on-the-ground marketing campaign, because they are temporary, non-W2 employees.

What does a promotional staffing agency do?

A creative staffing agency like Power Direct coordinates the hiring, training, and management of your team of brand ambassadors, so you don’t have to.

And before you get to that point, we’ll even assist with designing effective marketing campaigns themselves and help clarify the goals you want to achieve in your marketing campaign. Are you generating leads, collecting data through surveys or polls, passing out samples, something else?

Next, an effective promotional staffing agency will help your company:

Plan the logistics of your campaign
Identify the specific location or area where you’ll be active
Determine promotional staffing needs
Work with local staffing companies to assemble your team
Ensure your team gets trained with the knowledge they need to execute the campaign

Power Direct has relationships with local staffing firms around the country, and can find the right talent to represent your brand and carry out the tasks you require. We manage all the HR-related tasks for hiring temporary talent so you don’t have to hassle with it.

Once the team has been assembled, we train them to perform the tasks you need completed, including language to use or avoid, answers to expected questions, data you need collected and the process for collecting it, and whatever other specifics pertain to your campaign.

Types of Promotional Staffing

The promotional talent you’re looking for depends on your company, the products or services you intend to promote, the consumers in your target audience, and the goals of your campaign.

Here are a few types of event staffing personnel brands can hire:

Street teams

These people love to get out there and move. They like to engage strangers, be expressive, make noise, and have fun. They’re ideal for promoting brands in marketing contexts like sporting events, street corners, and busy public spaces with lots of foot traffic.

Promotional models

Also called trade show models, promotional models are a form of event staffing that work well in more formal environments such as a pop-up booth, business conference, or at community events like a farmer’s market.

Promotional staffing of this sort tends to feature young, outgoing people who draw attention and engage with potential customers and leads at special events. They do well with giving away samples, having photos taken, and signing people up for free trials or other forms of marketing follow-up. Promotional models can also assist with product demonstrations and experiential marketing.

Survey conductors

This type of talent does well with communication, including listening and answering questions. They also typically work with some form of technology to collect and record answers from consumers or potential clients.

Survey collectors can go door to door, or collect data from stationary locations like a booth at a trade show or in a busy commercial spot.

Other kinds of promotional staffing

What it really comes down to is, what kind of event marketing do you want to make happen, and what kind of talent do you need?

The types of people who have the expertise to take part in experiential marketing campaigns tend to be flexible, adaptable, engaging, and versatile. You can find professional talent to conduct just about any live marketing endeavor you have in mind.

All you need is the right promotional staffing agency that can make it happen.

What does a campaign cost?

Get a custom-built sample campaign with real targeting data, ad creative, cost estimates, and distribution plans.

Use the Project Estimator

Ways to leverage live promotional staff

What sorts of marketing activities can brand ambassadors make happen? Here are a few examples:

Experiential marketing

Experiential marketing includes things like pop-up displays, in-store demonstrations, product sampling, and any other creative experience that gets people to participate in some way.

You can run experiential marketing campaigns right on the street or in a mall.

You want prospects and leads to walk away feeling good about an experience they had interacting with your brand. You want them to remember you — and in a positive way.

Experiential marketing plants a seed that will outgrow the numerous other passive advertisements people see hundreds of times a day on their phones, screens, and going about their day.

Professional event marketing teams allow you to conduct experiential marketing in more places, for longer stretches of time, and with more potential customers and leads.

Live event marketing

Trade shows, booths, community events, sports events, and conferences offer another way to utilize promotional staff to engage with more customers and leads than you otherwise could. And you can do it without needing to bring your regular employees to perform all the tasks.

Event staff specialize in these high-energy environments where one good interaction can transform into an enriching experience for everyone. Some of the best and longest-lasting business relationships are forged at live events. And this includes B2B and B2C relationships.

Surveys and data collection

The third primary way to use promotional staff is for market research campaigns. Here, your primary goal is data collection.

You might be running a survey, gauging interest in a product or service, or gathering opinions or beliefs from a customer’s perspective on a variety of topics.

You may or may not also want to collect contact information for the people who participate in your market research endeavors. It depends on the goals of the campaign.

But whatever data you want to gather, you can use promotional staff to collect it much faster and from far more people than you could get if you did this yourself.

Why in person?

Why collect data in person rather than through other means like online channels, mail, or phone?

First, because in-person survey data will be more authentic. Second, because the survey experience will forge a stronger connection with your brand.

Whether you’re including some sort of offer as part of the survey experience or not, the people you survey will remember your company in a positive light. You care enough about their perspective to take the time and spend the money to talk to them in person about your products and services.

How to evaluate and hire event promotional staff

Hiring a professional team of local workers for a one-time event or for periodic promotional campaigns such as local sporting events requires a different set of skills and poses unique challenges.

Especially if this is your first event, you need a process for interviewing, evaluating, hiring, developing, and managing your event staff.

You have to make sure they:

Know what to do and say
Show up on time
Have a great attitude and engaging personality
Understand good customer service
Focus on the goals and tasks they trained for
Record or track the data relevant to your campaign

Learning the art of this process takes years. Having teams ready in national markets across the country means decades of scouting, fostering relationships, and hard work.

America’s top brands turn to Power Direct to instantly scale campaigns without the costly learning curve or wasteful mistakes.

See how Power Direct hires, trains, and manages promotional staff