Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing Treasure Hunts

Driving engagement is the key to mobile marketing

A great way to do that and to attract prospects is with a mobile marketing treasure hunt.  They are a successful tool to promote your company, services, products or points of interest. They offer you the opportunity to combine offline and online actions. It can be tricky to do so let’s take a look at 3 great examples.

What is a treasure hunt?

It’s a game in which players act upon clues and are eventually directed to a prize. The way you give clues can be anything like your social media channel, website, physical notes and or a mobile app. This is a great way for people to engage and have fun with your mobile marketing.

One of the most common types of treasure hunts is geocaching. Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.

Why do treasure hunts work for mobile marketing? Because it gives you instant interaction with your prospects and customers and who doesn’t like to win prizes? With scavenger hunts you can make your customers happy and in return they will be loyal to your brand and will definitely share their experience with others. Treasure hunts work for any industry if organized well.

Let’s have a look at 3 successful treasure hunts:

1. Muse Ununited Eurasia treasure hunt –

Muse (an English rock band) hid several USB sticks in a worldwide treasure hunt in seven cities: Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and New York. With almost no advertising, the Ununited Eurasia treasure hunt quickly caught the attention of fans worldwide. Each USB stick had a code which a founder had to enter at Ununitedeurasia.muse.mu. Each code unlocked a certain part of the song ‘United States of Eurasia’. To unlock it completely, fans had to find all the USBs. Clues and locations of the USBs were released via the website.

2. M&M’s The Find Red –

This campaign focused on a virtual treasure hunt in Toronto for M&M’s red character implemented into Google Maps. This digital treasure hunt started with a YouTube video of Red who got sucked into Google Street View. The Video had several hidden clues that would lead to winning a red Smart car. During the treasure hunt participants regularly got new hints on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, as well as the campaign official website. Organizers also used different advanced media, such as QR codes placed all over Toronto and UPC (The Universal Product Code) codes on M&M’s packages which added up to a total of 100 clues.

3. Tony Hawk’s worldwide scavenger hunt –

The skateboarding icon Tony Hawk arranged for more than 80 boxes to be hidden in nearly as many cities throughout the world, from Oak Park, California to Brisbane, Australia. On the day of the treasure hunt, Tony started tweeting clues out with the city, a photo and a riddle or hint as to the specific whereabouts. Then Hawk tweeted the finder’s’ photos to let everyone know the item was found.

As you can see, a creative idea is a must. You need to make sure that the rewards people can win are worth the effort they need to put into the hunt. Use social media to hype your event beforehand. Are you ready to get started on your mobile marketing treasure hunt?

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