What is guerrilla marketing, and why is it such a powerful tool for experiential? Asking yourself, “how do I create a successful guerrilla marketing campaign”? With all those fancy buzzwords out there, things are sure to get confusing once in a while.
I think it’s fair to say we’re all familiar with what marketing is, but you’ve got; consumer marketing, B2B marketing, direct marketing, buzz marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, online marketing, the list can go on forever. Jay Conrad Levinson first dubbed “guerrilla marketing” in his book published in 1984, Guerrilla Marketing.
Jay describes his method as a low cost or even, a no cost approach. There are those that call it unconventional marketing, others call it extreme marketing, stealth marketing, flashmob marketing,.. The list goes on. However all of these tactics are non-traditional, low-cost and highly effective.
Great Guerrilla marketing employs smarter deployments instead of more difficult. Successful campaigns are created with time, data, knowledge, experience, and creativity. You can’t implement a successful guerrilla marketing campaign unless you have imagination. Individuals that create functional guerrilla marketing campaigns tap into their contacts, influencers and people that want to get involved, everyone has great input and collectively, great ideas can spawn.
Guerrilla marketing is based on human psychology and emotion and thinking instead of building guesswork. A good measure of guerrilla marketing is the number of impressions and relationships you build over a particular period of time.
Guerrilla marketing employs a focus on markets and target audiences vs. trying to be all things to mass markets. There’s a concentration on three specific ways to increase business: new referrals, more transactions from existing customers and larger transactions from existing customers.
Instead of out-and-out competition, guerrilla marketing supports cooperation with other businesses. Guerrilla marketing is made up of many elements all working together and supporting each component of the program. Technology is the guerrilla marketer’s friend. Use it. Leverage it. Profit from it.
Here are some guerrilla marketing examples that you might have noticed, or maybe noticed but didn’t realize they were marketing of the guerrilla type:
Chipotle’s offer of a free burrito to anyone dressed up like one of their football-size burritos on Halloween
A business owner associating himself with a current event as an expert so he can get quoted in the media. An entrepreneur nominating herself for an award and promoting her nomination and receipt of the award (if she gets it)
Sonic DriveIn Restaurant’s magnetic cups that adhere to the trunk of a car as it drives off, making it appear as if the driver forgot to remove his drink from its temporary resting place. This guerrilla marketing stunt really got talked about, and word-of-mouth marketing took over and helped spread the word about this restaurant.
Many of these guerrilla marketing ideas appear to be common sense, but in reality, they’re not practiced all that often. These are just a few of the examples of businesses have used successfully. Many other campaigns have been executed with success, the only limitation is your imagination.