Guerilla marketing is an effective marketing strategy wherein brands use unconventional cost-efficient and innovative tactics in creating lasting impressions on target audiences.
It was introduced in the year 1984, by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing, which describes the inexpensive unconventional approaches for amplifying your services and products provided by your brand. Brands interact with consumers digitally or personally by bringing in remarkably untraditional elements which create effects on them. When the traditional marketing strategies do only a little good, then the business could take off their ‘guerillas'.
Guerrilla marketing is not about making war, it is about winning the audience with the elements of surprise!
Imagine you're a student, and all the students are wearing a unique school dress, but you're wearing a funky T-Shirt with hair and coloured Tattoos on your neck. What would be varied sense of emotion, surrounding you?
Everyone could start looking and staring at you, even though there are chances that you might be thrown out of classroom unless it is your occasion or your birthday. That's wherein guerilla marketing arrives into the picture. Your business would be presented in a different way from others.
Many Small-Cap, blue-chip, and mid-cap companies were attempting this guerilla marketing to outshine their equivalent competitors. In this marketing strategy, there lies a big window opportunity for business growth, meaning the audience would talk more about this surprising, unconventional brand, in its way of presentation, and reaches publicity in social media, newspaper, or in other mediums.
Every business line applies an investment for financial return which does not suppose to mean in product or service selling alone. It firmly means building a brand and reaching your name there.
So, if you're a small business owner and looking for an effective way to promote your business and reach visible growth for your small business in a shorter time span, then you can think of something out of the box to grab customers' attraction.
Don't be average in giving ideas when it comes to creativity. To bestow success, herein let us garner some of the best and efficient Guerilla marketing strategies and examples for small-budget businesses.
Significance of Guerrilla Marketing
The name guerrilla marketing draws inspiration from guerilla warfare that relates to small tactics used by armed civilians and personal civilians. Those tactics make use of sabotage, ambush, raids, and different surprise elements. Similar to guerrilla warfare, This sort of guerilla marketing also utilizes creative ways which have the essence of surprise to target audience, so that more volume of consumers come in. Guerilla marketing also reshapes the future of Digital Marketing, with technological advancement.
Spotlights of Guerrilla Marketing to Opt for your business
In the era of Digital marketing, the major goal of guerrilla marketing is creating a buzz in market through engaging and unique campaigns using limited resources. Besides this, the marketers opt towards guerrilla marketing when they wish to
Stand out - Stand out from the group clutter of paid ads and withstand a unique positioning in the minds of customers. Through this uniqueness, more users may get crowded with your brand.
Earn media attention as media houses and new agencies often focus on the campaigns of guerilla marketing, and showcase this audience.
Build a unique brand - this means that audience must remember your product through your unique brand creation.
Get viral as guerilla marketing campaigns, carrying a social value.
Utilizing this guerilla marketing could be fruitful for a unique brand, due to the following reasons.
Interaction with Audience: The strategies of Guerilla marketing, aid the brand to have interaction with customers, on a more personal level.
Cost-efficient - The execution of Guerilla marketing strategies, is not expensive as like other high-influencing strategies and does not burn holes in the pockets of the brand. They necessitate big creative thinking and low investment.
Progresses with word of mouth: When people talk more about your products and services, they are the most efficient and powerful weapons which any marketing arsenal had. People talk more about your brand, when it is more creative, surprising element and innovative, driving more people's attention.
Publicity can snowball: These strategies make it reach more volume of audience and maximize the reach. It creates buzz and awareness about the products in a competitive market.
Impact creation: As the strategies of guerilla marketing are highly innovative, it creates lasting impressions in people's minds.
Types of Guerilla Marketing
On their Own, Guerilla marketing is niche enough, in the era of experiential marketing. But there are some sub-categories of this Guerilla marketing. They are illustrated below.
Indoor Guerilla Marketing: these are the Guerilla marketing activations executed in public areas such as retail stores, college campuses, and other places. Examples of Indoor Guerrilla marketing could range from the performance of “flash mobs” to signage placement.
Ambush Guerilla Marketing: this Ambush Guerilla marketing, is defined as the activations implemented in large-scale events such as in trade shows, festivals, and sporting events without permission. This sort of Guerilla marketing could be challenging at an extreme level to pull off since this most large-scale events had heightened security for attendees' protection and also the integrity of official sponsors.
Experiential Guerilla Marketing: this sort of Experiential Guerilla marketing is the most general form of guerilla marketing, could be held off in any public environment, and has the capability in bringing more innovative rewards than other risks to the audience.
From ranging from pop-up shows to city-wide Scavenger hunts, the most successful experiential guerilla marketing forms are the ones that engage successfully with customers and invite the consumer for brand interaction.
Street Guerilla Marketing: they are the activation that takes benefit of the existing public environment for creating a distinct and creative brand presence. This street Guerilla marketing type is often temporary and consists of installation and marketing signages.
Best Guerilla Marketing Strategies for Small Budget Businesses.
In this section, you are exposed to some of the best and cheapest Guerilla marketing strategies for small-budget businesses, hence you could shed traditional marketing strategies and make memorable campaigns in the target audience's eyes.
Clever Sandwich Boards
Businesses have utilized a sidewalk and chalk for making jokes on sandwich boards to grab the attention of audience.
Using Funny Sandwich boards could turn out passersby laugh, post pictures, spread in social media and step up through your doors and purchase ultimately.
Sandwich boards are an inexpensive, fun, and easy way in promoting your business within your neighborhood.
Unique Infographics
Infographics were liked and shared on the platform of social media, thrice more than ordinary content types. Therefore this infographic is an awesome approach to grab visits to your website and users' eyeballs to your brand.
An infographic generally uses data in visual form to deliberate her own product description and ideas in an interesting manner.
You can either collect data yourself, through survey assessment of customers or can take up the fun and unique idea complimenting your product or brand,
Search out the statistics on the internet in building your own infographics.
After this, pick out an inexpensive infographic designer like Fivr in making infographics concepts to have life.
Smart Coasters
If your own a restaurant or bar, your customer will be more likely to spend the entire meal with a coaster placed in front of them. The customers would pick up the coasters, view them, read them, and write something on them.
The coaster could be a great place for adding innovative and surprising elements for their guerilla marketing, which your customers guarantee to see.
Above is a coaster, wherein the idea of an Optimal medicinal cure product is added with an innovative caption about the brand.
If you are running a small business-to-business firm, you can innovatively create modern guerilla coasters, to promote your product, effectively, by inhibiting all your product ideas with any surprising and trending idea in the coasters. This would grab all the customers, visiting the hotel or restaurant.
Landscape Takeovers
Guerilla marketing campaigns were often the urban manipulating landscapes, in some way, through bus stop ads, yarn bombing, spray paints or sidewalk chalks, crazy window displays, and subway signs.
Think about the area, surrounding your brand and business –how customers in the area will be driven through surprising, engaging advertisements making people stop, think and take over?
Surprising Flash Mobs
Flash mods are the ones when a group of people, who come together unexpectedly in public events and commence to perform for the surrounding crowds.
But don't stress to do the performance by yourself, rather your business can hire music students, drama students or local high school students for performing flashmob.
Just ensure to think about how you are going to integrate your brand into your flash mob with face paints, T-Shirts, or Signs to showcase the crowd.
Attention-Seeking Business Cards
Think more about how your business can rise, by also using surprising ideas, through guerilla marketing.
How many opportunities do you have in hand to pass out an effective business card, whether at a conference, social gathering, or networking event more people may ask for your business card.
If you have a snazzy business card, which made the audience laugh or contemplate something, they hadn't thought of before, it would leave a lasting impression.
Free Stuff
Think about your business the last time, your peak profits, giving away something free of cost with your products.
It is a human tendency to have love over free things. A lot of large brands, have used this strategy of guerilla marketing like Subway organized a giveaway food on 7-Eleven Piggybacking and National Sandwich Day on Pop Culture “7-Eleven day on July 11th by organizing giving away slurpees”.
For your business, set up a table, at any local farmer's market, take a rent of food truck to distribute a giveaway marketing your product, with surprising and attractive offers.
Open your business to give away free stuff on a day. By this, you will acquire new customers queueing up to your doors for your product and spread up the features to other persons also.
Take benefit of those guerilla marketing ideas for your small-budget business, and you can stumble on the surprising ideas aiding your brand to go viral at a low budget to no cost for you.
Small companies having low budgets are the firms that use this guerilla marketing mostly.
The point to grab the audience is to be easy and direct to understand. As start-up businesses have small budgets, the only and best option to stand out from other competitors is to think out of the box.
A few examples and tactics of these Guerilla marketing strategies, wherein the implementation is creative, easier, and innovative to grasp the user's attention are
- Graffiti
- Audience Participation.
- Projected Video
- Taking advantage of interesting packaging labels
- Mascots
- Advertising using means of transport.
1. Graffiti is a well-known method
Graffiti, is a convenient form of guerilla marketing, clean, innovative for the environment, and popular in the recent decade. Graffiti is more artistic, but cheap since you have to only spray paint cans or walls.
Pure Graffiti or Guerillas are the clean surfaces of the city, and appealing ones are made to have a better look.
Create Graffiti and chalk art, describing your business products and services, you offer in an innovative and creative way. This could be wonderful guerilla marketing for your start-up firm for its brand advertising. If you are more innovative and creative, you can hire someone, to create this graffiti layout. Later this graffiti design can be made into real ones. The idea would assist in business growth and also your customer base.
2. Responsive mini ad - Projected Video
The Strategy of Guerilla marketing has the capability to go on vial instantly. The projected video possesses the same characteristics.
Producing video can be cheaper, as long the message of the brand has been conveyed in a creative manner.
Think of it to be a responsive mini-ad, for it will be more interesting rather than a billboard, and could cover more large areas.
it illustrates a Projected video, wherein a company projects its brand message in the form of a video.
The higher the projection is placed, the more people would have a glance at it. However, this should be a visual message to make people stop their work and have a glance at it.
2. Use Posters and Stickers to Advertise
Another strategy of Guerilla marketing is using posters and Stickers. You must have seen stickers and posters everywhere for maximum engagement and reach.
Small businesses with their low budget plan use this idea to take off more customers and for business promotion.
As it does not have more cost, many medium-sized and small-cap companies tend to adopt this sort of marketing tactic to attract more customers.
3. Billboard Advertising
Billboard Guerilla marketing strategies helps business to maximize the recall value of the brand.
When people come across unique billboard advertising, support to recall the brand easily. This results in word-of-mouth marketing since people talk about the brand with colleagues, family, and friends. The content in the advertisement must be catchy, and informative, in such a way, mind mapping your content should amplify its reach to the audience whenever people pass by.
4. Use Food Trucks and Vending Machines
Suppose you have a beverage and food business, you can put vending machines in very popular places or you can have food trucks also.
It can be a wonderful idea for advertising your product and reaching more people to come in. It is a little expensive tactic however it turns out a high profitable business.
The technique could help you to drive more customers in buying your product and business profits.
3. Audience participation
The User-generated content could be more different and surprising from what a perfect marketing team could create.
An Instagram photo contest, that requires customers to shoot videos or needs user to share stories could be a fantastic Guerailla technique.
4. Location filters
Geo-fencing is an innovative new approach for businesses in engaging customers through utilizing GPS in smartphones.
It offers exclusive experience or content if you are in the target location. A Perfect example of this Geofiltes is the custom Geofilters of Snapchat, which are a great approach for creating location-based marketing campaigns on the platform. The cost to upload your own profile is less than 10 dollars in a few cases.
Those customer filters offer a prominent opportunity to create impressions on users in a particular area or at an event since they swipe through Geofilter during snap creation.
They may also apply those filters and share them with followers if it is relevant and fun enough.
5. Mascots are always cool
As per research, The most popular guerrilla strategy is using Mascots for business reach. People love them and prefer to take pictures with those Mascots.
Put the mascot on a specific line when the specific business event is planned. The planned event may be captured on social media as well. Definitely, this is an interesting approach to market your brand with a surprising mascot element.
6. Advertise using a means of transport
A creative striking logo or image on your personally made delivery vehicle could have a strong effect on Passersby who had a look at your advertisement.
Take advantage of interesting product packaging, product labels, or any flyers - it does not matter how much intense and how many tactics you choose to use, but still, your message must be conveyed effectively to the potential customers.
7. Sticker Marketing
Stickers are another inexpensive approach to get your brand out there to the target audience. People started utilizing their video game consoles or laptops as canvas to show off the brands they love efficiently.
Whether you are giving away those promo items at particular events or sticking the stickers all over the city, it keeps everyone acquainted with who has got.
Hints to make a successful Guerrilla marketing campaign
Guerilla marketing is something more different than other types of marketing, it generally utilizes the means of communication in an unconventional way ..!
Real Guerillas do not have hesitation in business in using everything they can in order to convey the product message and evoke unforgettable emotions for your business.
This sort of communication is prepared carefully and the messages created are effective to do their job of selling products through catchy phrases and attention-grabbing visuals.
To make this Guerilla marketing campaign successful, it is important for a business to induce these traits below.
- Clever
- Dynamic
- Memorable
- Effective
- Endearing
Make it clever
It is significant to have a clear idea of what you wish to convey, not relying on how you are going to convey it.
The essence of your product message is what matters most, not the witty manner you would convey that message. Hence make your information clever, to become memorable, and pass it on to your business.
Make it dynamic
Break the usual manner of communication, not the law!
Individuals think that this Guerilla marketing is like spraying web addresses on walls. It is not Guerilla marketing, it is just vandalism. Do not be rude, be dynamic and mysterious.
Make it memorable
Be better, not alone different. Do not get in a guerilla campaign since you think it is more interesting.
Learn more about Guerilla marketing, get to know all the ideas in Guerilla marketing, and how it makes the business fruitful. Without knowing the in-depth knowledge of Guerilla, don't commence the campaign.
The idea is in thriving better than a competitor in different approaches in an unconventional way, with surprising elements, not to stick out to be different alone.
Make it effective
Your Guerilla campaign must not be a joke circulating within the city instead, it should sell a specific product or specific service. If it does not achieve that impact, then it is not marketing. Make your visuals and content attractive and effective.
Then it's simply a better gag, you pay for.
Make it Endearing
Generally, People love all things free. This is the reason, why many engaging guerilla campaigns were tied to lend free giveaways.
Bottom Line
Guerilla marketing stands as a great way for your business promotion by reaching a wide range of audiences, globally. However, it is more significant to do this Guerilla Marketing in the right way. Avoid the general mistakes, and put forth the ideas listed above, in ensuring profitability for your small-budget business. With this little creativity and planning, you can utilize guerilla marketing to grow your business and reach a wide target audience.
Just ensure to plan ahead prior to launching your business and also measure the outcomes of a campaign to attain maximum success!
