Guerrilla Marketing – The What, The Why, The How

For decades, traditional marketing methods offered brands the choice of TV, print, or radio advertising. By the 1980s, as media channels were flooded by advertisements, businesses started to realize that they needed to be different to stand out.

Companies started using a strategy called ‘Guerrilla Marketing’, which uses an element of surprise or unconventional interactions to promote their products and services.

Guerrilla marketing helps marketers engage with customers in a unique and cost-effective way. The idea behind such a strategy is to leave a lasting impression and create hype around the products or services.

In this blog post, we will talk about what guerrilla marketing is, its benefits, and how you can create an impactful guerrilla marketing campaign.

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional marketing strategy in which businesses turn superbly creative to challenge people’s imagination for brand awareness and promoting a new product. It may involve unexpected interactions with the targeted audience to make an impact.

The goal is to catch people’s eye unexpectedly in the course of their day-to-day routine, targeting their unconscious minds, and bringing instant popularity to the product or service.

Types of Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing has different types and here are the most significant ones:

1. Ambush Guerrilla Marketing: This is a guerrilla marketing strategy in which businesses find ways to align their product or brand with giant events usually without being directly affiliated with the event sponsors.

A good example of this would be WePay’s campaign against their competitor PayPal. PayPal was facing the issue of freezing customer accounts. During a PayPal Annual Developer Conference, WePay froze money inside a giant chunk of ice and rolled it down to the front doors of the conference with a message, which essentially meant that while their competitor freezes accounts, they help unfreeze the money.

With a limited budget, competing against a giant in the payment industry, WePay decided to do a marketing stunt to get its message across and grab attention at the conference.

2. Stealth Guerrilla Marketing: It is an indirect way of marketing products and emphasizes on creating buzz among the audience without letting them realize that the product is being marketed to them. The most common example of stealth marketing is product placement during a show or a movie, outside of the advertising context.

3. Ambient Guerilla Marketing: Ambient guerilla marketing is a practice that involves advertising products and services in an unusual place. It could involve advertising on a bus shelter or with graffiti in busy downtown areas.

4. Experiential Guerrilla Marketing: This type of guerrilla marketing involves all types of interactive campaigns and activations in a way that makes the public interact with the brand and come away with a memorable experience.

A prominent example of this is Docker’s developer conference. Docker is a software platform that enables developers to make and run apps on various operating systems. It organized a developer conference, DockerCon 2017, to grow its enterprise market with a creative product demo called Docker Dash. What made it so different? It was not a demo, it was a game and the conference guests were the players.

Benefits of Guerilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is the holy grail for businesses with limited budgets. It enables quick engagement with the audiences in a cost-effective way. There are many benefits of guerilla marketing. Let’s take a peek into them:

• You can generate significant ROI by tapping into something fresh and unique in a way that audiences genuinely love.
• You can create memorable experiences for your audiences by using different experimental advertising techniques.
• You get a chance to reach a broader audience because of its uniqueness.

How to Set Up an Impactful Guerilla Marketing Campaign

Here are a few tips that can help you get started with your guerrilla marketing campaign:

1. Create an Original Idea: If you really want to run a successful guerrilla marketing campaign and catch people’s eye, your idea should be unconventional and original. Here is how you can create fresh and unique ideas:

• Set up a round table event and attend trade conferences
• Don’t stick to a fixed routine and explore other B2B opportunities with your marketing team
• Use your resources efficiently and get the maximum of what is available (evaluate every piece of content to see if you can use it in a new way)

2. Have a Call-to-Action in Your Campaign: Guerrilla marketing campaigns can be highly beneficial if you put up a call-to-action. You can put up CTAs like ‘Participate Now’ in giveaways or add links for your audience to fill out contact information for follow-up.

3. Entertain and Surprise Your Audience: Successful guerrilla marketing campaigns are all about entertaining and surprising your audience. This happens when your audience least expects a brand interaction.

For instance, Salesforce employed the guerrilla marketing strategy by hiring actors to pose as protestors at a Siebel conference, their biggest competitor at the time. They also rented dozens of taxis that were actually designed as mobile Salesforce marketing booths that drew people’s attention.

4. Measure Results: Guerrilla marketing campaigns mainly focus on creating buzz. Therefore, it may seem challenging to measure their results. If you are wondering how to track results, here are a couple of ways:

• Keep an eye on your brand’s mentions in media and track your likes, comments, and shares over social channels
• Use social listening tools to know conversations about your campaign on social media
• Conduct surveys to ask people if they have heard of your campaign and how they perceive your brand after it

The Bottom Line

If you’ve got a limited budget but unlimited creativity, guerrilla marketing is your best bet.
Once you’re ready to put your guerrilla marketing campaign in motion, remember your marketing approach needs to stand out from various advertising campaigns trying to capture people’s attention.

After all, creativity is the heart of successful guerrilla marketing.

Want to interact and engage with your target audience using the powers of guerrilla marketing? Talk to us!