A Guide To Guerrilla Marketing

After a while, the same marketing tactics can start to feel boring and expected, for both you and your customers. Even if you are routinely posting great content, customers might get bored of seeing similar posts every week. One way to excite customers and reignite your creativity is to use guerrilla marketing.

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is any non-traditional marketing method used to surprise and delight customers. When done well, guerrilla marketing generates conversation around your topic, boosts word of mouth marketing, and gives you plenty of foot traffic if you have an offline location. While guerrilla marketing lies partially on luck, with some planning you can execute a fun, creative, and successful event.

How Do I Plan For Guerrilla Marketing?

First and foremost, your guerrilla marketing idea should complement your online store and marketing efforts. If you carry out an event that people enjoy, but they do not connect it to your online store, then it is not benefiting you. Make it your goal to make an event so creative that people stop what they are doing to check out what is going on, and find a way to tie it into your brand. The point of guerrilla marketing is to evoke an emotional reaction, such as surprise, curiosity, delight, and admiration. If running an offline event, plan ahead to take into account variables such as weather, city laws, noise, etc to make sure your guerrilla marketing tactic runs as smoothly and successfully as possible.

What Are Some Things I Can Do?

With guerrilla marketing, the possibilities are endless. However, there are some ideas that are popular and a good place to start. One of the more common tactics is opening a pop-up shop. Pop-up shops are fun, easy, and allow customers to see what you are about in a casual setting. Pop-up shops can be just about anywhere, including offices, coffee shops or breweries, on the street, or at special events such as fairs. Giving away free samples is also a great guerrilla marketing tactic, as it lets customers try the product with no commitment or loss to them.

For a more modern, fun idea, create a custom filter on Snapchat. Creating Snapchat filters is easy, cheap, and allows you to reach a wide audience. The filters are determined by location, so make sure to choose a target area that you think will benefit you best. Once your filter is created, anyone within the Geofence is free to use it.

Stickers are an easy, classic way to utilize guerrilla marketing. Stickers are fun, easy to create, and inexpensive to buy. People love stickers, and love to stick them on everything from water bottles to laptops to cars. Stickers are portable marketing and are wonderful for showing off your creative side and grabbing attention.

Interactive ads are another great way to grab your audience’s attention. Hulu sets a prime example of this concept by offering users a shorter commercial break with an interactive ad, or a longer break with traditional ads. Volkswagen, along with several other brands, used a combination of print ads and technology to create awareness and excitement around new features they were offering. Using technology with print ads is a fairly new concept, and one people tend to respond well to.

Although traditionally done offline, with the rise in technology adding online aspects to your guerrilla marketing tactics can help boost your results. Keep up with your traditional marketing and try adding in a little guerrilla marketing to the mix for a fun change.