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Guerrilla Marketing 101: What Is Guerrilla Marketing? Why You Should Think About Using It?
Are you familiar with Guerrilla Marketing? If you aren’t, well you’re in luck. We’ll help you get the gist of everything in this post. Although we probably can’t give everything to you in one go, this post will help give you information on what guerrilla marketing is all about. So, let’s get started.
What is guerrilla marketing?
When looking through the internet, you’ll find a lot of hashtags and ideas for guerrilla marketing. However, you may really not know what it means. In totality, guerrilla marketing deviates from the traditional marketing. If you’ve simply just Googled, “what is guerrilla marketing?” Google will provide you with the meaning, “innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing techniques aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product.”
This seems pretty clear cut, right? However, look at a couple of these photos. These are examples of the innovative, unconventional and low-cost marketing techniques that have been used.
Now that you have an idea of what guerrilla marketing is like, the next step is planning. Planning a guerrilla marketing is basically planning how you’re going to get someone’s attention against all the ad-ridden streets and walls of the world. This type of marketing gets your brand name to stand out through something that is low-cost.
Pros and Cons of Guerrilla Marketing
Yes, there are definitely pros and cons in anything you do with marketing. So, guerrilla marketing isn’t any different. Although many companies have created teams with creative experts, these teams can’t capture everything and everyone. Hence, people that think outside of the box are, at best, something to look out for. So, with a team or an individual, guerrilla marketing can provide you with good points of success as well as bad ones, which may end up in a lawsuit.
Pros
Beyond guerrilla marketing having a low budget overhead cost, this marketing technique could bring in growth to your company. By growth, we mean similar to what Krispy Kreme has done for many years. If you’re not familiar with the growth of Krispy Kreme, well we’ll tell you that word got around how awesome their donuts were. So, if you did your guerrilla marketing right, your growth is going to be doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in a short amount of time.
Besides lessening possible costs of ads and the company growing almost overnight, creativity and imagination will help you and your company be different from others. When you allow creativity to flow, you will get much more attention, especially when it’s followed through because it’s different from the conventional marketing plans.
Last, but not least, you can probably get free publicity. Yes! You read that correctly! It’s possible that your guerrilla marketing idea was able to catch the attention of major news sites or someone from social media. This can make you and your brand viral! One simple and differentiated idea can snowball you a slew of people lining up for you brand. This, for sure, is something marketers always look for rather than calling for a press conference, right?
Cons
Besides all the pros you can get from guerrilla marketing techniques, there are also quite a lot of cons. Since you’ll be more aware of these cons, it may help you avoid some of these.
If you’re going to get out-of-the-box for marketing ideas, they can become misunderstood. This is probably one of the most common things where guerrilla marketing campaigns falter. Although brands try to offer mysterious marketing techniques to try and catch attention. People may take notice, but the message of the campaign not be well understood.
Beyond your brand message or marketing campaign being misunderstood, the authorities can also intervene. These are usually in cases wherein graffiti is used as a marketing technique. Usually, these have no permission to be put up. Hence, the authorities have the ability to stop the process. This can result in lawsuits or create unnecessary tension between authorities and yourself.
If the possibility of a lawsuit isn’t enough, there are also unpredictable things that could threaten the campaign. You may be thinking what could possibly go wrong. Well, you’d be surprised by how wrong timing can severely affect the entire campaign. For example, a brand decides that they’ll present a flash mob in Times Square. They already have a certain date and everything is setup for that. However, it suddenly starts pouring rain in the middle of the performance and everybody scatters away. What happens then? Well, that could be a success if there was coverage even if you thought was a failure. But, it could also end as a total disaster.
Another thing that could happen is the possible backlash the brand might receive. There are activists around the world. No country or city is free from it. So, if the brand guerrilla marketing sparks a fluke to someone, they could gather a number of people to be against your brand. This usually happens to brands that do “undercover marketing campaigns.” So, it’s best to prepare for the worst at best.
Overall, the pros outweigh the cons. Although the cons may seem scary, they are mostly just some things you’d need to think about in the process of executing your guerrilla marketing campaign.
Types of Guerrilla Marketing Campaigns
There has already been a lot of guerrilla marketing techniques that companies have used. Check these out techniques out!
Graffiti: Usually made using paint or spray paint.
Anti-Graffiti or Reverse Graffiti: Usually made by removing dirt off a wall or street.
Stickers: Peta has been very successful with handing these out.
Publicity Stunts: This has been done by a lot of brands. Check out this Red Bull publicity stunt. Stunts don’t really need to be this daring, but think magicians in the line of publicity stunts.
Now that you’ve got the gist of what Guerrilla Marketing is all about and have seen some ideas. Let your creative brain start thinking of ways to promote things around you. What are you waiting for? Want to get started or you have more questions? Leave a comment below!
About the Author Jesse Byron
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