Today, small businesses are focused on online promotion. It helps them create targeted campaigns, reach out to a wider group of people, provide real-time customer services, and save money.

However, excluding traditional marketing practices from your business promotion is not an option. If your budget is restricted and you cannot invest in expensive billboards, TV or radio ads, you need to go with their alternatives- more budget-friendly and yet highly engaging marketing practices.

One such example is guerrilla marketing.

Let’s find out what it means and how to use it wisely to boost your customer conversions.

Guerrilla Marketing: The Big Picture

When you hear the word guerrilla, probably the first thing that comes to your mind is guerrilla warfare. And, as you probably know from your history lessons, the element of surprise is the foundation of every powerful guerrilla strategy.

Similar to guerrilla warfare, guerrilla marketing is about catching your customers off guard. It is based on highly unconventional marketing practices that will surprise people and help them escape their day-to-day routines for a few minutes.

There are different types of guerrilla marketing.

For example, it can take place inside publicly accessible places like train stations, restaurants, or stores.

It can be set outside, as well. If you have seen some temporary stickers on sidewalks, fun stickers at the bus station, or removable statues, then you know what I’m talking about.

Some marketers use large events to engage wide groups of people, while others focus on experiential tactics to get their target audience actively participate in their marketing campaigns. Just take an example of a flash mob or a scavenger hunt.

But, why does guerrilla marketing matter?

First, it’s unexpected and fun.

Second, it’s subtle and offers an unforgettable user experience.

Third, it positions your brand as innovative and customer-oriented.

Finally, it’s budget-friendly. Guerrilla marketing is not about investing money. It’s about investing your time to evaluate your target audience’s existing environment and repurpose it to raise their awareness of your brand.

Build your Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Wisely

The major purpose of guerrilla marketing is to make people pay attention. As such, it requires a lot of creativity and some serious thinking out of the box. Your primary goal is to come up with authentic, exciting, and memorable solutions that will engage your target audience and make them spread positive word of mouth.  

Make it dynamic.

Guerrilla marketing is all about getting people to participate in your campaign. One of the most inexpensive and yet awesome ways to win the hearts of your target audience is to organize a flash mob. Seeing the potential in this a technique, numerous famous brands like Nivea decided to leverage it.

Sometimes, people can take part in your marketing campaign without even knowing it. Let’s take an example of Frontline, the maker of flea and tick prevention products for dogs. Knowing that there are hundreds or even thousands of people visiting a mall every day, they chose it for their product promotion. They covered the floor with a huge image of a dog in order to play with perspectives and create an optical illusion. Namely, when observed from a bird’s eye view, people walking across the image looked like flies.

Use it to incentivize.

Sometimes, even a tiny gift can go a long way. The idea behind all this is pretty clear- you reward your customers for buying your products and being loyal to your brand. That’s what Coca-Cola did with their Happiness Machine campaign. Namely, those people who used their vending machines to buy their products received different gifts, from free Coke bottles to flowers.  

Make it bold.

The beauty of guerrilla marketing lies in the fact that you can unleash your creativity. Instead of paying for expensive billboards, you can use public places, alleyways or any blank walls as your canvases. Take advantage of graffiti, street art, and stickers to create memorable marketing campaigns.

You can even use them to boost people’s engagement or raise their awareness about certain issues. For example, Folger’s Coffee “turned” manholes into large, steaming cups of coffee using stickers. As the steam coming from manholes is typical for New York, the results were really amazing.

Integrate it with Online Marketing and Measure its Effectiveness

Today, we shouldn’t observe traditional and online marketing as two separate notions. To boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you need to merge them together.

This holistic approach gives you the opportunity to measure the effectiveness of your guerrilla marketing campaigns. With a plethora of traditional media monitoring tools and social analytics platforms, you can stay on top of your brand/product mentions across multiple channels, as well as keep track of all major KPIs, such as your response rates, conversion rates, retention rates, positive comments, referrals, cross-sells, etc.

So, how to combine online marketing and guerrilla marketing?

• Take your target audience from the offline to the online world using QR codes. Add them to your promotional products, storefront doors, business cards or stickers to take them to a particular landing page or one of your social media profiles.  
• Use social networks to spread the word about the event you’re planning, create highlights from previous events, or even do a livestream of your events (look at what Red Bull did with their Stratos publicity stunt).
• Collect user-generated content on social networks. Once you start a guerrilla marketing campaign, inspire people to take photos and share them online, tagging you and using your hashtag.

Conclusions

Guerrilla marketing is bold and innovative. Most importantly, it’s highly personalized. What works for your competitors doesn’t necessarily have to work for you. So, do your research and be creative to turn your guerrilla marketing campaign into a customer conversion powerhouse.

Author Bio

Claudia Paisley Propp, graduated journalist, digital marketing lover, based in Sydney. Copywriting, Online Marketing… Lets just say – Communication in all shapes and sizes is her passion and what she does best. She is that lucky girl who gets to live her dream. Here to share her knowledge and write about latest trends in (social) media that can help small businesses grow really big. Writes for Bizzmark blog.