Credit: Diana Parkhouse
Guerrilla Marketing is the ability to turn heads without an extremely large budget. According to Lexico Guerrilla Marketing is defined as:
Innovative, unconventional, and low-cost marketing techniques aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product.
It isn't what you'll learn about in a class on marketing from your community college or four year university. The key word here is unconventional.
PayPal Got Played By We Pay @ Their Own Conference
Have you ever heard of PayPal freezing a business's money randomly?
It happens. A lot. CNN Business descriptively states:
While it's supposed to be a measure to protect users against fraud, more often than not it has hurt businesses finances a lot. One person was raising money for cancer treatment when PayPal froze his account. Do a simple google search for 'PayPal froze my money' and you'll find thousands of results:
Pay processors and the drama they sometimes cause for entrepreneurs deserves a whole blog unto itself, but going back to Guerrilla Marketing, there are new competitors to PayPal every year. One refused to stay quiet.
One of my favorite examples of Guerrilla Marketing is when the payment processor We Pay dropped a 600 pound block of ice, with hundreds of dollars in it at PayPal's developer conference, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The message was clear:
“PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay.
Credit: https://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/
According to Hubspot this increased revenue for We Pay significantly:
• Conversions on landing page 3x higher
• 300% increase in weekly traffic
• 225% increase in signups
But Guerrilla Marketing isn't just pulling pranks it's being prepared for increased traffic and having a framework set up ahead of time to benefit from it. We Pay's achieved this by having a dedicated landing page for its stunt.
The WePay team had prepared in advance for a peak in engagement. They were ready for more emails, calls, and tweets than normal. And they had fun with it, documenting everything with pictures.
Carrie Remake Telekinesis in NYC Coffee Shop Stunt
In 2013, a marketing stunt to promote the remake of Carrie, a horror film from the Steven King book of the same name, pushed Guerrilla Marketing to a new level. A crazy telekinesis stunt was pulled on unsuspecting New Yorkers just trying to get a cup of coffee:
Needless to say, it was effective in getting the word out about the upcoming October 2013 film. While it could be argued that this ploy didn't perfectly fit the definition of being cost-effective
-I mean staging a telekinetic action scene in real life is rather elaborate-
I say it still counts as Guerrilla Marketing. Guerrilla Marketing stunts are risqué, highly visible, and attention-grabbing - all of which the Carrie NYC coffee shop captured. Hard to top that!
Carrie Foursquare's SXSW Tactic Added 100K New Users
On the balling-on-a-budget level, the company Foursquare, which popularized the concept of real-time location-sharing and checking-in, played an actual game of Four Square at SXSW in Austin, Texas in front of the convention hall.
Credit: https://www.zdnet.com/article/playing-four-square-with-foursquare-at-sxsw-2010/
The game drew 1000s of walk-up participants, said Dennis Crowley, CEO of the firm. While the company co-hosted a party Monday night, Crowley said, its SXSW presence didn’t include other bells and whistles like signage or a booth in the hall. It largely hinged on “a box of chalk and two rubber balls,” he said.
“We played all day long, and there was always a waiting line,” Crowley said. “We were handing out tee shirts, buttons, and stickers. Anytime someone didn’t know what Foursquare was, we helped them find it on their phone. We helped get them up and running and using it.”
Foursquare benefited from an additional 100,000 checkins that Saturday they played the four square game at SXSW on. Ever wonder why you see an ad for a store after walking by the store?
Since 2014, Foursquare launched Pilgrim, a piece of code that passively tracks where your phone goes using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and GSM to identify the coffee shop or park or Thai restaurant you’re visiting, then feeds that data to its partner apps to send you a 10 percent off coupon if you leave a review for the restaurant.
Today, Pilgrim and the company’s Places API are an integral part of tens of thousands of apps, sites, and interfaces. As Foursquare’s website says, “If it tells you where, it's probably built on Foursquare.”
While there are privacy concerns using Foursquare and it's technology, that game of four square they played was a great example of low cost Guerrilla Marketing.
If you want to use Guerrilla Marketing for your business here are a few tips:
• Keep your strategy fun, simple, and witty.
• Physically travel to the influencers in your target communities.
• Engage influential bloggers through mutual plugging.
• Flatter your audience. Always make them look good.
• Make social phenomena the core of your campaign.
• Be outrageous.
• Dare your audience to test your services
• Create a viral video that is humorous and pokes fun at yourself.
• Leverage existing communities, events and platforms.
• Impress people who can grow your business thru their audience.
• Create controversy by challenging your competitors. Credit.
How can you use this strategy in your business? Have you seen Guerrilla Marketing happen in real life, or have a favorite example yourself? Comment below!
. . .
Enjoyed this blog?
Signup here to get updates on new startup blogs.
Check out my Medium page here
Is Facebook not explaining why the disapproved an ad?
I worked at FB for years and offer FB Policy Consulting here
Available for freelance writing and guest posting on your blog: [email protected]
Leave a Reply