When we talk about guerrilla marketing, tell me honestly what comes to mind? Well, apart from guerrillas in the forest thickets. Highly creative marketing campaigns with huge budgets from leading companies? Isn't that right? With a strong position in their sector, which launch this type of strategy to achieve immediate returns, media returns and latent virality? But what if we say that it can become a strategy for any company or organization as an interesting alternative when it comes to achieving their goals?
What is guerrilla marketing?
Guerrilla marketing is a marketing strategy that uses unconventional methods that, through creativity and low investment, aim to achieve maximum media coverage. It consists of performing actions that surprise the viewer in order to take them out of their routine and make them remember the event. By performing various actions, the media and users will share them, and we will receive free advertising.
Why do you need guerrilla marketing?
It serves to make itself known in an influential way so that the user remembers us. It is a technique that seeks to influence and offer a different experience to the user who sees it. There are different methods of guerrilla marketing, so the goals we set must correspond to the type we choose.
If there is one definition that comes close to guerrilla marketing, it is the element of surprise: a factor that seeks to create a positive memory in the minds of consumers after the first impact of surprise. It is obvious that the element of surprise is what gives guerrilla marketing its name: guerrillas were used in all major battles to wear down the enemy. Now, guerrilla marketing aims to use the element of surprise for exactly the opposite purpose - to be remembered and to encourage the consumption of certain products.
Guerrilla marketing, therefore, differs from other marketing actions in that it appears as easily as it disappears. These are usually not long-term campaigns, they appear in the most unexpected places and in different places at the same time.
Guerrilla marketing is a perfectly structured attack that stimulates our senses and grabs our attention. Ambient marketing is here, prepare your senses!
Guerrilla Marketing for Small and Medium Businesses
Large-scale promotions are out of reach for small companies, who consider their promotions to be economically limited and unable to compete with large companies, and this is where environmental marketing, guerrilla marketing, comes into its own. The costs can be really low, and the results as productive as your imagination can develop an original and impressive guerrilla marketing campaign.
A campaign that clearly and directly addresses you and sets you apart from the rest. But we don’t mean that guerrilla marketing is only for small and medium-sized businesses. Large companies invest large amounts of money in this type of marketing, the difference is in scale. These are usually synchronized campaigns for large populations, international and very well segmented. But for local small and medium-sized businesses, guerrilla marketing can be just as, or even more, productive than for a large company. It’s just a matter of scale and scope.
Certainly, if you look around you, you will find a good number of items that are part of advertising campaigns based on environmental marketing: from a T-shirt with a more or less large logo to a shopping bag with a catchy slogan. You carry these items in your daily life, and you contribute to the success of the advertising marketing campaign for which they were designed. Not to be confused with branding campaigns that brands carry out to gain a greater presence. The logo of a well-known brand is not the same as the logo for a specific campaign, and there are many examples of this.
Marketing is more or less the same, it's about using unconventional marketing strategies so that our actions don't look like advertising. Guerrilla marketing requires ingenuity, high doses of creativity, originality, and surprise for the target audience to whom the promotion is addressed. Often the goal is to create pleasant memories about the brand, rather than direct sales.
In the marketing struggle, guerrilla marketing requires much less investment and provides excellent results, since the use of communication formulas other than usual is much more effective. If guerrilla marketing is different in anything, it is only in that it deals with specific promotions, which are usually not campaigns with large media or long duration.
Types and examples of guerrilla marketing
Environment
Effectiveness is based on placing advertising elements where they are not usually present and where we do not expect to find them. It is not so much a direct promotion of a product or service, but rather creating visibility through an unusual application. Can you imagine a slide in the middle of a subway station that allows you to get to the top of the stairs faster? Well, Volkswagen conducted a guerrilla marketing test in one of the most popular subway stations, and it turned out to be very effective.
Hidden
It consists in creating an imaginary situation in which actors present the benefits of a certain product in an “everyday environment”. The consumer, who is a spectator of a “random” scene, is involved in it without realizing that it is a commercial campaign. In many cases, the interaction takes place in such a way that the consumer is offered to try the product, as if it were a real event. This model of guerrilla marketing is extremely complicated, but equally effective and inexpensive.
From an ambush
Advertisers who specialize in this type of guerrilla marketing take advantage of another company’s promotion at an event and literally sneak into the ad campaign without paying for it. The most telling example that comes to mind is a headphone brand that gave athletes personalized headphones to use during relaxation sessions. The impact was such that athletes took the headphones into the competition area, with the corresponding anger of the organization, which, in an effort to maintain the exclusivity of its sponsors, tried unsuccessfully to recall them. The promotion brought the company several million dollars in revenue and increased sales by more than 40%.
Street
The name speaks for itself. If marketing focuses on user interaction, showing elements in unusual places, then street marketing shows advertising elements on the street. But unlike the previous one, the surprise factor is static. Buildings, phone booths (are they still there?), posters, any street furniture can be used. Example: a guerrilla marketing campaign for Wilkinson on the occasion of Valentine's Day, which left no one indifferent.
Viral
The ultimate goal of guerrilla marketing is to go viral, to take advantage of the advantages that networks give us. We can divide it into two types: offline campaigns that people share and that go viral, and campaigns that we do specifically for online media and that we try to promote in a way that the largest possible audience follows us. A very clear example of this is challenges such as the Ice Bucket Challenge, which was created to draw attention to ALS.
For guerrilla marketing to be truly effective, it must expand at a high rate, since, as we mentioned at the beginning, its duration in time will be short. These are punctual and very direct actions that seek to make our emotional experience expand at a high rate. We explain it to our surroundings, on social networks, creating a wide viral effect, generating a great social effect. The media will be interested in it and offer us a place in their news for free, which fully justifies the action and the effort. We have television advertising in the form of prime time news. Hey — news! Did you dream of this, because it is not treated as a spot?
So, the key word in guerrilla marketing is strategy, because strategy involves
- Approach.
- Definition of the situation.
- Defining the goal or target audience.
- Action plan.
- Goal setting.
- Schedule.
- Budget.
- Measurement and monitoring.
- Results.
- Final report.
- Integration with other marketing strategies.
By following these recommendations, which are nothing more than writing a campaign brief and integrating it with other activities in the company's marketing mix, we increase the chances of success. Of course, by defining the goal, formulating the tasks that we want to achieve with the campaign, adjusting the budget, measuring and controlling. And then having the result or report after the campaign to assess its effectiveness and efficiency. And thus be able to make decisions for the future.
But can it also help us increase sales, customer loyalty, social recognition, etc.? It all depends on our creativity and originality! Alternatives that can become an advantage over our competitors.
Conclusion
Will guerrilla marketing lose its surprise effect? It all depends on the use and abuse of this type of action. If we lose imagination, freshness and innovation in our campaigns, we will probably find it increasingly difficult to connect. But if the essence of guerrilla marketing - creativity - remains alive in our environment, the ability to surprise the audience will remain intact, and therefore we will be able to continue to surprise and win over more people to our brand.
To support this argument, here's another example, you remember it well: if there is a brand that used guerrilla marketing in combination with traditional marketing activities, it is undoubtedly Red Bull. Faced with a decline in the effectiveness of its advertising campaigns, it decided to conduct the most aggressive street marketing campaign of all, with the Stratos project. Over 8 million viewers on YouTube (you were probably among them) watched in amazement as Felix Baumgartner jumped from a distance of over 38 kilometers in an offline campaign that spread like wildfire across the networks. The world record was not only in the jump, but also in the income received. And, of course, the prestige of the famous energy drink brand regained its popularity.
