Guerrilla marketing what is

Creators of the show sent a car shaped like Rick around US cities. They also organized social media support for the campaign. The action went viral.

People followed the vehicle across the country to take a picture with it and buy merchandise. The types of campaigns listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. Guerrilla marketing not only requires a lot of creativity but also an action plan. Here are six steps you need to take to engrain guerrilla marketing into your marketing strategy. Knowing your audience is a cornerstone of your guerrilla marketing success.

To trigger emotions with your marketing campaigns , you need to know your audience's desires, fears, and pain points. To learn more about your target audience, explore your current customers. Probably, your sales and customer service teams can tell you who your customers are, why they value your product or service, and what makes them tick. You can also find forums and Facebook groups where your potential customers discuss their problems.

To keep the information at hand, craft a customer profile. Our instructive guide on the data to include and the sources of information will help you out. Apply a jobs-to-be-done approach as well. It will help you understand how customers interact with your brand, where you can target them, and what activities or messages you can provide to them.

Although guerrilla marketing is a lot of fun, remember that its main task is to meet your goals. Thus, you need to set specific, measurable, accurate, reliable, and timely objectives for your campaign. Guerrilla marketing often aims at creating buzz and increasing brand awareness. However, you may want to use your campaigns to drive sales as well.

The best way to set KPIs for your guerrilla marketing campaign is to lean on the previous results. Your task with guerrilla marketing is to catch potential customers off guard in a familiar environment.

Moreover, you need to surprise and delight them. Start by learning what people are talking about at the moment. This is where social listening tools will come in handy. Another magic wand for you is Google Trends — a service to analyze the popularity of top search queries.

Apart from exploring current situations and trends, learn more about your competitors. Try to find their examples of guerrilla marketing campaigns and analyze them. Both best and worst practices can provide you with valuable insights on how to shape your unique distinguishable action. If you are floundering to find a technique for your guerrilla marketing campaign, good old brainstorming can help you get the ball rolling. Gather your colleagues together and encourage them to generate some ideas.

Set the time limits for a session and make sure everyone enunciates their suggestions. The main rule here is to avoid evaluating the ideas on-the-go — it will impede the creative process. In the following stage, you need to assemble the ideas created before and gauge them. Take into consideration the resources you have to bring the idea to life. As we said before, a guerrilla marketing campaign is a complex undertaking.

It requires you and your partners to consolidate a lot of efforts. For instance, to simply stick a poster in a public place, you need to form the pitch, create the design, print, and glue the poster. Make sure each stage of work is done properly and in a timely fashion. To save your campaign from flopping, take one more critical look at it before executing it. Think of how customers may perceive your message and how they will react. Try to find the possible downfalls and predict how they will affect the campaign overall.

Finally, there is always the chance that everything will fall flat. You should consider it, foresee the worst possible scenario and generate a plan B in case it occurrs.

As guerrilla marketing campaigns on average aim at creating buzz, it may seem hard to measure their results. If you are puzzled over how to track them, here are a couple of hints.

However, the tactics listed above will help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign. With this action plan on hand, you can set up a guerrilla marketing campaign without missing any important part of it. Now it's time to get into details and learn some strategies you can adopt. Thinking through guerrilla marketing techniques can get tough. A pop-up shop is a temporary store, that businesses can easily set up and take down. If you want to employ this tactic, try to think outside the box and pick an unusual yet well-trodden spot.

For instance, you may open a pop-up shop inside another shop or at a big event. Another option is to rent a van or truck and create a mobile version of the store. To achieve your pop-up shop goals, remember to launch a promo campaign. It allows you to embrace a much bigger audience. The song immediately became a hit, radicalizing the link between a fashion and rap music and contributing to the sale of Adidas shoes worldwide.

Given the same scenario today, we would probably be talking about influencer marketing. But at the time, it was one of the first guerrilla marketing actions, reckless and incredibly effective, able, among other things, to imprint a lasting mark on the habits of an entire generation.

About a decade later a media campaign , in perfect guerrilla-style, uses the internet in a way that today we would call disruptive and achieves commercial success using videos to fuel the short circuit between reality and fiction. A few desperate words, an apology, against a black background.

Next, a montage of archival material, with the disturbing commentary of a television journalist in the background and then a close-up view of the face of a frightened girl. Behind her is a dark and motionless night.

This opens the trailer for The Blair Witch Project , the independent horror film that is often cited for its promotion mode as t he first example of contemporary guerrilla marketing : a horror film that tells the story of three young filmmakers who suddenly disappeared in the woods of Maryland while working on a project about a mysterious witch.

In one of his many interviews, Jay Conrad Levinson defines guerrilla marketing as the set of unconventional tactics used to achieve conventional goals above all: profit with a small budget.

In an attempt to build a taxonomy of guerrilla marketing, this post has identified 13 popular tactics. The list has, of course, no claim to be complete or definitive. Hand-to-hand the physical and intimate sharing of products 3. Graffiti and reverse graffiti the latter uses dirty or damaged surfaces 4. Flash mob groups of people who perform an unusual or seemingly random act, before suddenly scattering 7.

Experiential immersive experience in products and services 8. Posters or stickers sometimes cryptic, often numerous, in strategic positions 9. Projections e. Waiting Marketing where recipients are waiting for something, for example a bus Treasure hunts using clues to create a sense of intrigue Grassroots aimed at existing fans who will naturally share your messages Ambient ad placements that are unusual or unexpected, prompting viewers to perhaps stop and think.

Guerrilla marketing is the chance to teach your prospects and customers how to achieve success, regardless of their goals. And while scary, saddening images are often an impactful way of communicating your mission, there's a way to convey it by creating something less in-your-face and interactive for the public.

Are you an underwear company looking for an unconventional way to market your product? Why, just try placing an enormous pair of briefs on an iconic charging bull statue. It's so simple, in theory, that it sounds like fiction. But when the GoldToe brand needed a way to tease and promote the launch of its new undergarments, that's exactly what it did -- casually placed these new items of clothing on statues throughout New York.

And while we can't be sure that it's the route GoldToe took, we sincerely hope that those bull-sized briefs were made with leftover manufacturing fabric, helping to make this campaign even budget-friendlier. The big takeaway: Don't overthink it. Sometimes what looks like your silliest idea might be the best one.

How is this real? FijiGirl GoldenGlobes pic. Strategic product placement is one guerilla marketing tactic to gain attention in subtle ways. One such example includes Fiji Water's presence at the Golden Globes where models wore blue and carried trays of water for thirsty attendees.

It didn't end there, though. One model -- Kelleth Cuthbert -- positioned herself in the background during photoshoots, effectively photo-bombing high-profile celebrities. When the photos started appearing on social media, people began noticing Cuthbert as a common denominator, dubbing her FijiGirl.

Ultimately, she became one of the highlights of the evening, winning over fans and drawing attention to Fiji Water's brand. The big takeaway: Your brand doesn't need to be the focus of an event for it to stand out. When pub and brewing company Greene King feared that small, neighborhood establishments -- notably, the pub -- would start to be overtaken by large corporate retail, it launched a campaign to communicate just how important these local businesses really are.

Even better, the content was almost entirely created by those who understand this predicament best: Pub owners, bartenders, and patrons.

These individuals were given cameras to capture video of the most meaningful moments and gatherings they've experienced inside these local pubs -- from weddings, to funeral receptions, to birthdays. These videos were shared on Greene King's YouTube profile and posed the question, "Without these neighborhood meeting places, where would we share these moments? The big takeaway: It's okay to get a little sentimental with guerilla marketing. Think about the emotions invoked by what you offer.

Then, invite your audience to create content around what your brand means to them. When I think of Count Dracula, I conjure the penultimate villain synonymous with everything that goes bump in the night. The BBC wanted to capitalize on this feeling to promote their show, Dracula. By day, their billboard was designed to be minimalistic with red text on a white background with a few bloody stakes. However, like its subject, the billboard changed completely every time night fell.

The installation ended up being featured in Adweek and had some viral success for its creativity and skillful implementation. The big takeaway: Think outside the box for your advertising materials.

In this case, light and shadow were enough to convey the message and capture attention. Hopefully, you'll be inspired by these examples, especially if you're promoting a smaller brand.

Don't be afraid to crowdsource the content for these campaigns, for example -- after all, it's creative approaches to your work that help maintain guerrilla marketing's budget-friendly, inbound nature. Remember: Catch people where they are, and insert your brand there. Don't interrupt, but invite them to participate. Editor's note: This post was originally published in July and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Originally published Aug 17, PM, updated August 17 Logo - Full Color. Contact Sales. Overview of all products. Marketing Hub Marketing automation software. Service Hub Customer service software.

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