About twelve years ago a friend recommended that I look into using some guerrilla marketing ideas for my growing business. At the time, I had never heard the term and had no idea what it involved. Now I am a confirmed advocate of the results of guerrilla marketing. In the first few year after we started using guerilla marketing my company increased sales by an average of 250% per year and we attribute almost all of that success to our aggressive and creative guerrilla marketing. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to go for a small business.
So what is guerrilla marketing and why are we so happy with its results? To answer that let’s first answer the question, “What is marketing?” The textbook definition of marketing is “all of the activities of a business required to produce, sell and deliver a quality product (or service) to the end user.” An even better definition is by Phillip Kotler in his book, Marketing Management where he says, “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know the customer so well that the product fits him (exactly) and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available.” Or, using a military analogy, Marketing is a strategic activity as opposed to Sales which is a tactical activity. Marketing concerns itself with the future while Sales is concerned with the “here and the now.” Marketing is concerned with advertising, production, cash flow, distribution, warehousing, product selection, targeting, positioning, market share and of course, sales.
Guerrilla marketing is concerned with all of the same things. The main difference between guerrilla marketing and conventional marketing is basically in the amount of money and creativity used in each activity. To put it simply (and perhaps a bit unfairly) conventional marketing solves a $1000 problem with a $2500 solution; guerrilla marketing solves a $5000 problem with a $500 solution. Guerrilla marketing replaces a lot of money with a little money, more creativity, a bit more time (yes I know time is money) and a lot more sweat. Any small business with limited assets – especially money – will find that guerrilla marketing is what they need to increase their sales.
Before we get into the specifics of guerrilla marketing, let’s take a look at today’s marketing/sales environment. I can’t believe that I am the only person who has spent 15-20 minutes on hold while repeatedly being told, “Your business is very important to us. Thank you for continuing to hold. A representative will be with you momentarily.”
We are now in a business environment where it is just short of a miracle when you get to talk to a real person or do not have to go through a menu of six or eight selections (none of which are what you need) before you get to talk to someone – and then that is the wrong person, the wrong department or a person who can’t answer your question. Here’s another situation. You want to have one of the basic services - telephone, gas, water, electricity - hooked up. You are told by the office, “We’ll have a man out there between 8AM and 5PM next Thursday.” Excuse me? Do you think I have nothing better to do than wait around a whole day for your man to get to my house? Increasingly we live in a more remote, less caring, less human-to-human business environment. The anonymity and “remoteness” of the Internet is not helping. At the same time, scams of all kinds are increasing so is it any wonder why our customers are increasingly suspicious and less trusting? Does that give you any guerrilla marketing ideas? Like, “Maybe if I were more responsive to my customers’ needs, my sales or my market share would increase?”
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