Some More About Guerrilla Marketing

I thought it might be useful to some readers to read about some specific examples of guerrilla marketing that have worked for my company. My company makes branding equipment and we receive frequent calls from customers asking for brochures or other information. Every time we mail out a catalog or brochure, we include a 10% discount coupon that is valid if the customer responds with an order within about two weeks. (The two week provision is another marketing ploy. We want them to place the order now, before they put the brochure aside and forget about it.)

Now comes the guerrilla marketing. We bought some off-the-shelf picture post cards of Santa Barbara. On the back, in my wife’s handwriting I had the cards printed in bright blue ink saying some cute remarks about Santa Barbara and adding, “Hope you can use that 10% coupon we sent you.” Then, about one week after we mailed the brochure to the customer we followed it up with the “handwritten” and hand addressed (by my wife in the exact same color ink) picture post card. The idea behind this was that no one can resist seeing who is sending them a picture post card from Santa Barbara - a city known around the world. And being “handwritten” and short, we felt reasonably certain that most of the cards got read. They must have been because that simple post card marketing idea increased our sales by about 50%.

Many of our sales come from quotes that we send to customers for their specific requirement. We used to convert about 1/3 of those quotes into sales. Then we tried what we called “our fishy letters.” We bought a bunch of squiggly plastic fish usually used as fishing lures. We put one of these fish into an envelope along with a sheet that had a big picture of a fish on it and read something like, “Something’s Fishy. We sent you a quote the other day and we never heard from you. We know it’s not because we don’t have the best prices and we know our quality is the best, yatta, yatta, yatta.” Here’s how that worked. No one could resist opening the envelope after they felt something squishy inside it. Once they opened the envelope, they read our cute letter and apparently got the message because that little marketing trick increased our sales from getting 1/3 of our quotes to getting 50% of them.

Here’s another guerrilla marketing idea I recently heard about. A real estate agent in the San Francisco area drives over the Golden Gate bridge every day on his way to and from his office. Every time he drives over the bridge he tries to position his car directly in front of a BMW or a Lexus or an Accura. When he gets to the toll booth, he pays for his toll and then he hands the attendant his business card and a second toll and tells the attendant to give his card to the driver of the BMW behind him. Of course the idea is that some day the driver of that expensive car may be in the market to buy some real estate and that they will have his business card. I have no idea how effective it is, but it sure sounds like a heck of an idea to me.

This what guerrilla marketing is all about. Do something different and clever. It does not have to be expensive; just different enough to attract attention or get a chuckle. Now think of something clever for your particular business and start increasing your sales.