What is Guerilla Marketing? Explanation, Strategies & Examples
Guerrilla marketing is also referred to as “experiential marketing” for its ability to pull the consumer into a unique and engaging experience. It can take the form of street art, print advertising, displays or even charitable acts that go viral. Because the method is fun, or deeply meaningful, it doesn’t feel like conventional advertising, and consumers respond strongly to it.
Recently, I gave an example to one of my clients and this was for an app, where you can sell products through an app. So I told, you should do is have a scavenger hunt where people need to use your app and first listing should be like trade through an app. Let’s say a silver coin and take that coin and go to another person and trade that for a key and go to another person and trade that.
So what it would do is it would be making people use the app but they’d be interacting in real life and it’s totally different.
There are tons of examples of guerilla marketing but first I wanna talk why guerilla marketing is so powerful and to do that I want to tell an example.
Let’s talk about Pokemon go
Few people have acknowledged the profound guerrilla marketing campaign that dominated the summer of 2016. The augmented reality app was made available for free to consumers, who immediately participated in one of the largest and most successful brand pushes of the year. Can it be classified as a mobile health app, given the fact that in the first three months there were an estimated 100 Bn steps taken by players?
While the app was only launched on July 6th, 2016, the Pokémon Go application deserves to be inducted into the guerrilla marketing hall of fame. Residual in-game purchases added $7.5 billion dollars to Nintendo’s market valuation. Sales for the gaming company’s Nintendo 3DS increased by 80%, thanks in large part to the augmented reality game.
In terms of use, TechCrunch reported that the app had been installed on more devices than Candy Crush, Tinder and LinkedIn, but did not take a bite out of WhatsApp, Instagram, or Snapchat. Businesses benefited from creating “Poke Stops” and generated walk in traffic that capitalized on the craze; restaurants, retail centers and organizations could benefit and create awareness, by drawing Pokémon hunters in.
One of the biggest gains for the brand, was endearment to families, who found themselves enjoying the app together. The surge in downloads and players of Pokémon Go revealed that 63% of players were women, over the age of eighteen, and 45% of players had a mean income of $50,000 per annum or more. While supposedly designed for children, the app managed to engage the prime purchase decision makers (women).
So my point is there are incumbents in your space, there are people bigger than you in your space, you shouldn’t fight them fair, you should do things outside of the box and they know that you’re gonna be doing internet marketing, they know you are doing adwords, facebook ads, they know you are gonna do social media and there are ways to turn a guerilla aspect to all the different social medias but you should be doing things out of the box and I can’t give you any sort of examples but I can come up with the ideas for you.
Here are some of the ideas for you, The scavenger hunt one like I said but basically just getting in front of people.
Let’s say I’m going to the conventions where I know people are gonna be there that would buy products and handling out samples, that’s a very low cost easy guerilla marketing tactic. Another thing I might do is run the race and get a team of people together and we’ll all put a giant helmet like monster or something like that and people look at it like what the hell they are doing and as we run the race we can hand out samples. That would create a memory. That’d be very memorable. So, you need to think like this. You need to think of things that are out of the ordinary.
So this article is a lot shorter and I’m sure I could do a better job of explaining guerilla marketing but the truth is I want you to start thinking outside the box, I want you to start thinking of how can I get the words out there and spotlight marketing and what can I do in a fashion how can I get in front of people, how can I get in front of my customers, so start thinking about that. Hope this helps as always.