Guerilla Marketing is a term coined back in 1982, by Jay Conrad Levinson when he published his book by that name. In a nutshell it means marketing your small business with very little or no money. It forces a small business owner to think in unusual ways and come up with creative ways to get marketing done for free.
Guerilla Marketing
One type of Guerilla Marketing is called Grassroots marketing. This is when you develop a personal relationship with your customer without them realizing they are being the target of a marketing campaign. What happens is that they become very connected to your brand and very loyal to your small business.
A very effective Grassroots marketing campaign is where you give your potential customer something they want and repeatedly find value with it. On the Internet, a great example of this is an Internet forum. Your company sponsored forum allows people in your target market group to gather daily on your website to discuss and learn about a related craft, a celebrity, or other hobby that is related to your product. Your company will actively participate in this forum, in addition to providing it for free. Your company shares expert advice on the forum topics and becomes the potential customer’s favorite guru.
Examples of this form of Guerilla marketing would be a fabric store offering a sewing forum with free patterns and project tips, a soap opera digital magazine offering soap star gossip, a movie review forum for a movie theater, a Greek restaurant offering authentic Greek recipe and cooking forum, just to name a few.
A Grassroots campaign like this one can cost only as much as an hour or two per day in participation, and the cost to set up the website forum on your website. Your company looks like an expert and hero, your forum participants will bring in more participants, it drives hundreds of people to your website daily and the forum grows to thousands of potential new customers very quickly. And every one of those forum participates thinks your company is awesome.
Ideas for Marketing that are Free
Guerilla Marketing is coming up with insanely effective marketing ideas that cost you little or nothing. Look to JOHO Marketing to help put you on the inside track of these types of effective and inexpensive, or even free, marketing ideas.
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