Guerrilla Marketing, or Tequila Massacre? – Find out What You Need Exactly to Make a Successful Advertisement!

TDA
  • Date Published
  • Categories Blog
  • Reading Time 5-Minute Read

Say that you’re a small company who started working recently and your business isn’t fully developed yet. So you are trying to find your way to the market which today doesn’t leave much space for competition or any kind of standout in the digital sea of fast-growing ideas every day. In this light, we bring you an article about one of the most controversial yet highly successful marketing tactics, guerrilla marketing.

You are a small company who started working recently and your business isn’t fully developed yet. So you are trying to find your way to the market which today doesn’t leave much space for competition or any kind of standout in the digital sea of fast-growing ideas every day. Every new generation is more innovative and creative than the previous one, and it’s almost impossible to find the right thing to put your company out there.

To find the right marketing tactic to do the job and to get the attention of potential buyers without putting your company’s reputation at risk can sometimes feel like google searching “HOW TO…” or even “DIY”. In this light, we bring you an article about one of the most controversial yet highly successful marketing tactics, guerrilla marketing. It may sound like a tactical trap set deep in the jungle, although it has some elements of war games from where it originally came from, the most common element used in the marketing business is the element of surprise.

A Quick History of Guerrilla Marketing

Jay Conrad Levinson was the first person who recognized possible benefits of using guerrilla marketing which he described in his book Guerrilla Marketing, from 1984. Back then, in the USA, guerrilla marketing just started to find its place in the advertising business, so Levinson started quite a revolution. Which, today, is one of the most controversial but successful tactics in the advertising business.

What Is Guerrilla Marketing?

According to Creative Guerrilla Marketing, guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics that yield maximum results.

The main idea of guerrilla marketing came from guerrilla warfare, which often includes ambushes, sabotage, raids, and elements of surprise. The most common tactics used in the marketing business is the element of surprise for potential buyers, who are then thrown to their knees by tactics coming from places they were expecting the least. This allows you to make a guerrilla web of people who will transfer their impressions about the campaign by word of mouth. Money has a small, or insignificant, role in guerrilla marketing because the most important thing to use is the cheapest resource – your imagination.

Image Source

For example, some of the most effective and creative guerrilla marketing ideas are the cheapest ones, found in most usual places which you encounter or use in your daily life like bus stations, shopping malls, and public benches.

The Three Most Important Effects of Guerrilla Marketing

  • Effect of Surprise – Create an unusual message and place it in unusual places. Target people’s emotions, which will make them think even more about the product; this can be achieved with comical, absurd or shocking messages.
  • Effect of Distribution – Your goal is to increase the number of recipients of your message without investing too much money, the most important thing is to be as creative as it gets, and let your imagination do the work.
  • Low-Cost Effect – This is tightly related to number two because when you start with low-cost guerrilla marketing, it stays that way thanks to the effect of distribution.

Guerrilla marketing mostly relies on a small budget and is designed for small companies with the goal of retaining existing customers—while reaching a new mass audience and getting noticed on the market. Guerrilla marketing is the ideal tactic to create buzz using unconventional methods in the ad business, make people talk and think about your product until the point where they can’t get it out of their heads.

Also, there is no fear for small companies using guerrilla marketing, because if it doesn’t work the customers will just describe the action as unsuccessful, unlike the big companies who already established their names on the market. One of the most successful guerrilla marketing hype-campaigns in small business was The Blair Witch Project, the movie which started with one camera and ended up earning $248,639,099 worldwide.

Where traditional advertising fails the job, guerrilla marketing takes over in a way that gets people talking using nothing more but simplicity by drawing focus and leaving a strong impression.

Your job as a Guerrilla Marketer: make every single moment of the experience satisfying, simple and worthwhile for the customer. When you do that, you’re truly a practitioner of Guerrilla Marketing.

Even if your campaign isn’t the most innovative, because we already said there are many previously-seen ads on the market, the word guerrilla really speaks for itself. First, know your audience, be a guerrilla, be controversial but smart, don’t use shock and surprise to offend your customers but to outsmart them with that one thing you know they desire the most. Think of guerrilla marketing as food for your marketing campaign. With food in your stomach, almost anything is possible, the sky is your limit. So, why would it be any different in marketing advertisements, or peoples’ desires?

You can find some of the most innovative and creative marketing ads that used guerrilla tactics in this article about the 25 best guerrilla marketing ideas.