Plan a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign

The key, as with any and all events and promotions, is to plan, plan and plan your guerrilla marketing campaign.

This can be tricky so below are a number of tips and a planning resource to get you started.

To start things off in a neat and tidy manner, here’s a link to our Guerrilla Marketing Campaign plan template for easy management and planning.

7 Core, Guerrilla Marketing Planning Tips

Below are some tips and ideas as to how you can effectively create and plan your guerrilla marketing campaign.

Do you know how your buyer thinks?

Consider guerrilla marketing as the ‘growth hack‘ of the events world. With growth hacking in the tech world, you take data that you have on record and create a campaign based on these key data findings. You misread data, the campaign doesn’t go quite right.

Which is why it’s vital to understand your audience and buyers. With guerrilla marketing, you need to draw the crowd in, determine if they are the right buyer’s persona with certain aspects of the campaign and try to convert.

Sounds very similar to those ebooks or whitepapers that are advertised online – you see it, review it and then decide if it’s for you. The more relevant the information, imagery and general campaign to you the higher the chances are of conversion.

Guerrilla marketing is about getting in front of as many of your key buyers as possible, getting them to convert and then sharing their experience all at the same time. You have to ask questions such as triggers, pain-points, where they hang out and so on.

Are you being creative enough?

There are a number of promotional marketing such as brand activations, pop-ups and so on. These are quite creative on their own, so ask yourself the question – is the proposed campaign creative enough?

Will people pre, during and post-experience talk to their friends and share to social media followers? If all you plan to do is send out people dressed in costumes to hand out samples and leaflets it’s unlikely that the guerrilla marketing effect will take hold.

Avoid copy-cat success stories, they worked for a competitor sure but people will always refer back to the original and that’s not something you want.

The good thing is that once you’ve done the data research and really understood your buyers, you will then most likely come up with some highly creative and targeted ideas.

What is the measure of success?

With guerrilla marketing campaigns there need to be various other measures of success that go beyond on-the-day sales.

Some other key metrics to consider for tracking guerrilla marketing success:

1. Response Rates
2. Conversion Rates
3. Growth Rate
4. Marketing Campaign History
5. Customer Acquisition Costs
6. Retention Rates
7. Customers Saved
8. Cross-Sells
9. The Control Group
10. Positive Comments (Public or private)
11. Referrals or Recommendations

I’ll dive into each of those measures of success in another article so look out!

Lone-wolf or partnering up?

Cross-overs an incredibly popular in the movies and with TV series so why not partner up with a similar brand or company to leverage audiences and buyers?

These strategic partnerships, especially with guerrilla marketing campaigns can add more hype and attention to the campaign.

Below are some key areas of potential partners to consider, especially when they have ‘shared’ interests:

• Target audiences.
• Mission and vision goals.
• Values and similar cultures.
• Campaign or seasonal goals.
• Willingness to share contacts (and bring new contacts to the table).
• Extending a high-quality or valuable offer to your customers.

Have you committed to all other channels?

Guerrilla marketing, by definition, is to conduct a campaign at a cost of free or incredibly low-cost. However, the romance of a successful campaign that is reported in an industry magazine clouds judgment and makes it seem as if there are no other resources.

When you have the world of social media, granted it’s becoming more and more of a screaming match to get seen or heard, as well as blogging it pays to dedicate time to these channels.

Consider what actions you are currently taking on the various free channels across the web, sometimes it’s a not a good fit for your target buyer so it’s reasonable to assume it just won’t work – but double check these before heading out on planning a guerrilla marketing campaign.

Are you ready to start?

This depends on the scale and nature of your product/brand. The bigger the company, the higher the chances of approval from HR, Legal and the management team which means things will move slowly which means you need to plan well in advance and get everything together so there’s no back and forth with updates and questions.

For the smaller businesses. If the campaign goes well and customers are flooding to your store or website – can you handle this additional capacity?

A website’s hosting company may need to be informed or potential influx of traffic, additional store staff may need to be on standby just in case things go haywire.

Ultimately you need to conduct the planning stages of the guerrilla marketing campaign and determine if you are ready to launch and the process of launching too.

3 Additional, Guerrilla Marketing Tips to Consider

Some additional food for thought when planning for your guerrilla marketing campaign.

Have a clear call-to-action

Again handing out leaflets with information is not a guerrilla marketing campaign, it’s also not a clear call-to-action in any way at all.

Think more take action now based CTAs to ensure people are clicking on links, visiting shops, using coupons. These drive people to take action which is ideal but it also makes measuring the success of the campaign easier to track, both online and offline too.

Target specific funnel groups

This will take more planning and require some serious data crunching to determine if its a good idea or not. If you have a product or brand that seems to be stuck in a specific area of the funnel and nothing seems to work, guerrilla marketing may answer the question.

Let’s say that you find a group of buyers within a specific area that is all, essentially, in the awareness stage of the funnel.

Creating a guerrilla marketing campaign that focuses on educating these people will inevitably build a memorable moment and potentially move them into the next stage. Again this is where data becomes vital.

Forget about virality

The unicorn for every marketer and ultimately a snake-oil pitch. No one really has any idea how things so viral, you can work with viral coefficients or flip a coin, either way, there’s no clear way of telling.

If you understand your buyer and have done your research, you increase your chances. If you understand your buyer and get hyper-creative, you increase your chances of virality.

With hard work, your luck seems to increase and if campaigns going viral is based on luck you should focus on the preparation of the campaign.