How about doing something different from the old school marketing strategies?
If you feel most of the marketing techniques are monotonous and dull, guerrilla marketing will hold your attention.
“Guerrilla” with “Marketing” sounds strange? No, we are not sending guerrillas to promote your products and services. Although that sounds fun, the charm of guerrilla marketing lies in its creativity.
This article will talk about guerrilla marketing and see some fascinating examples that will amaze you.
Table of Contents
What is Guerrilla Marketing?
Guerrilla marketing is one of the most creative and cost-efficient marketing strategies that businesses use to garner maximum awareness for their products and services. It uses innovative tactics for promotions, such as an element of surprise, ambush, or creating social media hype.
Due to its creative nature, guerrilla marketing often fills potential customers with a memorable experience or moment. Unlike traditional marketing, it tends to build a customer relationship with a long term goal in mind.
Types of Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing has a few subcategories that you can consider depending upon your marketing strategies.
- Outdoor Guerrilla Marketing: Every marketing strategy you do out in the open is a part of outside marketing, like temporarily painting the walls or sidewalks or putting your brands’ mascot on the street.
- Indoor Guerrilla Marketing: Kind of similar marketing, but the only difference is it takes place inside public places such as botanical gardens, railway stations, colleges, etc.
- Event Ambush Guerrilla Marketing: Event Ambush is nothing but approaching the audiences of a particular event, such as live concerts, football matches, or fashion shows, and surprising them by offering your products for free or just letting them know about your products.
- Experiential Guerrilla Marketing: You can use any of the above strategies, but the sole purpose is to let the customers interact with your brand.
Benefits of Guerrilla Marketing
The concept of guerrilla marketing might seem a little naive, but here are a few benefits to give it a second thought.
Cost-Efficient
Guerrilla marketing uses unconventional methods, generally cheaper than traditional marketing strategies, such as running television commercials or radio broadcasts.
Viral Approach
The guerrilla marketing strategies are impressive and, therefore, are mostly shared by people on various social media platforms, making them viral.
Memorable
Guerrilla marketing happens in most unexpected places and gives the audiences an element of surprise, creating memorable moments for everyone.
Positive Feedback
Primarily guerrilla marketing positively impacts the audiences and, hence, gets positive feedback as it sets an overall fun environment.
Five Guerrilla Marketing Examples to Inspire You
Read some fantastic guerrilla marketing strategies used by bands that became a huge success.
McDonald’s Zebra Crossing
The example of McDonald’s will let you know how you can take your brand to the streets without creating a big-budget marketing strategy.
McDonald’s painted their most loved fries on a busy street to substitute for the monotonous black and white zebra crossing. Not only it was creative, but it also served an essential purpose.
Red Bull’s Free Drinks
When Red Bull hit the market in 1987, energy drink was not a thing. People were hardly aware of any drink that kept the drinkers active and alert throughout the day.
So, instead of launching television commercials or other traditional marketing strategies, they thought about offering their drinks free to their potential customers and giving them a taste of their energy drinks.
Also, the marketing team did their research quite well about who they wanted to target. Therefore, Red Bull started handing out free energy drinks to young people outside the college campuses, libraries, coffee shops, kiosks, and other places. Soon, the brand successfully created a large market for its energy drinks.
Deadpool’s Tinder Profile
Most of the Tinder users might have been confused to swipe left or right after seeing the profile of Deadpool appearing on their feed. Yes, before the movie was released on February 12, 2016, a Tinder account was created for Deadpool with a quirky bio.
And to add to the fun, those who swiped right and had a match with the anti-hero were given a link to purchase the movie ticket. It created a movie date with your superhero kind of a vibe. So, not all promotions are irritating, right?
Burger Kings’ Online Breakup
The whole fuzz happened when an Instagram user commented on Burger King’s post stating how “his girl took 20 minutes to order whoppers, but it was worth it”.
It became gossip when another user, claiming to be his girlfriend, replied that she had never gone to Burger King the day before. Then there was a heated argument leading to a public breakup.
Results? There was a flood of comments from different users giving their opinions on Burger King’s post, and also, the fast-food brand ended up getting a massive number of Instagram followers.
Many users speculated that Burger King staged the whole war zone to gain public attention.
It’s Creepy Red Balloons
To promote the movie It, an adaptation of Stephen’s King’s clown thriller, red balloons were tied up to the storm sewers across cities. The strategy was creepy but created a lot of buzz among movie enthusiasts.
No spoilers! But, if you have watched the movie before, you would know the significance of the sewers.
Had fun reading some of the exciting examples of guerrilla marketing?
We hope these examples inspire you to take your marketing strategy to another level. Don’t be worried about being judged or misunderstood, but be creative, fun, and engage with your audience. With that note, don’t overdo things and don’t interrupt people but drag their attention to your brand.
