What is Guerrilla Marketing and its Benefits?
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that uses unconventional techniques, creativity, ingenuity, and innovation to achieve certain objectives, without the need for high investment in advertising space.
In addition, it allows us to reach our buyer persona in a different way than conventional advertising, carrying out surprising actions that can go viral and leave the memory of our brand in their minds.
Guerrilla marketing requires a minimum investment but a lot of ingenuity, which is why it is ideal for small companies that require little budget but a great desire to publicize their products and services.
However, it is increasingly common to see large companies resorting to guerrilla marketing since the benefits are evident and the results surprising.
Surely you have in mind some great guerrilla marketing campaign that you have come across on the street, right? Keep reading, because below I will present some examples.
Guerilla Marketing Benefits
Among those benefits that we mentioned before, we can highlight:
It requires little investment.
It allows us to achieve objectives in the short and medium term.
Increase brand visibility without the need to resort to traditional media that require a higher investment.
It allows the positioning of the brand against the competition with few resources.
To design a guerrilla marketing campaign, it is essential to take into account human psychology to achieve a greater impact on our target audience.
Highlight the most creative, authentic, surprising, and innovative side of the brand.
It is possible that it will become viral content, which will make more people aware of the brand.
By requiring little investment, it allows the brand to have a budget for other actions.
Types of guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing uses many techniques to achieve such surprise and impact on the target audience, but the best-known types of guerrilla marketing are probably the following four that I am going to talk about.
1. Ambient marketing
Ambient advertising consists of choosing a public space with a large influx of public, whether interior or exterior and transforming it to send our advertising through it.
2. Experiential marketing
Experiential marketing seeks to involve the public, to interact and participate directly with the campaign. It is the perfect formula to generate an immediate response in our target audience.
3. Flash mobs
Despite not being strictly an advertising technique, these “spontaneous” meetings of numerous people prepared to carry out a specific action that attracts attention in a specific public space are most effective.
4. Surreptitious advertising
It is an old technique like advertising itself but nowadays we see more and more, especially in the world of online marketing. The best-known cases may be the YouTubers who make videos talking about products that they have supposedly bought and of which they comment on all their benefits to encourage their purchase.
5. Viral Marketing
All brands, from the smallest to the largest, try to create viral content almost every day. When you get this content noticed (which is very difficult), the benefits can be huge thanks to the amount of visibility you get.
Guerrilla Marketing Real Examples
The theory is all very well, but what you want to see are guerrilla marketing success stories that have worked using the aforementioned techniques.
Netflix
Undoubtedly, Netflix has become one of the companies that know how to do guerrilla marketing, as it never ceases to surprise us with each major series or movie release campaign.
Below, I leave you with some examples that you may have come across on the street or have seen in networks and that surely have surprised you with their ingenuity.
glee flash mob
How can we promote a musical TV series without having to make ads and put up posters everywhere? Well, with a flash mob. Glee did it in 2009 by occupying a famous shopping center in Rome for four minutes in which a group of people began to dance to the rhythm of the best-known songs from the series.
The result of this action was mentioned in the media, TV appearances, and millions of views on YouTube.
Kit Kat
If there is a company that has effectively worked guerrilla marketing together with ambient marketing, it is Kit Kat. They have occupied hundreds of public places, creating a combination between their own brand and those spaces in a fantastic way, getting thanks to that that practically all the specialized media in advertising and marketing talked about them without having to pay them anything at all.
American Greetings was able to use a date as special as Mother's Day to achieve a great media impact through one of the best viral videos of last year.
Taking into account that it is a company that sells and sends congratulatory letters for special events, of course, the moment and the video could not be better connected.