The world never stops for anyone and everything in the world evolves with every passing day. The marketing world learns new things every day and implements innovative strategies to get the customer’s attention.
One of the methods that world-class brands and marketers use is Guerrilla Marketing.
What is Guerrilla Marketing?
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising or marketing strategy in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional methods to promote a product or service.
Guerrilla Marketing is a strategy that focuses on spending really less on marketing the product but relies on mass appeal and word of mouth for reach.
This unique strategy and term were coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing. Ever since world-renowned brands have adapted this strategy at least once to market a new product or services.
Well-known types of Guerrilla Marketing:
Street Marketing:
As the name suggests, streets are the canvas for this guerrilla marketing strategy. The main goal of this marketing strategy is to capture eyeballs on the streets.
Product demonstrations on the sidewalks, advertisements on lamp posts, hoardings, flyers, pamphlets, all come under the street marketing strategy.
This strategy is very much effective in a majority of cases. Imagine a big advertisement hoarding near a busy junction. Every time a car stops for the red, the occupants of that car are more likely to spend those couple of minutes looking at that hoarding.
This type of Guerrilla marketing strategy is still largely effective and it still brings in effective returns for the brands.
Ambient Marketing:
Ambient marketing is nothing but putting advertisements at places that people never expect them to exist. For example, advertisements on buses, taxis, and literally anywhere else where the consumer goes,” Wow! I didn’t expect it here!”.
Stealth Marketing:
This is the hardest one for marketers designing the campaign!
In stealth marketing, the advertisement will be hidden under something else so that the customer sees the advertisement without actually knowing that something is being advertised to them. Even though it is a low-cost strategy, it requires tremendous creative work.
To give you an example, if a newsreader has a certain laptop in front of them with the logo visible, it is stealth marketing. Just like that, there might be a brand logo or name visible in the background of a movie scene.
These are some of the classic examples of stealth marketing and it is mostly a strategy followed in the digital entertainment industry.
How to integrate Guerrilla Marketing strategies with social media?
The consumer likes to be surprised when it comes to advertisements and social media campaigns. In the traditional Guerrilla marketing strategies, the success of that specific campaign relies on word of mouth.
Yes, it happens. But it takes time to reach the masses and it may die out soon. When it comes to the social media side of things, people love to jump on the trending topics and be a part of the community that gets it.
Sharing a post is just a click away and if the creativity and content are fresh and good, then boom!…it blows up in a matter of hours.
Example of Guerrilla Marketing in the Digital World
The campaign by CRED:
This was a raging success across all social media platforms. CRED portrayed Rahul Dravid in a light that no one has ever seen him. The angry and on-the-edge Rahul Dravid was a completely different thought by the CRED team.
Once the video was shot and edited, they didn’t stop their Guerrilla marketing strategy there. They did something else to launch it.
There were no teasers and the world had no idea that this bomb was dropping on them. They made Virat Kohli launch it. Ya, King Kohli with over 42.5 million Twitter followers.
Not a lot of people were aware that this was another marketing trick that CRED pulled on us. Virat Kohli never tweets on a match day, but he did it this one time.
When he shared the link to that advertisement, there was no mention of him launching it. It was designed to look like he just came across something and just shared it with the world via that one line tweet. But, the video never existed on the internet or anywhere else before Kohli tweeted about it.
Neither CRED nor Kohli confirmed that it was a marketing stunt, but isn’t it obvious? That is how good their Guerrilla Marketing strategy was.
Once this video went viral, multiple brands started using it to their advantage by posting multiple memes using the templates from this video. To be honest, even we at NautOne did it. Here is that post if you want to laugh at it.
Here is another example of Guerrilla Marketing by a Global Giant
Reads scary and looks like a real newspaper article, doesn’t it?
Fret not! We are not there yet. Yes, 2020 was weird and 2021 is even weirder but there is still some time till we reach the alien level weird stage.
This advertisement in a US newspaper was by Netflix to promote its new show, Sweet Tooth.
Even though they can become viral overnight and grab a lot of eyeballs, Guerrilla Marketing strategies can be double-edged swords. In the case of Netflix, the internet was divided over this was just crossing the line and scaring the shit out of people. The other part was showering praises for Netflix’s creative team.
Even if the world turns against them, it is still marketing, isn’t it?
We can see you guys getting excited and looking for strategies like these for your business! NautOne can do it for you. We specialise in creating exclusive marketing campaigns and executing them for multiple brands across the globe.
You can reach out to us by calling us at 8072696474 or by mailing us at hello@nautone.com.