Call it unconventional; call it dirty tactics; call it unfair play – in fact, throw every bad comment you can at “Guerrilla Marketing”, but in the end, both of us can agree on one thing – guerrilla marketing works, and it works wonders when incorporated with the word “internet”.
For a start-up business, initial sales figures can be atrocious –that is why most business owners often resort to connivance with top copywriters and marketing gurus to drive sales to a tenfold sum.
But if the words and the ad gimmicks don’t just cut it, guerrilla tactics come into play. But what exactly is guerrilla marketing? How does it work? Below is an answer to your questions.
Guerrilla marketing, is in fact, marketing, per se. The only difference is that the business employing guerrilla tactics uses unconventional methods to market a certain product. These methods often employ the use of hired people to use that business’ products and in turn, those “hired people” spread positive testimonials about the products profound effects, even though half of those stories are either made up or just plain lies.
Consider this: A giant shoe company wants to make it big in the teen shoe industry. The marketing director suggests hiring a bunch of popular high school students in a nearby academy to showcase the shoes to the community. The students aren’t exactly hired – they’re given the shoes for free, which they in turn, successfully promote by discretely telling all their classmates and friends in school how cool their shoes are. The tactic works when those “popular kids” tell their friends that the shoes they’re promoting were bought at a “reasonable price” at the malls instead of telling the truth that the shoes were in fact, given to them (with a catch). That, in itself, is guerrilla marketing. It works 90% of the time and doesn’t require too much blatant advertising. Word-of-mouth is actually more effective than advertising, come to think of it.
In the past, guerrilla marketing was only limited to street/campus promotions, now the web-driven world has opened doors for guerrilla tacticians everywhere.
A few notable examples of how online guerrilla marketing works are listed below:
- Bribing network communication company officials to divulge active phone numbers and sending out mass messages promoting a product/service/cause.
- Paying webmasters of popular websites to create a seemingly “unbiased” and “unpaid” positive testimonial of a product/service/cause.
- Spreading video campaigns on popular video streaming sites like YouTube and MetaCafe, where a seemingly “unbiased” review is aimed to promote a product.
- Sending out mass spam comments targeted to a specific blog/forum category.
- Creating scripts on social networking sites that auto-adds users to be fans of a certain product (i.e., contact lenses, beauty products). This can also be done in a clean way by hiring a certain school personality to be the endorser of a product through her photo albums.
- Creating awareness campaigns that entices users to buy a product. (i.e., the popular Emergency Seed Bank)
- Paying users to post negative comments on a blog, forum or a video channel of a strong competitor.
- Using divulged information to gain access to chat channels and personally making friends with leads through chat, empathizing with them and finally getting them to buy the product.
- Using a referral scheme used by most paid-to-click (PTC) and survey websites that offer more money as you refer more people, thereby promoting the business rapidly as more people sign up.
The above-mentioned not only give us a vivid representation of how online guerrilla marketing works but also does it manifest how viral guerrilla marketing has become.
Fast-paced and incredibly viral – this is how everyone’s online presence shaped the realms of internet marketing.
Great job.
