What is Guerrilla Marketing and how it can increase brand awareness?

The word “Guerrilla,” is not common among marketing, and it has a profound meaning. You must be wondering what is Guerrilla marketing specifically? It is not an intrusive form of communication but a unique form of inbound marketing. It is applied to improve brand awareness among people without creating any interruption.

As you know, this is a very unconventional method, so it is difficult to explain and can be understood entirely when witnessed practically. Here, we will explain the best practices, marketing strategies, or ways to make your brand a great success.

Let’s start with the basics first: guerrilla marketing, its pros, cons, and different types of guerrilla marketing and some of its examples.

What is Guerrilla Marketing?

When we talk about Guerrilla Marketing, the first thing that strikes our mind is Guerrilla Warfare, where this marketing technique got its name. In the setting of Warfare, Guerrilla Marketing strategies majorly depend on factors of surprise. You have to be a little bit imaginative to make the most benefits of Guerrilla Marketing.

But how should we decipher our daily activities into work? With Guerrilla Marketing, you could design unconventional campaigns that will attract people unexpectedly in the course of their everyday activities. This term is not new, but it was found in the early 1980s by one business writer Jay Conrad Levinson who penned several books related to Guerrilla Marketing tactics.

During that time, marketing methods were looked at differently. Guerrilla Marketing is still practised in the modern technological marketplace, but its landscape has been changed compared to traditional tactics.

So, what makes Guerrilla Marketing so prevalent among marketers?

The first thing to focus on Guerrilla Marketing is its budget-friendly structure. The real investment is made in the implementation part. Still, it should not be that costly, like other marketing strategies.

The Guerrilla Marketing technique is similar to reconstructing the existing content where a small portion of the report has converted to interactive blogs. The demand for the investment of time and efforts but not that much money. So, Guerrilla Marketing goes by re-purposing the contemporary environment of audiences. You should assess it and figure out the segments that need rework to encourage your brand.

Guerrilla Marketing – Pros and Cons

Guerrilla Marketing has two sides – positive and negative. It would help if you considered both before you finally start acting on the marketing campaign based on Guerrilla marketing.

What are the Pros of Guerrilla Marketing?

• Affordable – As explained earlier, the main highlight of Guerrilla marketing is its budget-friendly structure. It is much more affordable when compared to traditional advertising.
• Creativity – When you propose Guerrilla marketing, imagination or creative thinking is always given more attention than budget.
• Word-of-mouth – Guerrilla marketing mainly depends on word-of-mouth, taken as one of the most powerful weapons to give your brand new strength. There is nothing better than observing people talking about your campaign and brand.
• Publicity is incredible – With different Guerrilla marketing campaigns, you can always earn immense popularity. Your campaigns are even picked news sources and supported by other marketers, too, by taking inspiration from your brand.

What are the Cons of Guerrilla Marketing

• The message could be misunderstood – As marketing campaigns are not mostly direct, they could be misunderstood sometimes, and the ultimate result is not as great as expected.
• Authority Interference – Sometimes, in exceptional cases of Guerrilla Marketing, the extra interference of authority may lead to unwanted tension.
• Unknown Obstacles – Sometimes, you have to meet unpredictable circumstances that you are not sure of earlier. These new obstacles are indeed intimidating for your entire campaign.
• Potential Backlash – in some instances, savvy audiences could call out businesses who are not approved for running a campaign. It could be harmful to likely companies looking to promote their brands.

From this conversation, this is clear that Guerrilla Marketing frequently gives excellent results when campaigns are treated with utmost creativity uniquely. But, make sure that all challenges, as discussed, should be controlled carefully.

Different Types of Guerrilla Marketing

There are a few subcategories of Guerrilla Marketing that are based on your business niche and requirements. These are Indoor Marketing, Event Ambush Guerrilla Marketing, Outdoor Marketing, Experiential Guerrilla Marketing, etc.

Let’s discuss each of them in brief one by one.

• Indoor Guerrilla Marketing – Add something to the pre-existing urban setting at indoor locations like buildings, shops, universities, train stations, campuses, etc.
• Outdoor Guerrilla Marketing – This marketing category is very much comparable to indoor Guerrilla Marketing. It takes place at outdoor locations like on to a statue, puts temporary artwork on streets or sidewalks, and has more exciting ideas.
• Event Ambush Guerrilla Marketing – Attempt to leverage the audience of some progressive event with your campaign to advertise a product more noticeably. Usually, it is done without taking approval from the sponsor.
• Experiential Guerrilla Marketing – Here, you can incorporate more categories to require the public to interact with the brand.

We understand that without awareness of the concept in-depth, it could be challenging to implement Guerrilla Marketing strategies successfully. Let us see the top examples of how a few other successful brands executed it.

Top Examples of Guerrilla Marketing

Red Bull

In 2012, Red Bull sent Austrian athlete Felix Baumgartner 128,100 feet into the stratosphere to establish the world record for the highest skydiving jump. The Red Bull Stratos performance attracted over 8 million (confirmed) views on YouTube, with the video currently owning over 44m views.

This guerrilla marketing campaign got people speaking, and Red Bull’s deep association with the sporting world meant this was an excellent fit for their brand.

KitKat

A great example of outdoor guerrilla marketing, KitKat ingeniously utilized outdoor space to build a public advert in the Philippines, without employing a traditional billboard or poster.

Assured to get more public engagement given humans are becoming increasingly guided to notice, recognize, and overlook an advert, this particular campaign gained over 262 million impressions. It achieved a 21% volume growth in sales.

Newcastle Brown

With a media budget for the whole year equal to about a 15-second Superbowl ad (you’re looking at a cool $2 million), Newcastle Brown chose to make an ad or, instead, make one about not making one. In a kind of ambush marketing, Newcastle Brown released a profanity-laden 2-minute ad with Anna Kendrick on how she had been asked to do a Superbowl ad, but the brand had backed out.

Adweek’s number one ad for 2014, the brand led to be the biggest Super Bowl advert without ever appearing on the Superbowl and reached nearly 4 million YouTube views across the video series.

Frontline

A type of indoor guerrilla marketing, Frontline took advantage of a large public square and understood that a good number of people would look down on the square from upper levels to see what looked like a dog covered in fleas.

The dog was just in

a photo and the fleas were humans walking down below—a fabulous way to play in public space and create a brand buzz online and offline.

IKEA

In 2011, an Essex IKEA started a sleepover in reaction to a Facebook group with over 100,000 members called ‘I wanna have a sleepover in IKEA.’

One hundred winners were chosen and given manicures and massages, as well as having a bedtime story read to them by a reality TV star. There was also a sleep expert on-hand to advise and potentially encourage them to choose a new mattress—a great example of experiential guerrilla marketing.

Wrap up

After reading this blog, you might get an idea of what guerrilla marketing is and how it has a huge potential to boost your brand awareness. So what are you waiting for? Start a guerrilla marketing campaign today.