The sheer number of products and services available today means that society is spoilt for choice when it comes to making a selection. This has enabled the field of marketing to thrive, with organisations investing heavily in marketing management and research to gain the biggest market share for their offerings.
The marketing world has seen so much change just in the past decade and there has been some amazing campaigns that deserve to be highlighted always. In this article the team here at ThunderQuote explored the greatest guerrilla marketing campaigns to help you pull of your own marketing campaign today!
The advent of online marketing also gave organisations an additional avenue with which to tout their products and services. While this may seem to be a boon for marketing firms, the constant barrage of information and messages targeted at consumers resulted in content saturation, making consumers unable to retain the information and messages, thereby lessening its impact.
Consequently, marketing management and research entities have had to device new and exciting ways to capture the attention of target audiences, leading to the rise of guerrilla marketing as an innovative yet cost-effective advertising option. In recent years, guerrilla marketing has also been referred to as ‘experiential marketing’, referring to its capacity to give consumers a unique and immersive experience. There are many forms of guerrilla marketing, ranging from on-the-ground methods such as pop-up kiosks and flash mobs, to online techniques such as guest blogging and animation videos.
Consumers can be hard to please, and at times, even fickle-minded. With them being constantly inundated with advertising content, a company’s marketing management and research team would have to device a really innovative marketing tactic that sets them apart from every other company. Knowing this, what is the best way to go about creating a great guerrilla marketing campaign that is simple yet memorable, without making a dent in the company budget?
Defining your objective
The first step towards a great guerrilla marketing campaign is to be clear on the underlying key message, as well as the objectives and goals of your campaign. For the campaign to be solid, the key message must be streamlined across your mission, vision, brand and the products or services offered. Keep in mind that key to your campaign is the level at which you connect with your customers: guerrilla marketing is founded on the premise of strong customer relationships.
You will first need to do some marketing research and endeavor to understand your customer profile, i.e. age group, education and income levels, marital status and general interests, as well as how they consume information, i.e. print, audio, video or online.
This knowledge, along with good marketing management and research, would give you an idea of the kind customers that you would be dealing with, and subsequently, whether they will take to your offerings like duck to water. You can start by developing your own survey to obtain the information required – Google consumer survey is a good place to start. If you have the budget for it, consider hiring a research company. This may incur some additional expenses, but the information that you obtain will go a long way towards keeping your potential customers happy.
Source: indigoprod.com
Fleshing out the content
Upon obtaining a clear idea of your potential customer base, the next step would be to expand on the content for your new campaign. In mapping out your campaign, consider all types of media to put forward your message, and the various methods for effective outreach. Also, it would be good to ensure that the message behind your campaign is positive. After all, most people gravitate towards positivity, and you’ll want your target audience to be optimistic about your campaign. Below are a couple of considerations to ensure that you cover all bases when carrying out your guerrilla marketing campaign:
Visuals designed to captivate
People are naturally drawn to colours and images, as opposed to blocks of words that require deep concentration to comprehend. There is also the time factor to consider when developing content. Visuals such as infographics, illustrations, images, charts, tables and diagrams offer a quick way of disseminating information to the intended audience without requiring them to invest large amounts of time to understand what’s on offer.
It has been proven that visual aids are more effective in capturing the attention of the audience, making them more likely to be open to suggestions. It would also be nice to include an element of surprise to your content. The appeal of guerrilla marketing is in its unconventionality, so draw on that aspect and throw in a couple of Easter eggs into the fray. This is guaranteed to up the wow factor and make your campaign memorable!
Giving context to your campaign
Marketing research shows that an interesting story-line has a way of capturing the imagination of the audience and evoking strong emotions. Author and established marketing consultant Douglas Van Praet mentioned in his book, Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing, that there are several unconscious and emotional drivers that influence a person’s decisions, among them being survival, safety and sustenance.
To get buy-in from your potential customers, they need to see that your product or service has a purpose, is worth their while and can benefit them in one way or another. You’ll want to craft the story behind your campaign to that effect. Once they are invested in the product or service, they will be more than willing to spread the good word about your offerings, thus increasing your sales figures naturally.
Marketing across many platforms
The availability of multiple communication formats provides for a more efficient way of getting maximum publicity for your campaign across as many platforms as possible in the shortest amount of time. Upon finalising your content, consider duplicating your campaign messages in video, audio, image and print formats to cover both traditional and online marketing. People love sharing information that they find interesting with friends and family, and duplicating your messages in various formats allows the public to be your mouthpiece by spreading the news on social media and by word-of-mouth, giving your guerrilla marketing campaign a big boost!
There are many other ways to go about developing the greatest guerrilla marketing campaign that will command the attention of your target audience, but the fundamentals listed above should set you on the right path. While it’s important not to lose sight of your campaign objectives and goals, injecting a little fun and spontaneity into your methods of delivery can go a long way towards getting the results you want!
ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.