Do You Think Like a Guerrilla or a Baboon?
If you are running a small ormedium sized business and competing with the big guys you need to be able to market smarter not harder. You need to think like a Guerrilla. If you don’t know what I mean you will by the end of this article. Without clever, well designed marketing strategies you will find it hard to beat your competitors on their terms, fighting like a baboon.
It is essential to build a loyal customer base. One great way to build loyalty with your customers is to remember them after completing business with you. Often business people spend so much time with clients winning the sale and then forget them once the transaction is complete. Don’t forget the value of the customer and the possible repeat business that could be won. It’s much harder to find a new customer than it is to win repeat business, presuming of course that your product or service is of reasonable quality. When you have a powerful database it opens you up to many cost effective Guerrilla Marketing strategies.
Guerrilla Marketers Build a Database
Building a database of prospects and customers is an important asset for building an effective Guerrilla Marketing strategy. Guerrilla marketing has become a popular term in marketing today. “So what’s it all about?” I hear you ask. It’s about building a marketing process, not a once off or random series of events. It’s based on proven psychological techniques and some intuition.
Guerrilla Marketing is about cost effective marketing strategies that don’t strictly follow traditional marketing and advertising techniques. A successful Guerrilla Marketing strategy brings together new ways of thinking to achieve your marketing goals. It is essentially a strategy for promoting your business and your brand while generating profits in creative ways. Guerrilla marketing has become quite a popular term however many businesses are not implementing this way of thinking in their own businesses. Having said that, Guerrilla Marketing is easy to implement, practical and a highly profitable marketing system. It is a way of thinking with creativity and openness to new ideas. Many business owners use these techniques to increase word of mouth and publicity while using other traditional avenues for other marketing purposes.
Guerrilla Marketers Are Entrepreneurial
Guerrilla Marketing is well suited to the Entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs tends to be creative, energetic and imaginative while building their businesses into a lean, mean, profit generating machine. Guerrilla marketing is a way of achieving conventional goals in unconventional ways. It’s about achieving the maximum results with a minimal budget by approaching your marketing from many different angles that cost next to nothing. Social Media is just one technique that would fall under the Guerrilla Marketing banner since it is designed to reach many with little cost.
Guerrilla Marketers Take Risks
When investing in any Guerrilla Marketing there are always risks involved. Sending the wrong information to your customers or prospects or sending it at the wrong time could have a negative impact on your business. Imagine receiving a viral marketing message that others found funny but you found deeply offensive. Is it likely you would purchase anything from that business? Of course not. Walking that fine line is what makes Guerrilla Marketing exciting and challenging. You must take a calculated risk.
Imagine sending a funny email that everybody forwarded to their friends with your website link on it. Imagine projecting your brand on the side of the largest building in Melbourne the night after the AFL Grand Final. Imagine if your business could get noticed in a way nobody else has ever tried or even thought of before. How much more business would these types of strategies help generate? What would that mean to your bottom-line?
If you have any ideas for your own business you would like our opinion on please feel free in the comments below. It would be interesting to see what ideas we could come up with together as a community.
