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Guerrilla Marketing - When Less Is More

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Without vast marketing budgets to call upon and with acute time-pressure upon employees, small businesses can sometimes struggle to generate interest in their company.

Finding the most efficacious promotional strategy possible is something of a Holy Grail for SMEs – But without enough care, this can soon become an exercise in not seeing the wood for the trees. In essence, focus is key.

That’s why the notion of guerrilla marketing has become a bit of a buzzword amongst marketers in recent years. A simplified distillation of this technique is as follows:

• Concentrate your efforts on small, focussed areas of promotion that are effective; and
• Repeat them over and over again.

Colin Campbell, a sales and marketing professional from a large corporate background started his own business recently. In the following article, he reflects upon his own experiences of going guerrilla, and argues that a pared-down, but channelled, marketing strategy is what most SMEs need:

I launched my business at the end of 2005, and six months later I found myself in a position of trying to carry out too many marketing activities - yet I had too little business coming in.

I was going from developing my websites, to writing marketing collateral, to developing newsletters, to making contacts and attending networking meetings. All this was taking time and money.

Step back

Taking time out to think about what I was doing and how I was trying to develop my business proved to be the best thing I did.

I immediately discovered some problems. My marketing consisted of a series of activities - they were not linked up. I was meeting people, picking up business cards and not following up sufficiently quickly - people didn’t have a clear enough perspective of how I could help them or how they could help me.

I turned to the internet for answers - Perhaps people with similar business challenges could provide me with some new ideas. I went on some online networking communities and it was here that I came across the concept of guerrilla marketing.

Don’t do too much

The first key with guerrilla marketing is to seize responsibility and analyse the best marketing activities to undertake. One of my problems was that I was trying to do too much at the same time.

On top of this, I was attending a lot of networking meetings as I knew other people had very successful businesses through having a wide and deep network. I’d failed to realise that all these other people had achieved initial success through using one of these strategies, not all of them all at once!

Narrow your focus

The second key with guerrilla marketing is to focus on a small number of marketing activities and carry them out to the best of your ability. CJ Hayden, author of Get Clients Now! says that businesses often know what to do - they just don’t do enough of it, or get distracted.

I therefore concentrated my efforts on networking and following up. By doing this I was able to focus on building relationships with people I already knew and go to events to meet new people. When they showed an interest in what I did, only then did I hand them some of my marketing material. By putting people first, my business increased rapidly.

Repeat it again and again

The third key is to execute and repeat whatever works over and over again. In his Guerrilla Marketing books, Jay Conrad Levinson says:

Mediocre marketing with commitment works better than brilliant marketing without commitment.

I started a programme and five weeks later my business doubled. The growth was far greater than I could have expected if I’d continued with my previous approach.

Factors for success

Here are some other factors that are critical to success.

• Establish how much business you have today.
• Establish how much business you would like in the long term.
• Establish how much business you could add in 28 days, if you put your mind to it.
• Work out where you are stuck or need most effort - Most people think they need to fill the sales pipeline, in fact, most need to focus on following up!
• Work every day on putting the ingredients for success in place.
• Monitor your progress every day.
• Stick to your plan and it will work.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your gun and start your own bit of guerrilla warfare!

The above article originally appeared in the October 2007 edition of Better Business magazine

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under SMEs, Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.