Guerrilla Marketing Volume 1: Advertising and Marketing Definitions, Ideas, Tactics, Examples, and Campaigns to Inspire Your Business Success

INTRODUCTION

Guerrilla Marketing is intelligent marketing that utilizes a strategy and a plan that is supported with a toolbox of low-cost, unconventional, and creative tactics to choose from to convey and promote a compelling product or service. Guerrilla Marketing makes the truth fascinating. Guerrilla Marketing turns time, energy, imagination, and information into profits.

Guerrilla Marketing was introduced to the world in a self-titled book in 1984, by Jay Conrad Levinson, as an unconventional system of marketing that relies on time, energy, and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.

We are continuing Jay Conrad Levison’s unconventional system of marketing. By understanding not only what marketing is, but why it works, we give small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the opportunity to think and grow big. When you understand the power of your SMB and what you can do with Guerrilla Marketing, it not only levels the playing field with your competition, it tilts the playing field to your advantage.

The pillars of Guerrilla Marketing are as strong today as they were decades ago when it was introduced to the world. The tactics, tools, and tips are continually evolving, and our desire is to keep you continually on the forefront of Guerrilla Marketing.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a small or medium-sized business, or a solopreneur, we understand that your business (or your idea that you want to turn into a business) is your dream, and you will never settle. What do you plan to do with your precious opportunity? Will you succeed beyond your wildest expectations? Will you give in to doubt and fold?

Guerrilla Marketing exists to give you a toolbox of tactics, tools, and tips to choose from to succeed beyond your wildest expectations. The simple question is: Will you act and succeed, or will you fold? We think you’re ready to act and claim your success, so let’s get to it.

To implement Guerrilla Marketing is to challenge yourself and/or your business to implement intelligent marketing. You can stick to what you’re doing now with your marketing. You can stick with what others are telling you to do with your marketing. Or you can challenge yourself to understand Guerrilla Marketing and implement it to your full advantage.

While writing this book, we had a conversation with someone about Guerrilla Marketing and they said, Well, now is the worst time to be marketing your business. That comment highlights both the fundamental misunderstanding of Guerrilla Marketing and the enormous, missed opportunity for success that results.

Many business owners think marketing is a light switch that you turn on and off. Therefore, they conduct their marketing activities as if they are turning the switch on and off. As an SMB, you can perform excellent marketing as easily as you can perform poor marketing.

Fortunately, for those who wisely choose to understand and implement Guerrilla Marketing in their business, they understand that the light switch is always on, and the lights are always shining bright. With the bright lights on, Guerrilla marketers are intentional with their marketing efforts, and precious profits are their reward.

Many businesses fail to utilize Guerrilla Marketing to its fullest benefit by failing to execute the Guerrilla Marketing fundamentals which guide your marketing and allow you to perform 360 degrees of intelligent, impactful, and consistent marketing that drives profits for your business. Instead of mastering the fundamentals, they jump right to the tactics and implement them like light switches—turning them on and off and flipping from one to another without a plan, strategy, consistency, or an understanding of who their prospects and customers are or what their business is and how it’s seen in the marketplace.

Why? Many think it’s not exciting or showy to build the strong marketing foundation for their business. However, Guerrilla marketers understand that their strong marketing foundation is where their Guerrilla Marketing success is born.

Guerrilla Marketing isn’t simply about implementing tactics that appeal to customers and prospects. It’s a 360-degree consistent methodology that weaves through every aspect of your business. A strong, successful Guerrilla business is built on a Guerrilla Marketing foundation that keeps them focused on, in part:

Why marketing works

Who their prospects and customers are, the problems they want to solve, and the way they want those problems solved

Being clear as they tell their prospects and customers what they can do for them

Caring about and understanding who their customers are, why they make additional purchases, and why they refer friends, family, and associates

The input and opinions of their prospects, customers, employees, vendors, and community that can lead to long-term satisfaction, success, and profits

Why ongoing relationships build their business

What makes their business unique and fascinating, and how they can make sure everyone knows about it

Why they’re better than the competition and making sure everyone knows their advantages

Why measuring their marketing and measuring their creativity turns into profits

Understanding that they’re marketing with every interaction, so they’re intentional about it

The power of consistency and repetition

As an entrepreneur, a small or medium-sized business, or a solopreneur, you need Guerrilla Marketing more than ever because the competition is smarter, more sophisticated, and even more aggressive than ever before. That is not a problem for Guerrilla marketers.

If your competition is a large business, you may find that they employ some Guerrilla Marketing tactics, but they don’t have the advantages that you do as a smaller business. As a smaller business, you are nimble, engaged, and focused, which is the rich fertilizer that your Guerrilla Marketing needs to bloom.

More than ever before, consumers receive vanilla or one-size-fits-all service from large companies. That creates a perfect opportunity for you to utilize Guerrilla Marketing to make your business shine.

Guerrilla Marketing takes a quality product or service and sets it apart from the competition. How?

We’d venture a bold guess that fewer than ten percent of the new and existing small-business owners have a plan or strategy. Additionally, they have likely explored less than a dozen of the marketing tools and tactics available to them. Guerrilla marketers, on the other hand, recognize that the more they understand about how and why marketing works, combined with Guerrilla Creativity and a toolbox of options, the better they will be able to take the right action that creates the right results.

Businesses that implement Guerrilla Marketing have a tremendous advantage over businesses that don’t. The business that implements Guerrilla Marketing is ridiculously hard to replicate, and that makes their business unique.

That uniqueness makes their business more valuable. That increased value means that as the business grows, larger businesses are more likely to want to partner with or acquire the business. Without the unique advantages of that business due to their successful Guerrilla Marketing efforts, the larger business wouldn’t see their value. They would just replicate the business model and dominate the smaller business by competing with them.

If you’re not where you want to be, it’s a good indicator that there is more you can do. Guerrilla Marketing helps you to realize every facet of marketing—and the more you know, the more you can achieve.

In the wise words of Jay Conrad Levinson in the book Guerrilla Marketing:

Guerrilla Marketing is always intentional. It pays close attention to all the details of contact with the outside world, ignoring nothing, and realizing the stunning importance of those tiny but supercharged details.

Guerrilla Marketing is about getting all the details right so that when you deploy an attention-getting Guerrilla Marketing tactic, it works. Why does that make sense?

For example, if you drive by a business and you see a group of picketers, you’re likely to look. Then you notice that they are holding clever signs that are promoting the business and asking you to honk because you love this business. If you find it clever, amusing, or intriguing, your reaction will likely be to look the business up (search engines, social media, whatever you prefer).

Friendly picketers are versatile (handing out samples, directing people to their location or a booth at an event, etc.), and can garner attention and pique the interest of your prospects and customers. However, it’s what happens next that determines if that piqued interest will be turned into profits. Now is the time when your attention to the details (great reviews, a clear and compelling description of the business, easy-to-access hours and contact information) will make that attention turn prospects into customers.

If the business gets your attention but then it’s hard to find in an online search or their marketing is disconnected, their prospects:

Aren’t sure about the business, and they’re skeptical

See that their social media looks different than their website, which makes them more skeptical

Can’t read their copy because the fonts are hard to read, and they find the graphics unappealing

Find their hours and contact information are inconvenient, incomplete, or missing

That’s a business that views marketing as a series of disconnected gimmicks, or it’s a business that thinks marketing is a light switch that they turn on and off. That business takes action, but it doesn’t understand how to set themselves apart with good Guerrilla Marketing.

Energy alone is not enough. Energy must be directed by intelligence. Successful Guerrilla businesses are intelligently designed and operated from the outside in (from the customers’ point of view, needs, desires, and expectations), not the inside out. They are designed with forward and backward thinking. Equally, those businesses use intelligent marketing, which is Guerrilla Marketing.

Successful Guerrilla Marketing means that their prospects experience a business that’s:

Easy to find in an online search and whose social is consistent with their website

Convenient to reach, in the way the prospect wants to reach them

Clear and appealing while they quickly explain a relatable problem and is compelling with how they solve it

Unique and has several competitive advantages

The Guerrilla business has appealing and consistent marketing while they’re easy and convenient to do business with. Because the business has carefully and consistently executed their marketing, they build familiarity with their prospects, and that familiarity allows the business’s quality product(s) or service(s) to shine. Guerrilla Marketing emphasizes that consistency builds familiarity; familiarity builds trust, and trust creates sales, repeat purchases, and precious referrals, which is the fuel for long-term success.

Often, the only factor that determines success or failure of a business is the way they market their product(s) or service(s). Businesses who are successful Guerrillas get it right because they know the secrets of intelligent Guerrilla Marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing is a 360-degree consistent methodology that weaves through every aspect of your business. If you want to succeed with Guerrilla Marketing, and we know you do and can, let’s get started with building the strong marketing foundation from which your Guerrilla Marketing success will be born.

To implement Guerrilla Marketing, it’s time to challenge yourself and/or your business to implement intelligent marketing and use it to your full advantage. You’ll begin in "Section I" by building your strong marketing foundation with your energy and understanding of:

Research and Knowing

Guerrilla Creativity

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Guerrilla Marketing Ten-Word Profit Challenge

Guerrilla Marketing Plan Challenge

Guerrilla Creative and Advertising Strategy Challenge

A Guerrilla Marketing Calendar

To understand the role and importance of each of these building blocks for your strong marketing foundation, we’ll first provide an overview in this book.

For those of you who are new to Guerrilla Marketing (or those who want to learn more), we encourage you to then take it online for your FREE companion course (visit gMarketing.com/Club). In the companion course, we’ll dive deeper with video tutorials, exercises, and the tools you’ll need to build that crucial foundation for your Guerrilla Marketing success.

With your rock-solid marketing foundation established, it’s time for options. The tools, tips, and tactics that begin with "Section II" will have the launch pad they need to create success and profits for your business. We’re excited to see you unleash your Guerrilla Creativity and guide your business to success that’s beyond your wildest expectations.

SECTION I

The Strong Foundation of Guerrilla Marketing Success

1.1 RESEARCH AND KNOWING

Effective Guerrilla Marketing starts with researching and defining your target market or prospects. Think about marketing as a continuous and ever-growing game of darts. Your marketing is the dart, and your prospects (and customers) are the dartboard. However, both the darts and dartboard evolve and change over time.

The center of the dartboard is your perfect/ideal customer that is, initially, defined by the characteristics that your research has produced. Those characteristics are refined over time as you attract, and learn more about, your customers.

As you move further away from the center of the dartboard, the prospects become less specifically defined and are, instead, broadly defined. In the center, you may have twenty characteristics that define your perfect/ideal customers, and as you move away from the center, you have fewer and fewer specific characteristics.

The characteristics of your prospects are made up by:

Demographics: age, income, sex, ethnicity, education, marital status, nationality, occupation, language, geographic (the location of your prospects), household data (such as number of children), etc.

Psychographics: the interests, activities, values, problems, and opinions of your prospects that help you market to their preferences

When you’re just getting started with your business, you must rely on your research skills to learn how to reach, connect with, and motivate your prospects. When you’re fortunate enough to have customers, ongoing knowledge of their problems, needs, desires, and opinions while creating long-lasting relationships is how a Guerrilla marketer grows their business.

Ongoing research and knowing (e.g., product and/or service, shopping, payment, etc.) preferences, is a key to creating a long-term, thriving business. A successful Guerrilla marketer knows that neither of these activities ever ends.

The wants and needs of your prospects change over time. They try new products or services that might enhance their desire for your product, or they may compete with and replace your product or service. If you don’t keep up with your research, you’ll miss connecting with what motivates them and your once robust business may begin to decline.

The same goes for your customers, who are changing constantly. They change jobs, have children, move, change friends, change their interests, develop new problems they want solved, and so on. The only constant is that your prospects and customers change.

That means that the accuracy and certainty of your data is an ongoing activity. IBM estimates that poor data quality costs the US economy $3.1 trillion per year. As the desire for personalization in marketing grows, the importance of the accuracy and certainty of your data grows exponentially.

Guerrilla marketers stay focused on the accuracy and certainty of their research regarding their prospects, the information they collect from their customers, and the lists they buy to create leads. Cutting corners with your research and data collection can cost you far more than you could ever hope to save by skimping.

When you stay curious, engaged, and excited about knowing your customers, you gain both repeat sales and the most precious gift they can give you: referrals. They like you; they recommend you, and they promote your business, and that is pure gold to every Guerrilla marketer in terms of pride and profits.

Knowing your customers has far-reaching benefits. Knowing your customers gives you the ability to spot trends and identify their wants and needs. That affords you the opportunity to expand your product(s) or service(s) and to establish Guerrilla fusion/affiliate marketing relationships with other businesses that have products you want to recommend to your customers.

Guerrillas thrive with competitive research also. They know their competitive advantages inside and out. With that knowledge, they promote their unique advantages that leave the competition flat. Tools that allow you to research and analyze other websites or apps are a great way to get to know more about your competition and customers. Become familiar with tools such as:

SimilarWeb

Alexa

SparkToro

Tools and resources that help you locate and study demographic and economic data are a must, and you’ll want to be familiar with and utilizing the data available with:

United States Census Bureau

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data and Statistics about the US

The National Bureau of Economic Research

Data.Gov

Academic Institutions

Foundations that research specific data categories

Trade and Industry organizations

Tools that help you understand the psychographic characteristics of your prospects and customers include:

The National Retail Federation

Claritas

Numerator

Academic Institutions

Trade and Industry organizations

Intelligent marketing is Guerrilla Marketing, and it simplifies marketing. It helps you break down the fundamentals so you can be smart and effective with all of your marketing tactics. Remember to visit gMarketing.com/Club to access your free companion course for the latest information and tools.

1.2 GUERRILLA CREATIVITY

The ability to tap into and stoke your Guerrilla Creativity isn’t by chance. The more you know about marketing, and the more you know about your customers and prospects, the more creative your ideas will be.

The formula for determining highly creative Guerrilla Marketing is an amazingly simple one. The more profit your marketing is producing, the more Guerrilla Creativity you’ve employed. If your marketing is not producing profitable results, it’s time to reevaluate your creativity.

Sales – Marketing Investment = Guerrilla Creativity Profit

The bigger your creativity profit number is, the more Guerrilla Creativity you’re employing. Which result do you want your Guerrilla Creativity to produce?

Example 1 – High Guerrilla Creativity:

$115,000 (Sales) - $15,000 (Marketing Investment) =

$100,000 (Guerrilla Creativity Profit)

Or

Example 2 – Low Guerrilla Creativity:

$115,000 (Sales) - $100,000 (Marketing Investment) =

$15,000 (Guerrilla Creativity Profit)

How do you generate Guerrilla Creativity that is highly effective for your marketing and business? Guerrilla marketers first take the time to understand the different ways to approach thinking when it comes to creating powerful marketing and business ideas.

When you use direct thinking, forward thinking, backward thinking, and lateral thinking, you’ll expand your traditional thinking and stoke your Guerrilla Creativity. When you expand your traditional thinking in combination with your ever-expanding knowledge, your Guerrilla Creativity will be extraordinarily successful.

Being knowledgeable about your customers and prospects, your business and its product(s) or service(s), your advantages and benefits, the problems you solve, your industry, your competition, your community, and the trends that matter sets the stage for developing highly creative marketing, products, services, innovations, and solutions.

Successful marketing requires a formidable balance between creativity and knowledge. For example, if you don’t know your prospects and customers, your creativity is likely to miss the mark and not get their attention or interest. Alternately, if you know your advantages and benefits but you can’t creatively express them, your prospects and customers may never know your advantages and benefits.

Because Guerrilla Marketing is a consistent methodology that weaves through your business, your Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy, Guerrilla Marketing plan, and Guerrilla Marketing calendar act as a safety net to help keep you from mistaking low Guerrilla Creativity for high Guerrilla Creativity.

Guerrilla marketers also look before they leap. Even after developing a solid Guerrilla strategy, a creative marketing tactic, and creative way to deliver it, Guerrilla marketers engage in testing their creative idea(s) and tactics. Guerrilla marketers appreciate safety nets and the money they can save. Regardless of how brilliant or inspired their creative idea seems, testing allows for variations and changes that can unexpectedly take your Guerrilla Creativity from good to the highest levels of success.

Testing also prevents a brilliant or inspired idea from falling flat and taking your business with it. When businesses make the mistake of not using safety nets, they can plunge their way straight out of business.

Visit gMarketing.com/Club to access your free companion course with videos, exercises, and tools that will help you quickly and easily know more about Guerrilla Creativity and the approaches to thinking that will unleash your creativity.

1.3 UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION (USP)

A USP is a unique selling proposition. The term was first popularized in 1961 by Rosser Reeves in his book, Reality in Advertising.

Your USP represents one of your greatest marketing opportunities. Most businesses neither promote, nor have identified, their USP. Fortunately, Guerrilla marketers don’t make that mistake. Guerrilla marketers find the tiny, supercharged details that can generate big profits.

Your USP is your proprietary competitive edge that is stated clearly and succinctly. Your business may have several USPs, but when you distill them, you can express your USP in a way that compels your prospects and customers to take action (e.g., learn more, contact your business, purchase your product or service, etc.).

In the marvelous words of Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing: Every business must have one to succeed. But most businesses don’t. Not surprisingly, most businesses fail.

Guerrilla marketers thrive where other businesses fail to act. A simple USP is an effective way to help your business thrive. The good news is that it’s far easier to develop your UPS than you might think.

Effective USPs have four traits:

It should make a specific promise to customers. Example: Buy this product, and you will get this clear benefit

It should be one your competitors cannot, or will not, match or copy. It must be unique. Your customers should not be able to get the benefit anywhere else

It should be so strong that it can create a crowd of eager buyers. Ideally, only a lunatic would refuse to buy from you

It should address both the pain points of your prospects and customers and the resulting pleasure that your product(s) or service(s) benefits will deliver to them

Customers and prospects are likely to remember one thing about your business. When your USP is communicated with consistency and repetition, you can be sure that when they remember your USP, they’ll remember what makes your business unique and compelling.

A great low-cost way to test the effectiveness of your USP is your elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch is otherwise known as the brief answer you give to the question What do you do? or What does your business do?

If your business has several USPs, you can test those in your elevator pitch to pare down to one leading USP that aligns with your prospects and customers. To test the strength of the USP, after speaking it (in your elevator pitch), take a pause before saying anything more. Is the listener engaged (facial gestures, body language, etc.)? If they’re not engaged, you have more work to do to make your USP compelling to your prospects and customers.

The additional USPs that your business has (that are also aligned to your prospects and customers) can be used in long-copy marketing and advertising (e.g., presentations, letters, emails, your website, direct mail, etc.), while your leading USP always gets the spotlight.

Once you’ve chosen your USP, it’s time to consistently put it to work in all your marketing. Know this: what makes you unique makes you interesting and memorable, so promote it. Guerrilla marketers don’t let their USP remain a secret. Instead, Guerrilla marketers embrace their uniqueness, and they consistently promote it.

Visit gMarketing.com/Club to access your free companion course to learn more about building your strong Guerrilla Marketing foundation.

1.4 GUERRILLA MARKETING TEN-WORD PROFIT CHALLENGE

The Guerrilla Marketing ten-word profit challenge is designed to help your business drive profits. In ten words, you’ll express your core concept, make a memorable statement which will build familiarity, and compel your prospects to want to learn more.

Sound impossible? It’s not. Sound like something you’ll get to later? Sure, if you’re happy putting off profits. If you don’t want to put off those profits, let’s get to it.

First, these few questions will help you focus on the important information about your business that you want your prospects to clearly know and understand:

What is the core concept of your business?

What is your USP?

What are the top three pain points of your customers as it relates to your product or service?

How will your prospects feel and how do your customers feel when your business, product, or service alleviates their pain points?

Now, with those questions answered, you have two particularly important tools for your business:

Information that every person in your business should know by heart and should be sharing with your customers and prospects (e.g., sales presentations, your About Us page on your website, customer service scripts, etc.). As your prospects are attracted to your business based on your powerful ten words, now you can expand on those words and further motivate your prospects to become customers

The cheat sheet to create your powerful ten words

Now, with that valuable cheat sheet in hand, it’s time to distill and formulate the ten words that will set your business on the path to greater profits. You’re looking for words that allow your business to be:

Engaging: Make your prospects want to connect

Unique: Your USP offers a head start

Compelling: Make your prospects want to see more or learn more about your business, product(s) and/or service(s)

The Solution to the Problem: After all, your business exists to solve problems. Your prospects and customers have a problem, and no one can solve it better than your business. Your job is to clearly let them know that your business:

Understands the problem

Understands how it affects them

Knows how they’re going to feel when your business solves the problem for them

Authentic: When you compel your prospects and they become your customers, your authenticity creates customer satisfaction. Authenticity also builds your customers’ trust, which turns into referrals and repeat purchases (the path to increased profits). If your business is not authentic, your business generates refunds, bad reviews, and negative social chatter

Consistent: You’ll use these ten words consistently and with repetition in your marketing. From your website to your business cards, and even writing it on the walls, make these words known and remembered. It’s important to understand that consistency builds familiarity; familiarity builds trust, and trust creates sales, repeat purchases, and precious referrals

Memorable: When you’re memorable, you become familiar (I’ve heard of that company, Oh, that’s the business that . . .), and as we just noted, familiarity builds trust, and trust creates sales, repeat purchases, and precious referrals. However, there is a key to successfully connecting the dots between being memorable and familiar. Guerrilla marketers know the key, but many businesses (small and large) don’t know or choose to ignore the key. What is that key? It’s quite simple: include your business, service, or product name. Without your business, product, or service name, it’s ten words about some business that your prospects don’t remember the name of

At this point, you likely have a lot of words. The good news is that ten of those can help you drive your profits. If you need a bit of inspiration to get your creative juices flowing, here are ten words for Guerrilla Marketing:

Guerrilla Marketing Turns Time, Energy, Imagination, and Information into Profits.

Now it’s time to reduce your words down to the ten that will connect with and compel your prospects and customers. However, we’re not done yet. Do you want to take the Guerrilla Marketing ten-word profit challenge to the next level for the benefit of your business? If so, once you’ve completed the exercise, have your team take on the Guerrilla Marketing ten-word profit challenge at your next meeting.

Don’t let them know that you’ve completed the challenge. This is your opportunity to see both the cheat sheet and the ten words from their point of view as compared to yours, and that valuable information takes your challenge to the next level.

If your ten words don’t match your employees’ ten words and your cheat sheets are dissimilar, you’ve gained powerful insight that can be priceless for your business. Now it’s time to roll up the sleeves and connect the dots between you and your team. Connecting those dots will make your business a cohesive experience for your prospects and customers, and that’s a Guerrilla business advantage.

If your ten words match those of your employees and your cheat sheets are remarkably similar, give yourself a huge kudos. You and your team are a well-connected Guerrilla business.

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness and success of your ten words, the answer is in your profits. When you have the right ten words, your profits will show it.

1.5 GUERRILLA MARKETING PLAN CHALLENGE

Guerrilla Marketing is first and foremost focused on a core idea. All your marketing must be an extension of that core idea: the advertising, direct mailing, USP, sales presentations, packaging, internet presence, uniforms, store design, innovation, etc.

Fortunately, Guerrilla Marketing is a 360-degree consistent methodology that weaves through every aspect of your business. To succeed, it isn’t enough to have a better idea; you need to have a focused plan and strategy.

Whether you have a business now, or you have an idea that you want to turn into a business, now is the perfect time for intelligent marketing. It’s time to build a very simple Guerrilla Marketing plan to guide you along your journey. After all, a plan is about winning on purpose.

If you want to succeed with Guerrilla Marketing, and we know you do, you’ll be intentional with your marketing, which means completing a Guerrilla Marketing plan. By doing so, you’re building the strong marketing foundation from which your Guerrilla Marketing success will be born.

The tactics of Guerrilla Marketing have been proven effective for decades. However, successful Guerrilla marketers make the time to plan because they understand that strategy (a Guerrilla Marketing plan) always comes before tactics, and that’s how you make Guerrilla Marketing impactful.

Because your Guerrilla Marketing plan is simple, you can easily accomplish it and commit to it. Give yourself every advantage, because the impact of Guerrilla Marketing is fully realized when you’re operating with a plan/strategy.

You’ll quickly find that your simple Guerrilla Marketing plan will help you stay focused, and that means you’re making intelligent marketing choices. It will make it obvious when you’re veering off course or being tempted to engage in gimmick, spray-and-pray, and other disconnected marketing that wastes your money.

What does a football coach do? They do their research and create a plan. During the game they keep checking their plan, and they recalibrate as the game progresses, but they know that executing their sound plan is the key to winning on purpose.

Think of your Guerrilla Marketing plan in that same way. You can also think of your Guerrilla Marketing plan as you think of the GPS on your mobile device or in your vehicle. You connect where you are to where you want to go, and your GPS simply and dynamically gets you there while making it clear when you’re veering off course.

If you’re operating without a Guerrilla Marketing plan, it’s as if you’re driving a vehicle in an unfamiliar area without GPS or a map and you can’t figure out why you’re not getting where you want to go.

When you’re operating with a Guerrilla Marketing plan, all your marketing is focused on your core idea. Your USP and your ten words are consistent and repeated. Your business is benefiting from the power of repetition and consistency, neither of which costs a dime but build familiarity. Familiarity, in turn, builds trust, which creates sales, repeat purchases, and precious referrals.

Once you’ve created and launched your Guerrilla Marketing plan, you’ll keep track of which of your marketing tactics are hitting your target and which are missing. Merely knowing and taking needed action can double the effectiveness of your marketing budget. Sound daunting? It’s not. Sound exciting? It is!

Visit gMarketing.com/Club to access your free companion course with videos, exercises, and tools that will help you quickly and easily begin your Guerrilla Marketing plan. The few minutes you’ll spend creating your plan will turn into hours and dollars saved as your business makes intelligent marketing decisions with clarity and focus while your business grows.

1.6 GUERRILLA CREATIVE AND ADVERTISING STRATEGY CHALLENGE

If you don’t know it already, advertising and marketing are different. You’re marketing with every bit of interaction you have with your business—with employees, prospects, customers, and the outside world.

Advertising, on the other hand, is a part of marketing your product and/or service. Advertising is effective when it’s done in combination with your marketing. As an analogy, think of the game Jenga. All the blocks together are marketing. Each individual block is a component of marketing, such as: advertising, uniforms, sales, product development, packaging, website, social media, public relations, store design, etc.

Therefore, it’s important to create your Guerrilla Marketing plan first. By doing so, your Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy will be aligned to your Guerrilla Marketing plan.

In your Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy, you will get clear about your creative strategy and what you’re offering your prospects and customers. You’ll define your target audience based on your research about your prospects and knowledge about your customers (if you already have customers). You’ll also create clarity about the benefits of your product or service and the clear message that tells the prospect what action you want them to take.

Visit gMarketing.com/Club to access your free companion course with videos, exercises, and tools that will help you quickly and easily create your Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy.

How to develop Guerrilla Creative Strategies

How to incorporate Guerrilla Marketing tactics into your Guerrilla Creative Strategies

How to creatively deliver your marketing tactic(s) to your target market

1.7 GUERRILLA MARKETING CALENDAR

A Guerrilla Marketing calendar enables you to take your successes and move them forward into the next year. By taking the time to document your efforts and grade the success, you focus your efforts and track your progress.

This process allows you to sort through what’s working and what’s not. It’s an amazingly simple process to maximize your effectiveness and minimize your marketing and advertising investments.

By taking the time to analyze your results, you’ll quickly be doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t. You’ll also be consistently adding new marketing tactics that are carefully selected based on your past and present performance.

Unless you have money to waste, the last thing you want to do is to continue doing something that doesn’t work, yet many businesses do. Take that money and put it toward a better option.

Your Guerrilla Marketing calendar also allows you to see everything you’re doing (activities and expenditures) at a glance. That can help you spot redundancies, gaps, and overspending. You’ll avoid hit-or-miss marketing efforts and unexpected costs.

A Guerrilla Marketing calendar helps you ensure that you have a cohesive marketing plan that is accountable and measurable. When marketing and advertising opportunities arise, you’ll make sound decisions by using your Guerrilla Marketing plan, Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy, and Guerrilla Marketing calendar. You’ll find the entire process of marketing your business far simpler, clearer, and focused.

Visit gMarketing.com/Club to access your free companion course and a simple Guerrilla Marketing calendar example.

IN SUMMARY

Remember, Guerrilla Marketing is intelligent marketing that’s built on the strong foundational elements of Guerrilla Marketing:

Research and Knowing

Guerrilla Creativity

A Unique Selling Proposition

Guerrilla Marketing Ten-Word Profit Challenge

Guerrilla Marketing Plan Challenge

Guerrilla Creative and Advertising Strategy Challenge

A Guerrilla Marketing Calendar

Now you’re ready to proceed with ideas, examples, and tactics of Guerrilla Marketing. These ideas, examples, and tactics of Guerrilla Marketing are amazingly effective when they are utilized properly and in combination. Utilize and test as many as fit with your target audience research, customer knowledge, Guerrilla Marketing plan, and Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy.

With your Guerrilla Marketing calendar, you’ll do the important tracking and follow up to remove what’s not working. You’ll then do more of what’s working and add new tactics. The more you do well, the harder life is for your competition.

Remember, many businesses, big and small, view marketing as a series of disconnected gimmicks. Different messages, different colors, different fonts, different target markets, and different tactics. Fortunately for you, you’re not most businesses.

With Guerrilla Marketing, you’ll benefit from the power of a combination of marketing initiatives that consistently market your business. Never forget: consistency builds familiarity; familiarity builds trust, and trust creates sales, repeat purchases, and precious referrals—and that is the path to profits.

The simple and powerful act of consistently marketing the right message to the right audience will rocket your success far above and beyond that of other businesses. While you’re basking in the simplicity of your success with Guerrilla Marketing, you’ll notice that other businesses (hopefully your competition) are struggling with their marketing.

Those other businesses may have success from time to time, but you’ll notice that they use disconnected gimmicks, and they turn their marketing on and off like a light switch. They also focus on price over value, sameness over uniqueness, and irrelevant benefits. Those businesses are constantly in pursuit of new customers because their existing customers do not make repeat purchases or recommend the business to their friends, family, co-workers, and social followers.

The Guerrilla Marketing ideas, examples, and tactics that we are about to share are segmented into several categories:

Guerrilla Maximedia Marketing

Guerrilla Minimedia Marketing

Guerrilla E-Media Marketing

Guerrilla Info-Media Marketing

Guerrilla Human-Media Marketing

Guerrilla Non-Media Marketing

Guerrilla Company Attributes

Guerrilla Company Attitudes

These categories are classic to Guerrilla Marketing, but the toolbox of examples and tactics are ever-evolving and growing, and we’ll give you the latest tools and tactics to succeed right now. You’ll find a broad array of tactics that will help you find the right combination for your business. Utilize them properly and test as many as fit with your target audience research, customer knowledge, Guerrilla Marketing plan, and Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy.

Guerrilla Marketing should be thought of as a band, or even as an orchestra. The individual pieces of your marketing and advertising (i.e., the instruments), when beautifully playing the same song in perfect harmony, contribute to an extraordinary piece of music that people enjoy hearing over and over. However, when one or many pieces are out of harmony (or playing a different song), it’s the kind of music that people either never notice or, worse, they press dislike, skip, or change the station.

SECTION II

Guerrilla Maximedia Marketing

GUERRILLA MAXIMEDIA MARKETING

As Jay Conrad Levison stated in Guerrilla Marketing:

Guerrillas must use the mass media with precision, carefully measure the results, and make the media part of an overall marketing plan. When they use the media, Guerrillas must rely on know-how, intuition, and business acumen. Maximedia Marketing is about two things: (1) selling and (2) creating a powerful desire to buy. Also, Maximedia Marketing enhances the success of Minimedia Marketing—response rates to simple circulars jump when radio advertising blazes the way for them, and telemarketing results improve when TV spots pre-sell the market.

Guerrilla Maximedia is what many people think of when they talk about traditional advertising. Guerrilla Maximedia is at its most powerful when your Guerrilla Marketing is in full congruence. Your Guerrilla Maximedia endeavors bring your business to light in front of large audiences. Additionally, your Guerrilla Maximedia and your Guerrilla E-Media (Section IV) are typically the largest advertising investments that your business will make.

Therefore, taking the time to skillfully create your Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy is a must. Effective Guerrilla Maximedia is creative, clear, focused, compelling, and consistent. Your Guerrilla Creative and Advertising strategy will keep you on the path to profitable advertising. As with every marketing investment you make, understanding how advertising works equips you to make wise investments that will help you sleep well at night while your business profits grow.

As you would expect, we’ll help you with the low and no-cost ways that you can make your Guerrilla Maximedia investments create maximum profits for your business. Those precious profits are the fuel that