The idea of a guerrilla marketing campaign refers to a highly unorthodox & unconventional advertising & promotional campaign that is dependent much more on the proper utilization of time & energy with an equal dose of imagination & creativity than it is on big funding as is the case for more traditional advertising & promotional campaigns. By nature guerrilla marketing is a very unexpected way of letting your targeted customers know that you are out there, with the campaign being extremely innovative like being completely interactive or targeting prospects in the most unlikely of places.
The primary objective of guerrilla marketing is to create completely unique advertising ideas that make the viewer think & if they like it, it quickly generates a huge amount of buzz about the product, and the campaign may possibly turn viral. Although this is more specifically viral marketing, it is only one of the many unconventional techniques that come within the radius of this term coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing.
Less commonly a guerrilla marketing campaign might also involve street giveaways of complimentary products & other public relation stunts intended to obtain maximum results with the minimum amount of resources. The most innovative guerilla marketing techniques consists of methods such as utilizing state of the art mobile & digital technologies with the aim of creating a more memorable brand experience.
Nowadays guerilla marketing has become a much more generalized term & encompasses a number of different unorthodox marketing techniques such as:-
- Viral marketing — This is the method of promoting or advertising a product that relies on convincing would be customers to market the product of sorts by spreading word of it within their various social networks.
- Presence marketing — In simple terms this is the art of selling without selling. This uses the well known & easily recognizable image that an established brand has as marketing tool, by for example placing the product in the hands of the lead male in a hit sitcom.
- Buzz marketing – Buzz marketing is an innovative offshoot of viral marketing that aims at making each & every encounter that would be prospects have with the actual viral content appear to be a unique, instantaneous & very personal exchange of information rather than appearing as a glorified sales pitch.