get guerrilla with your marketing

Summary

guerrilla marketing is the unfair advantage of the small business. you cannot outspend the big players. you can absolutely out-think them.

the textbook example: the Blair Witch Project. tiny budget. they ran a website that treated the events as real missing-person reports, planted fake news, refused to break character. the curiosity carried the marketing. the movie did 250 million on a 60 thousand dollar budget.

the modern version, framework form:

1. show attention to one person at a time. comment on the post. send the personalized video. write the email that names the specific thing they tweeted. mass marketing is loud and easy to ignore. one-to-one marketing is almost impossible to ignore.

2. create exclusivity. limit the offer. cap the cohort. make the access feel earned. scarcity is not a trick. it is a signal that the offer is real.

3. skip the automation when it matters. the auto-DM bots are everywhere now. a real human reply, written by you, in a market full of bots, is the cheat code.

the whole point is to show actual human investment in the customer. that is the part the big competitor cannot copy because they have decided not to.

Transcript

introduction to effective marketing and guerrilla marketing strategies

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. So how do we make your marketing more effective? Because you’re either spending your time to market or you’re spending your money to market and you want either one of those things to be as efficient as possible.

Well, short answer, it’s guerrilla marketing. So let’s talk more about that today. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. Let’s start with the definition of what guerrilla marketing is. So defined, guerrilla marketing is an unconventional marketing strategy focused on low cost, creative and often unexpected tactics to promote a product or service.

deep dive into the definition and examples of guerrilla marketing

So that is guerrilla marketing defined, but what do we actually mean? Sometimes it’s that outside the box thinking around marketing that really helps people stand out. Now I don’t know if you were alive or around, depending on your age, demographic, whatever. When the Blair Witch Project came out, I was young.

I remember it scaring the freaking daylights out of me. I was very scared when I saw that movie. My parents watched it. I don’t remember my age. I was pretty young at the time. But anyway, the Blair Witch Project, if you haven’t seen it, I don’t know if it’s worth it at this point. I think the movie is actually pretty stupid now, but it’s like these teenagers go out in the woods, they get lost.

They’re searching for, I think, these witch or whatever, and they one by one kind of get taken or whatever. It’s all shot in this very unusual documentary style with handheld cameras. It wasn’t like this produced with or didn’t appear to be produced with really nice cameras like a typical movie or even a typical documentary.

It was very user-generated style, old school. It is very uncommon. To be honest, when it came out, people didn’t know if this was real or fake. This was the 90s, I believe, maybe late 90s. The Internet isn’t what the Internet is today, and people didn’t know if it was real or not. But what was interesting is before the release, the makers of the Blair Witch Project used guerrilla marketing by creating a website filled with fake police reports, interviews and news stories all about these missing filmmakers, like missing in quotes.

It generated a ton of buzz and curiosity, leading people to believe the movie might be real, which significantly boosted its popularity. It was this question. They basically put out all this fake news on this website, and when you’re a kid and you’re not even looking at the Internet or anything else, you go see this movie, you think it is real.

practical tips for applying guerrilla marketing tactics in your business

It was very, very crazy. That movie did really well, and they used guerrilla marketing. The person behind marketing this was very smart and very creative in their marketing because they didn’t just take out all these ads about this random movie about witches up in the Northeast somewhere. They wanted to add to the story and the mystery and all those things, and they played all of that to their advantage.

Incredibly creative, in my opinion. Now you’re like, OK, dude, enough about the Blair Witch Project. How do I do this in my post or in my business? The takeaway is not, hey, go put out fake news and all this stuff. The idea is try to think outside the box. Everyone’s always, hey, here’s my funnel, go through my funnel, or here’s my sales process, go through my sales process.

People aren’t really thinking outside the box as much. If you can just start to think about going just a little bit out of the way for your potential leads and prospects, that’s a great way to start with guerrilla marketing. What I mean go out of the way is I’m talking about don’t just have them go through their funnel.

Show them a little bit more personalized attention. A smaller example of guerrilla marketing that’s not this epic marketing strategy like the Blair Witch Project, but for instance, if you have someone, if you’re posting regular Instagram content or any content on social media, reach out to the people who like your Instagram posts.

Unless you are a massive influencer and you’re getting 7,000 likes per post, you can probably stomach reaching out to the people who like your posts, especially if they comment or share anything else. If you do have a lot of followers and a lot of interaction, maybe triage that. It’s like only the people who comment, only the people who share it, whatever.

the importance of personal touch in marketing and its impact on conversion

But if you don’t get a ton of likes or maybe it’s 50, it’s 60 likes, maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s 12, reach out to those people who liked it because you can see every single one. That’s one tiny way of doing guerrilla marketing. I’ve talked people through that. When they start Instagram ads or Facebook ads, they’re like, basically, people aren’t following through my funnel.

They liked it. They liked my post, but they didn’t do the steps and it’s, oh, someone didn’t do your three-step process and funnel to buy your thing. Oh, wow. They must be a human being. But if they liked it, that’s an indicator that they thought it was cool. This is someone that you can now interact with, message, talk to.

So it’s just thinking outside the box. If not, every single thing has to be, oh, people follow this process because every interaction in marketing, whether you’re business to consumer or business to business, everything is a human to human interaction. So if you can show that you’re human, I think that’s a way to be a guerrilla marketing.

So going conceptual, one way to do guerrilla marketing is to show that you’re human. Another way to do this is send personalized videos to every new lead. Now this is getting harder and harder to be authentic because everyone thinks everything is AI and everything’s created by a robot or whatever. No one thinks that there’s any authenticity left in marketing or customer outreach.

But if you can show a way to do that, like sending personalized videos to every new lead, especially if you don’t have a high volume of leads, showing specifically, if you can talk about in this video something specific to them or if they filled out a form mentioning those things, these are time-based things, but they go a long way.

conclusion and encouragement to think outside the box and try harder with your marketing efforts

They pack a very powerful punch in the minds of your prospects and your leads because they’re like, oh, wow, this person, they really care. They’re reaching out to me at a specific level. Maybe I do want to work with them at a deeper level. The framework applied, the three things that you can do here and start doing this today is one, show that you’re paying attention to individuals.

However you want to do that in your business, show that you’re paying attention to the individuals. That would be the person who liked your post reaching out to them directly, sending these videos. Any way you can do it in your business, you might have to think through, but how can I check the box that I’m showing that I pay attention to people at the individual level?

The second thing is creating a sense of exclusivity or personalized engagement. Think about that video or they only get it or they only have a conversation with you. How can people feel like they’re being taken care of and they’re more exclusive than just what everyone else is getting? Think about that.

What content can you send them? How can you help them? There are all sorts of ways that you can go about this, but this is a way to start building an audience and building a following. The last thing is skipping the automated or impersonal nature of standard funnels and fostering direct interaction.

That’s what a lot of people want to do in marketing right now is automate everything, put it on a drip, don’t ever interact with a customer. Here’s the deal. You need to do those things. I’m not saying don’t do those things, nurture your leads, take your brain out of it, let a marketing machine or CRM pull a lot of the weight for you.

I’m not saying don’t do those things because those things are high leverage, high value tasks for us to leverage our time, but when you start to get people who are raising their hand a little bit more, but they’re still not coming over the edge. If you can identify these people, hey, this person’s opened 11 emails, but they’ve never interacted with me, reach out to them.

You can even automate things like that, but I would suggest that you don’t because say you have 1,000 people on an email list and there’s six people who’ve opened 11 of your last emails. You can reach out to those six people, right? If you have a phone number, text them, let them know, hey, I mean, you can even say that these days, be like, hey, saw you open all my emails, really interested.

Is there anything I can help you with specifically? You can get down to that level and it’s actually really impactful. You might get ghosted too by some of these people or they think it’s weird if you call out like, hey, you’re opening all my emails, so you can do it a different way. If you don’t want to go that direct, you can just be like, hey, John, how are things going?

Just a random reach out. They might be ready to engage at that point and I would take it to the manual level because the reason I like manual and that kind of process is because I want to play around with the process manually before I automate it. It’s not automated because, oh, after 11 emails get opened, I send a message to this person.

You don’t even know if that works, right? You don’t even know if that’s an effective strategy. What we do know is effective is sending regular newsletters, nurturing people with content, those kinds of things. But then it’s, well, when do I reach out and do this manual touch point? Oh, it’s after five interactions.

Okay, boom. Then you can automate after you’ve done it with 50 or 20 clients, customers, leads, or whatever. Ultimately, the whole reason why this works is because people are skeptical now more than ever. I think you probably are that way. I’m a little bit that way. Everybody’s a little bit that way now more than they ever have been.

So if you can show you are a real human who’s invested in your customer, it will go a long way. So implementing unconventional marketing strategies like guerrilla marketing is the definition of trying harder when it comes to marketing with your business. Like literally, it’s trying harder. It’s thinking outside the box.

It’s putting in more time. It’s being unconventional. You have to think outside the box. You have to put in more time and try harder than you ever have before, but it will go a long way.