Guerrilla Marketing Tips
Penny Pinching Guerrilla Advertising for Home-Based Businesses
Learn how to market your home-based business on a lean budget. Fast facts on guerrilla marketing to help new and current entrepreneurs grow their image and sales.
Odds are, if you have opened a home-based business, you are most likely selling a product or service. Hopefully you’ve also realized that the sales process begins with getting the word out about your firm. Even if you are a solopreneur without a support staff, you can market your firm with gusto by putting into play some creative guerrilla marketing initiatives.
Wisdom from the Head GuerrillaAccording to Jay Conrad Levinson, the marketing guru who coined the phrase (and wrote the book, Guerrilla Marketing) "guerrilla marketing is a body of unconventional ways of pursuing conventional goals. It is a proven method of achieving profits with minimum money."
In his Guerrilla Marketing Minute called Avoiding Advertising Mistakes, Levinson says that true guerrilla marketers know 25 reasons why advertising campaigns falter or fail, the top five being:
- Premature abandonment
- Silly positioning
- Failure to focus
- Starting without a plan
- Using the wrong media for the right audience
So what can this information do to help your home-based business?? LOTS!
Three Secrets to Successful Marketing
Before you can appreciate the power of guerrilla marketing, you need to fully understand why marketing is so important to the fiscal health of your firm. Think of it this way: if no one knows who you are or what you are trying to sell, it will be difficult if not impossible to run a profitable business. So here is the first secret of running a lucrative business: marketing is what drives sales to your door. Any successful company understands the VALUE of marketing.
The second secret: really successful firms use several different kinds of mediums to engage their target markets (think direct mail, online advertising, radio, etc.).
Marketing Secret Number Three: Wildly successful organizations have taken the time to understand their respective end consumers. Think about it. If you haven’t done your homework on this one you’ll waste tons of time and money doing stuff that won’t work. If you understand WHO you are trying to reach and WHERE you can find them, you are leagues ahead of most of your competition. If you know this information you can then get the message right (where LOTS of newbies fail). You can also pick the perfect venues to engage, not lukewarm, but red hot prospects which are in the market to buy what you are selling! A slam dunk under any circumstances.
Greatest Guerrilla Options
If you’ve got tons of money to fund your strategic marketing plan, click away at will. If you run a lean outfit, and want amazing results with minimal investment, read on. Here are the top three cost-effective guerrilla tactics you can use, to grow your sales.
- Networking - an oldie by goodie! Make it your business to get to at least one function a week. You’ll have no trouble finding a wealth of business groups, trade associations or women-focused choices. Go online to your Chamber of Commerce, Google “Business Networking Groups” and you’ll have options galore!
- The World Wide Web. This is by far one of the cheapest guerrilla options out there, with different methods of getting the word out about your firm, your expertise and your services. Web-based guerrilla advertising platforms include your website, e/mail, e-newsletters, cross linking, taking an online ad, Pay Per Click advertising (using keywords), blogging, podcasting and video clips.
- Direct Mail. Even with all the noise out there, direct mail, when done right, is the honey of guerrilla advertising and sales tools! The key to its success does not rely on large quantities, but quality. Great direct mail campaigns have the following in order: the message (it must be compelling); the design (don’t cheap out, have it professionally designed using your unique logo, also professionally designed); the timing; the pre-qualified prospects (yes, you need to make sure the recipients actually buy what you are selling); the offer (give them something - a discount, a free report, etc.); and the deadline (studies show that 60 days works best.)
So what are you waiting for? Get your guerrilla marketing engine going and start reaping the returns you want!
