1. Be Relevant
Your audience is fickle. They are bombarded all the time - advertisements, billboards, radio, newspaper. Make your contact with them relevant to them, and you will win their heart. Flyer Distribution, Postering, Spokesmodels, Events, these are all great ways to communicate to your target audience, but YOU MUST BE RELEVANT. Promoting Coach Handbags at a Biker Convention is NOT RELEVANT. Promoting Retirement Accounts to teenagers is NOT RELEVANT. Think about your audience, get inside their heads. Think about what they like, and then you’ve got them.
2. Be Where Your Audience Is
An event may be a high-traffic location, but the traffic may be all wrong. Sometimes the location looks good on paper, but when your street team arrives they realize it’s the wrong crowd. Your target audience has predictable behaviors, predictable patterns. If you understand your audience, understand their buying habits, understand where they like to be, you will have confidence that you guerrilla efforts will get in your audience’s hands.
3. Call to Action
Street Marketing, Guerrilla Marketing, it is difficult to measure CPM on a campaign that involves these elements. How do you know you are winning the good fight? Present your target audience with a hook, involve them in the game, and then you can track how they respond. Whether flyers, posters, bar promotions, sampling programs, even guerrilla wall projections, make your audience move, and you will be able to track the success or failure of the initiative. Websites, Scratch & Wins, Photo Ops that drive your target to a Branded Photo Page, Prize Giveaways, Call in & Win programs - All of these approaches make your audience move, and that movement can be measured.
4. Results – Show Your Work!
Everyone has a boss they want to impress! When it comes to non-traditional marketing campaigns, results can be tricky to measure, so get as much evidence of your work as possible. If you were buying advertising, you would show your boss/client the great ad that you purchase in LUCKY magazine. With non-traditional, or street, or guerrilla marketing, you can still show them how cool you are. Get photos! Get event reports! Hire a videographer or a professional photographer. Do what it takes to make sure that your initiatives are very well documented. If you take this step, you will be covered, even if the program isn’t as effective as initially planned.
(Important note: When it comes to reporting, make sure that what you have in mind regarding reporting is well communicated to your team. A photo from a cellphone is technically an event photo, but it is not going to show well in a presentation to the board of directors. Be clear in what you are expecting and you have a much higher likelihood of not being disappointed by the results you are provided).
5. Package – Make it Creative
How do you break through to your target demographic? Packaging has a lot to do with things. Whether your teams are dressed in leotards instead of khaki, or you are giving them branded fruit instead of flyers, think about what will shake your target from the rigors of their daily pattern enough to see what you are showing them. Singing telegrams, or flyer distribution on roller-skates, Segway Marketing, or BASE Jumping from buildings – make a stir and the window of impression will open long enough for your point to hit home.
6. Leave it to the Professionals
Don’t try to do it alone. Leave it to the professionals. We all see those commercials where there is a warning that says “These Are Trained Professionals. Do Not Attempt to Try This on your Own.” The same is true with street marketing, guerrilla marketing and non-traditional marketing. The professionals know what they are doing. (Full disclosure – I work for Attack! Marketing, attackmarketing.net. We are a nation-wide promotion staffing firm. We believe we are the best in promo staffing, but there are many options to choose from). Pick a company that you can work with, that provides solutions to the things that are important to you, and that makes your life easier, in the short and long term.
Not all programs go 100% perfectly. In fact, it is the wise man that anticipates issues and makes plans to counter-act the issues, rather than believing everything will go perfectly, only to be disappointed because they have no back-up plans.
By using a professional street marketing agency, you can get all the resources you need, and if anything is not as you intended, they will fix it for you. A good promotional agency will have contingency plans to account for the ‘what ifs’ of a campaign, they will have back-ups, and a 24-hour support line. Plus, even though you may think you can do it alone, with the help of a source like craigslist, do you really want to add Hiring Personnel or Firing Personnel to your list tasks and responsibilities. Stick to what you do best, and let the professionals make your life easy, instead of letting a marketing and promotional campaign make your life hell.
7. Have a Great Team
The difference between an excellent promotional campaign and a rotten one can be determined by the street team you have on the ground. This is not an area where you want to skimp. You can have the very best materials, the very best call to action, and you could have anticipated your target demographic so well that you are at the perfect event, but without a A+ Team (of Managers, Staffers, Samplers, Spokesmodels, Emcees or Costumed Characters) to attack at will, you are at risk. Look for Enthusiasm, Professionalism, Ingenuity, Self-Starters, and Experience. Attractiveness is always a plus, and with some programs a major necessity, but that should not replace any of the above qualities and remember you will always get more and better results from someone who is truly excited that they were picked to be on the project rather than someone who felt it was your privilege to have them there.
8. Hit em @ all Levels
The best defense is a good offense, and the best offense is one that attacks from all sides. Do not put all your street marketing eggs in one basket. Hit em @ all levels. This means diversify how your consumer is targeted, and where. Be at as many of the places your consumer is, and interact with them in as many different & compelling ways as your budget allows. Marketing 101 tells you that it takes 7-10 times of a consumer to see your product/name before the messaging is effective.
A good street-level marketing campaign should include at least 3-5 of the following street components: flyer distribution, product sampling, strategic retail store drops, wild postings, permission-based postering, sidewalk stencils, guerrilla projections, Segway marketing, roach baiting, branded pizza boxes/coffee sleeves, publicity stunts.
9. Good Timing
Understanding the question of WHEN is very important. If you are promoting a nightclub, flyer distribution during the day is not going to be as effective as hitting your target at night. If you are doing a coffee promotion, cruising the entertainment district in the evening may not be as effective as hitting commuters on their way to work in the morning.
Think about your product. Think about your target audience. Knowing their behavior will allow you to know the WHEN that makes your campaign a WOW.
10. Twist the Norm
Be unexpected! Be shocking! Make the public look. If you have a great to-market approach, your audience will have no choice but to look, listen and absorb. Shake it up. If you are promoting a movie, pass out popcorn. If you are doing a tradeshow for dental professionals, give the public floss. For every great promotion that hits the mark on timing, relevance, call to action, etc., taking a moment to anticipate what the public will expect and twisting it ever so slightly will catch their eye, make them remember it and compel them to share the experience with others. That is true viral marketing, true guerrilla marketing – major impact from minor cost due to creativity and solid execution.
Promoting Coach Handbags at a Biker Convention is NOT RELEVANT
While at first glance this would appear to be common sense (and funny), folks might do well to find out whether in thhis (and similar) instances, there may be wives left at the hotel to whom Coach bags *can* be marketed, in which case, a Coach-sponsored event at the hotel might be a good idea.
IOW, think of the wives who mightta come along for the trip but who aren't attending the convention themselves. Maybe your product's right for *them*. They've gotta lotta time to kill while Biker Boy is off polishing his rice rocket, so maybe they can use that time buying stuff.
(I'm thinking of all the wives who tagged along to all the trade shows I ever worked, and who sat around all day waiting for and hoping their husbands'd be done and take 'em to dinner or something. Someone smart woulda put together a hospitality room for 'em and let companies offer 'em, say, manicures, foot baths, hair cuts, etc.)
Nice article and some very good points.
Call to action is the aspect I am concentrating on most at the moment. It can be very difficult writing copy and offering something small and simple that grabs your visitor when you can never fully see your site trhough the eyes of them. You are always on your own side, no matter what.
However, as Aaron Wall put it, the simple things like refreshing the potential customers memory about how secure your site is or that you protect privacy can also work wonders.
you can never fully see your site trhough the eyes of them. You are always on your own side
That's what user testing is for. Find anyone and everyone you can to look at your page and see whether they "get" what your page is for, what it wants them to do, what it's offering them, what its value is, then adjust, tweak, add, remove, clarify, re-think. You can't look at your page and tell whether it's effective because you're not your intended audience (you can understand your page juuuuuust fine!), so you need to test it out on real people.
Boy, do you ever learn a lot doing user testing. (The first thing you learn, sadly, is that you give people too much credit. Their reading and comprehension skills ought not have gotten them a diploma, so you hafta go back in and replace lotsa stuff with synonyms that twelve-year-olds can comprehend.)
Glad the article was well received. It is true that some of the points seem a bit obvious, but that is more of an indication of their effectiveness than anything else.
Guerrilla Marketing, Field Marketing, Non-Traditional Marketing - the key to all of these elements is creating a connection with your audience that is less overt, and appears more to come from a trusted source, than from a marketing machine. If the target feels as if they found you, not you finding them, then it is their dirty little secret, that they can dole out to firends and colleagues as a measure of cool.
Everyone loves to recommend things. When you think about how you are connecting with your target demographic, think about where they are, and how they see things - if you can then place your relevant message at the cross roads of where they are and where they are going, they will 'find' it and they will evangelize it.
Last point, marketing tells us that it takes as many as 7 interactions with your brand/product before you can break through with your target... If you are committed to your product/service, be committed to communicating that to your target demographic, whether that be youth marketing, gamers, bloggers, through guerrilla projections, or street teams, or live performances, or something we have not even thought about.
If I can be of assistance, I would love to help. Drop me a note, or give me a call.
Well, some smart race directors, especially at ultra-marathon races (50km and above), do provide events for the waiting crowd. Usually to keep them warm (and entertained ).
It is so much fun to uncover hidden markets in places where you don't expect to find them, eh?
Thanks for sharing Christian. Traffic Generation is a broad strategy.
I've only one tip for others on article writing. If your content is irrelevant the reader and does not pose as a good content then it would immediately degrade your credibility.
So, always put content as a first before anything else.
I once did some work for a company that hired a pr company called "Guerrilla". They painted a load of pigeons in the company colours in the town centre - caused a real stir all over the local papers. Despite some pissed off animal activists the promotion was a great success! Thinking a bit more about it, the target audience was young adults and so the off-the-wall, somewhat controversial approach was enough to make the right connections.
Top 10 Guerrilla Marketing Tips
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