Marketing MadEZ: Social Media : Boost for Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing is an expression used to describe a kind of low cost and unconventional marketing strategy. Initially the idea behind it was this strategy will be used by small companies, with low marketing budget, but with great ideas, to compete against big groups. But the Social Media took this advertising strategy to another level.

At the origin , the Guerrilla Marketing was often used to promote small businesses at a local scale. For example, if you wanted to promote your business in your town, some street art /reverse graffiti will have a very positive effect as a matter of promotion, without spending as much as a big group spends for billboards and TV ads.

The idea is very close to the guerrilla warfare, which is usually a small group of people with low funds fighting against a regular army. You have to attack quick, locally and without being caught. Let's take an example:

Vueling, a young Barcelona based airline company. They are positioning themselves as low cost airline, which is a very competitive market in Europe and you have to fight against national companies (like Iberia) and other low cost actors on the market (Ryanair and Easyjet). Instead of facing directly the competitors on traditional media, they chose Guerrilla Marketing to promote their business. The first idea was to stick everywhere in the city of Barcelona sticker representing the logo of Vueling, the cloud. But on the form of a smiley face which gave to any object in town a friendly face. Then they started giving ice creams in the street during the summer, with their logo on the cone, with their slogan " hot summer,fresh ideas".

But with the rise of Social Media, Guerrilla Marketing lost its local aspect, and now is used by big companies to reach a viral state of promotion. To go viral means people will share your content, and it will transmit from user to user, like a virus. This is the Holy Grail for any marketer right now: to go viral. Because it means that the product is promoted by the customers themselves and the leads are organic. It is efficient and free. But it is not as easy as it seems. On Social Media, direct promotion can be very bad for your business because you will destroy the interest of your audience (except some cases where the audience is following any new product from your business, such as Apple for example). So the idea here is to social advertising without social advertising. And the solution is Guerrilla Marketing.

This strategy used in the past to promote locally small businesses is now the best way to create a buzz online for big companies on social media. This magic is possible because of the emotional factor of Guerrilla Marketing. it is always an humorous and clever way of advertising, which strikes the mind of the customer and make him (or her) think: "Oh this is cool", "This is nice", "That is smart". And people will share this content because it talks to their feelings. Your content goes viral this way. It is now even more efficient that people can share their content on "meme" websites and image host like Imgur or 9gag, very popular nowadays to share funny and clever content that will be later shared on Social Media. And this strategy that was once used by small businesses is now taken over by big companies because of its huge impact. It is advertising without looking like it, which if we transfer that in military terms, will be the definition of Guerrilla...

Take it EZ and enjoy below some good examples of Guerrilla Marketing: