Guerrilla Marketing has always been something that I’ve had loads of respect for. I just really like to see people thinking outside of the box and marketing with unconventional methods. For me, the best guerrilla marketing methods are the ones with the lowest cost and with the most targeted audience. I’ve tried a lot of different guerrilla marketing tactics and I’ve seen a lot of guerrilla marketing tactics.
I have one particular one that I loved and will always remember.
While attending college at Iowa State University I stopped in at “The Hub” one day. The Hub was just a small building that was full of vending machines and had a lot of tables people could use to eat lunch or study. A number of the vending machines are like the ones pictured to the right. The kind where you hit the arrows and the machine rotates the display. Once an item you wish to purchase is visible you put in the letter and number and open the door.
Those machines, for some reason, always had apples in them. The apples were only 25 cents and only a few of them would sell. As I was rotating the display I noticed this little paper stand up advertisement that someone had placed into one of the containers. It was an advertisement for a local website that allowed you to order food online from a number of the restaurants in the area. You could easily read it and it was colored to get your attention. Since nobody would open up that window just to purchase an advertisement, it stayed until the machine was restocked. That means anyone who was hungry on campus that browsed that vending machine would see that advertisement. I don’t know how effective that was for them as far as sales, but the ad sure was memorable for me. I stopped by those machines more times than I can count and there were frequently ads placed in them. I even started doing it myself because it felt like a waste to purchase something from the machine and then just leave the slot empty. Take an apple, leave an advertisement.
That’s just one example. Those ads were targeted, unexpected, and memorable. To me that’s what guerrilla marketing is all about.
Here are some of my favorite guerrilla marketing methods:
- Fake money that is really an advertisement placed in the trays at ATM machines.
- Stick a couple of your business cards into those SkyMall magazines anytime you take a flight.
- Sticking your fliers into free newspaper stands around the city.
- Calling up talk radio stations and mentioning your site, even if its to comment on an unrelated topic.
- Have shirts made with your URL and give them away on college campuses. College students wont turn down a free shirt.
- Sidewalk chalk your URL all over a college campus.
- LED Light characters placed around the city of Boston (Not Recommended)
All you have to do is use your imagination. In a future post I’m going to list guerrilla marketing ideas specifically for airports. If you have any guerrilla marketing ideas you would like to share, please leave them in the comments.