5 takes on Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing is fantastic type of marketing, the whole idea is about creating creative and unorthodox content - squared. I heard the we each day is exposed to 3.000 marketing impressions or interruptions.

Guerilla sets itself apart because it is unorthodox, customers feels refreshed and like something new and appealing. You want to use the element of surprise!

The beauty of this concept, it that you can be done with little or no budget, even though it can in the big numbers two. Some of the biggest brands is using this concepts, ever heard about the happiness campaigns by Coca Cola, if not this this youtube clip:

5 inspirational ideas anyone can do

Elementary

There is some really elementary things you should do, if you do not already have this in gear.

• Use T-shirts

Buy some T-shirts and have them printed with your company name, logo or statement. Wear the shirts your self and spread them around your community to people who will wear them. There is a walking billboard.

• Decorate your vehicles

Either decorate your vehicles with your company name and logo or consider wrap the entire vehicle for maximum visibility. The last options costs less than you think.

• Use flyers

Print flyers and leave them in strategic places, where ever you target group is, or swap flyers with other businesses in your community.

Business cards

You probably have a business card, likely a regular white card with your name, title, company logo and so forth. Why not make it fun, make it stand out.

Change the shape, make it relate to your company, to your product, use colors, statements, information, make sure it stands out.

Need inspiration to get started, check this link: http://www.quicksprout.com/2008/09/20/creative-business-cards-that-make-you-look-twice/

Free

Everybody like to get something for free. Have some t-shirts, cups, pens made with your company logo, website or a statement. Make sure it stands our.

The great thing about free, it people really like it, the bring it home and they use it!

Hang Apples (coupons) on trees

Here is a creative idea. In you local neighborhood is there some high traffic areas, and there is trees. Hang coupons on the tree, like they were apples for people to pick, ensure you use a eco friendly material. Check out the example below:

Contests

Have a competition is a classic, it always works. People love to participate in contests where they can win a prize. Think about a theme / reason for the competition:

• Company birthday
• Holliday
• come up with something relevant

Consider the prize you want to give a way, a good advice is not to be cheap. Buy / get something you would like to win your self. Sometimes you can partner up with some other company who wants to spread their new product.

Advertise your competition to draw attention, ask people to come in to your store to get traffic and ask people to participate. Consider a side effect, get people to sign up for your newsletter.

When you draw the winners, make sure to tell the story. The story might be strong enough to get press coverage.

Partner up

Forming a partnership is fantastic, because you can get help from another company brand. There are many directions to consider, here is a example:

Say you own a furniture store. Then team up with a business that shares the same target group as you, like a clothing store. Ask the clothing store to have a fashion show in your showroom. Invite guests using both companies mailings lists and tell people this is a exclusive event, and the have to make reservations.

Put together a goodie bag with samples for your suppliers.

Not take it up a notch, arrange food with a local restaurant. Let the restaurant sample food at the event, they will get their name out, and you will food and drinks. Moreover, will the probably advertise the event in their restaurant.

Again if done right, invite the press or help them with pictures and a press release.

What to you gain, because your sales will be limited at this event. You will get your name out, your showroom will be packed with potential future customers and the will use word of mouth, when they tell about the great experience they had last night. What is your spend, not much except your time and effort.

5 step guide to Partner Advertising

If you want to elevate and grow your business, you should consider partner advertising. This type of advertising is quite simple and you with relative little work get started and best of everything, very inexpensive. Below will you find a 5 step guide to get started and some real life examples for inspiration?

1. Find out which values your business represents.

• Who are your customers? (Which demographic profile do they have and where to they live)  
• Why do customers shop with you?
• Why do they like about your product?

If you do not know this already, you should ask your customers. There are some simple yet great free survey tools, which can use to learn about what other people think of your business.

2. Start scouting for potential companies, you should look for companies which shares your:

• Brand values
• Customer target group
• Strategic targets

Say you are the lucky owner of a furniture store; you should probably look for businesses that are in the interior business. Such related businesses could sell paint, kitchens, lighting, flooring or maybe interior design consultants.

3. Consider how this company, can help your business and how to can help them. You need to think of this as a two-way deal, it has to work for both of you. You are in the market to increase your turnover, by getting more traffic and / or increasing basket size. There is a number of activities to consider, below is some examples:
• Create a referral program
• Use each other mailing lists
• Is co-branding an option
• Advertise a free sample
• Advertise the experience / consultancy of the other business
• Consider an in-shop display

4. Before you approach another company, work on your pitch, practice your story. You can use the below point, when you work on your pitch.
• Prepare a one-pager summary of the concept
• Highlight this can be done with no budget or a shoe string budget
• Do not oversell this. It will not grow the turnover from 100 to 100.000.000
• Be fact based. Share insight about your company, like displaying who your customers are to show how the two businesses match each other.
• Respect a concept like this takes time to implement and probably a couple of swings before perfected.
• Accept you are not the smartest guy in the room, be humble yet confident.

5. When you meet, ensure you act professional through the entire meeting, not just during the pitch. Show your passion.

Which partner advertising tactics to use?

When you have decided on partner marketing, is there a number of tactics you can choose from. Below are there a few examples of what these tactics are and how they work:

Referral program

The good old word of mouth method is still valid and fantastic. In a world where you as an individual are exposed to thousands of marketing impressions each day, do you as a marketer have to be very good to make your impressions last with your targets?

A good method is establishing referral program, where you lead your customers to your partners business and the other way around. It is simplest format do you simply advise your customer to go to that particular business.

You can decide with your partner how you compensate each other, do you charge back per customer or do simply trade leads.

Mailing lists

Do you have a mailing list? If not you should get one. When you have what you can discuss with your partner how you can benefit from utilizing each other’s list.

I will advise you to advertise your marketing partners products in you newsletter, write a positive recommendation about the product. Hopefully is your newsletter digital, if not get it fixed, then you can lead traffic directly into your partners website or e-shop. Or maybe you advertise the customer can pick-up a coupon or sample at your store? There is a lot of option, consider what is best for your business.

Co-branding

This format is often used by major companies where they partner up and combine their brands to create a very attractive product. So is this solely for major brands? Nope!

Get some inspiration from my local McDonalds, they partner up with the local sport team. This means on game day all McDonalds is wearing the team jersey, moreover can you purchase a meal, where McDonalds donates an amount to the sports team as a sponsorship.

This is cleaver, because both McDonalds and the sports team benefit from this. McDonalds wins on the image part, where they cultivate their local offset, get awareness and visibility in the arena. The sports team gets a sponsorship (cash), awareness and publicity.

If you translate this to your business, you can maybe probably go very local with this. Engage with a local soccer or hockey team, market one of your products as a “hockey team product” and donate a x to the team and wear jerseys in your store and let the hockey team advertise your product in the media channels (email, newsletter, arena)

What happens if you cross two channels? Say you are a florist and you partner up with a local sports team or charity.

1. Brand a bouquet of flowers with the colors of the sports team or charity
2. Each party promote the product in the email channel
3. You get awareness and trial
4. You donate an agreed portion of your turnover to the team or charity
5. You or the charity agree on a press release which the team or charity submits to the local media

I have no doubt, that this works. You get more customers to your store with very little cost. Your biggest investment is time!

15 Fantastic quotes by David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy is a legend within the advertising business, he was brilliant creative, admired for his style and management technique which lifted the advertising business.

Through his fantastic career, Mr Ogilvy created some ground breaking campaigns, which today can be studied in text books all over the world.

I strongly encourage everybody who works with sales and marketing, would benefit from reading the fantastic and timeless book, Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy.

Besides the outstanding campaigns, is Mr Ogilvy acknowledged for his management style and writing. He made several very interesting statements, which today still is spectacular and worth some consideration for entrepreneurs, business owners and sales and marketing executives.

1. “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”
2. “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.”
3. “Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.”
4. “Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.”
5. “Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.”
6. “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
7. “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”
8. “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.”
9. “Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?”
10. “Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.”
11. “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”
12. “It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read.”
13. “I don’t know the rules of grammar … If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”
14. “Consumers [decide] to buy or not to buy [based on] the content of your advertising, not its form.”
15. “Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients”

I hope you find these quotes interesting and useful. Keep them in the back of your mind, they will come in handy when you are looking to recruite (quote 2), motivate (quote 1), implement tactics (quote 7) or consider strategy (quote 5).

If you search the web, who can find much related information, which is worth spending some time on.

Enjoy!

5 Step Guide to Public Relations

Public relations is a fantastic type of communication, it can be super efficient and inexpensive at the same time. Just have to it right.... Before you through your self into the world of public relations, you should do some research and studying. Below is a simple 5 step guide to master public relations.

1)  Understand the media

First find out, which media (newspapers, magazines and other publication) shares the same target audience with your company. You can get a lot of help from searching online,please use the library and read the fantastic book; The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , by Malcolm Gladwell.

Once you know which medias you would like to work with, find out how the media is working. Find out who the reporters is and how they work.

• What do the reporters specialize in?
• What stories have the done?
• Other significant info, like who have the interviewed?

Document your research in a document, which you have easy access to. You should update the document, you will get valuable information from reading the media, be on the lookout for journalists switching jobs.

There is a short-cut. There is portals web sites, where you upload your story and journalists downloads stories. One of the most popular is call Help a Reporter out or HARO.

2) How to spin your story

Now you need to start thinking about the journalist, and how he or she will bring your story.  You probably have twist your story in order to match it with the journalists angel.

• Why should a journalist bring your story*
• How can a journalist benefit from your story
• Evaluate if you can contribute to any trending stories**

* You can setup a daily scan about articles which is relevant to your company, such as your competitors and industry news. You can use Google Alerts to be informed

** Say there is a story about the media, which relates to your business. You could contact media and informed them that your product can help / assist / prevent the problem, like you can offer your technical assistance to help the journalist. Your service provider could be Google Trends

Before you do so, make sure your have written a document with the key points your are interested sharing with the media and consider different angels, this will help the journalist. When you contact the journalist, you should be confident, fact based and accurate in your dialog.

3) Approaching journalists

When you are sure about your content, and have done the preparations, you are ready to approach the journalists. These are the typical format you send:

• Press releases
• Relevant stories
• Attach pictures, graphics, charts +

When you write your press release, make sure you are direct and fact-based. Avoid spelling errors and grammar, like you should limit industry lingo. Keep in mind who the audience is, and write to the audience.

A good advise is to contact the pitched journalist and follow up, be brief when you ask about the opinion on your story. Likewise could you ask if the is an interest in receiving other relevant stories from you.

4) Fieldwork

You have an interest in positioning yourself as an expert within your line of business. Speaking at different event can help you achieve the position.

Consider which relevant events there in your community:

• Chamber of commerce
• Business networks
• Organizations
• Online communities
• Institutions of education

Journalists get a lot of stories from such event, and is likely to interesting in getting more details about your story at the event. Moreover, will this spead by word of mouth, that you are an expert within your line of business.

If you are in a tech or trendy industry you benefit from using social media.

A nice bonus will this also count as advertising, that drives traffic and builds network.

5) It is a long term commitment

When you have said A to public relations you also have to say B. It can take a while before you brake the ice and your stories a brough and published by the press.

Keep reminding the press you are out there, write press releases:

• About a new product
• About success stories with customers
• About new hires you have done
• Keep reminding the press, what your company does

In addition, could you keep your own blog, where you post your news when it is hot. Writing a blog gives you some other benefits, such as google rank, which everybody like.