Use Guerrilla Marketing Ideas to Promote Your REI Efforts

A few years ago, the term “guerrilla marketing” wasn’t even part of the English language. Today, most REI professionals have at least heard of it, if they’re not familiar with the concept or how it works.

According to Wikipedia, “Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy in which low-cost unconventional means are utilized, often in a localized fashion or large network of individual cells, to convey or promote a product or an idea.” In other words, guerrilla marketing, made popular by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book of the same name, consists of innovative marketing ideas that cost little in terms of cash, but do require creativity and an attempt to engage your target customers.

Guerrilla marketing involves free giveaways, PR stunts, revolving truck signs and many other creatively original concepts that work to attract your customer’s attention and interest. Guerrilla marketing is not specifically focused on immediate sales, but instead is aimed at driving traffic and building brand recognition.

One such guerrilla marketing idea used by a dentist involved placing chattering plastic teeth around town within a certain distance from his practice and including a card with the dentist’s address and contact information. After this campaign, sales and patient retention increased dramatically for this local practitioner, who still sees many of the same patients today.

Other guerrilla marketing strategies that have worked exceedingly well include flash mobs, those seemingly random events that practically give you goose bumps when you watch one that’s well choreographed. T-Mobile, for instance, created a fun, exciting flash mob advertisement filled with dancers of all ages, sizes and styles who demonstrated their moves to a variety of tunes from hip hop to Strauss. The video, produced in 2009, still garners a tremendous amount of interest, and is still being seen by people the world over on YouTube today.

Watching the video, you’d think its only purpose was for fun and entertainment… until the end, where the T-Mobile logo comes online. Then you recognize this brilliant advertisement for what it is. And if you’re a self-employed REI professional, you begin to dream of creating something of your own that’s even half as effective.

That’s the genius of guerrilla marketing. You don’t have to be a communications giant or Fortune 500 company to use such imaginative and effective advertising ideas for your business. Learn to pick up on the ingenuity of others and adapt their ideas to meet your own needs while at the same time continually looking for ways to come up with your own, truly original campaigns.

Who knows… what you come up with might become just as popular as Levinson’s catch-phrase or this oft-watched online video created by T-Mobile.