Guerrilla Marketing #2
Guerrilla Marketing for Startups
from the book “Guerrilla Marketing” 2/10 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz
Using a Feature of your Product to get Publicity for its innovation or excellence
When it came time to revamp the website for the design agency “Good Creative” where I work, we thought long and hard about how to best use the design to market the site. Since CSS design Blogs are so popular, we built the site using lovely, clean, table-less markup. While this has other, obvious benefits, it also led to the site being listed in numerous CSS portals and generated thousands of visitors. Of course many of these visits were from designers coming no doubt, to steal our ideas! But mixed in were many, many leads, and it cost nothing but a bit of extra time & care to make sure the design was done right.
Giving a little something for nothing. There’s nothing that gets people interested quite like the idea of getting something for free. A common application of this idea is to give away a “Free Trial or a no-cost Subscription, thus lowering the so-called ‘barrier to entry’ – the initial time and cost it takes a user to adopt or use your product. While a Free Trial is a great thing to do however, it’s hardly Guerilla Marketing.
A more inventive idea is to truly “give something away” Valuable. Take for example company 37 Signal.com, who gave away an entire framework in Ruby-on-Rails producing no direct, obvious profits, but creating huge reserves of public goodwill, a large cache of dedicated supporters and a damn lot of publicity – which is priceless. Still we don’t all have frameworks to give away, at least I don’t.
Another Example of something a little less grand, when Internet Explorer began having the “Click to activate” issue with Flash movies, the portal Kirupa.com, let designers type in their Flash movie clip name & details, then in return, it generated some JavaScript. Not a particularly hard feat to accomplish, but for their target market it was very useful. As a result a legion of tech-shy designers would continually return to the site to use this tool giving Kirupa ample opportunity to entice them to use the site.
(Continued on Premium Content)