Guerrilla Marketing for Startups

When you’re Bootstrapping, you have to think differently.

from the book “Guerrilla Marketing” 2/10 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

When you run your own Business – be it Web or otherwise – it is a general rule that you need two things to accomplish any particular task, Money & Time. A lot of one means you need less of the other. If you had a lot of CA$H, you can just pay someone to do the work, whereas if you’re broke with all the time in the world, well…then you get creative.

For Publicity & Traffic generation, a lot of money means you can advertise, sponsor & pretty much buy your way to celebrityship (or infamy). If on the other hand – like most startups – you are short on money or just plain stingy, then you’ll need to take a different tack, for this situation you’ll need a bit of Guerilla Marketing. So before you run out to the local zoo armed with placards and bananas, let’s do a bit of definition work.

Guerilla Marketing is a term coined by author Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1982 book of the same name, and it simply means “unconventional marketing & promotional activity on a shoestring budget”. The name comes from guerilla warfare not the gorilla ape, and is thus named because it’s a technique that is especially powerful in the hands of a small, agile business.

Without Big Bucks, your primary tools & assets will be Time & Creativity. Rather than competing, you will need to cooperate and leverage off others to strengthen your own position. Instead of buying your way in, you will need to create “value” for people in unconventional ways. In every case, you will also mix up many different strategies to create your plan. Although every business & marketing situation will call for different & creeative strategies, here are some examples to get you thinking:

Using a feature of your Product to get publicity for its innovation or excellence

(Continued in Premium Content)