Guerilla marketing is not zero budget marketing.

A recent local workshop on guerilla marketing prompted me to scrutinize my own thinking about what guerilla marketing is and what benefit it provides to marketers. As I sat in the audience and listened to the presenter give examples of successful guerilla marketing project and the audience ooo’ing and aaa’ing about wonderfully creative sparks being presented, I just though “how much of this is about tactical solutions and how much is actually serving the overall strategy?”

Let’s get back to the basics people. Guerilla marketing is not about creating a buzz with zero budgets. It is certainly not about getting media attention for free, positive or negative. It is not about amateurishly executed activities to get people talking. It is about brand engagement, it is about energizing a communication campaign, it is about relevancy to your audience and it is about off the beaten path hands on solutions designed to get your target audience connect with your brand.

One of the essentials of any successful guerilla tactics is that the buzz generated should serve the overall brand campaign and add an element of excitement that will enhance the target audience’s engagement with that brand. The concept has to somehow compliment the brand equity. If your brand stands for safety, the guerilla campaign has to reinforce the concept of safety.

Another essential element has to be that your campaign has to be measurable. What was your campaign objective? Did you just want the media to pick up the story or did you want actual conversions or leads? How many people made the connection that it was your brand? Was the return worth your efforts? Was the guerrilla tactic able to persuade people to take some sort of action? These are the questions your agency can help you determine before creating a guerilla campaign.

I guess the word of wisdom here is that don’t do it on your own and don’t do it because you don’t have a big marketing budget. Talk to your advertising agency. Agencies love to have our clients ask us for guerilla marketing ideas. This type of request gets us all pumped up and our creative juices start flowing. Your ad agency team has the discipline to come up with on-strategy creative ideas that will totally energize your brand. Just don’t say “I want to do something guerilla because we don’t have any marketing budget this year.” That is not how guerilla marketing works.

Guerilla marketing is a low cost brand engagement tactic but it has to be on strategy and carefully executed to bring in the best business results for your brand. The best agencies that come up with brand building guerilla marketing ideas are the ones that think on strategy but also possess sharp, compelling and kick-ass creative mojo.