It’s often said that competition is good for business, as it pushes you to be your best. Think Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi and Visa vs. MasterCard.
Part of the fun of rivalry is stealing customers from your rivals, and you can do this with the help of guerrilla advertising.
So let’s look at five guerrilla marketing strategies you can use on Facebook to get in front of your competitors’ customers and turn them into your customers. Cue evil laughter.
1. Target your competitors’ fans
There’s never been a more fertile hunting ground for picking off competitors’ fans than Facebook ads. And currently, there are no legal implications of targeting users who express interests in other companies’ brands.
This won’t last forever, so you should do it while you can.
Why do you want to target your competitor’s customers and fans?
It stands to reason that people showing an interest in your competitor’s product or service may well be interested in yours too – especially if you offer it at a lower price or with an added value item.
2. Target users that hate your competitors
We all love moaning on Facebook, but you can use this to your advantage. Negativity comments towards your competitors’ brands are marketing gold dust for you for two reasons.
Firstly, those unhappy customers were once interested in your competitors products – it was their bad experience with the brand that pushed them away.
Secondly, these unhappy customers may well be in the market for an alternative, which you are no doubt only too happy to offer up. For example, Spotify could target users who like the fan page “iTunes sucks”.
3. Occupation
Another great guerrilla marketing Facebook tactic is to ask yourself “what are the occupations and places of employment of my target audience?” Targeting occupations can be an extremely potent strategy, because after family, your profession is one of the most powerful components of your identity.
If you look at Facebook’s PPC targeting girth, they boast over 800 million users worldwide, which equates to almost one in seven people on earth.
It’s therefore reasonable to assume that business people use Facebook at sometime in their daily cycle. If you sell specialised goods to large manufacturing companies, you could target users with the job titles, “procurement manager” or “purchasing manager”.
If you’re an independent coffee shop located next to a well known business, you could target your ads to these professionals as they are your target customers.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
