Like guerrilla soldiers, forced to use limited resources to fight mightier opponents on the battlefield, guerrilla marketers rely on strategic strikes to gain a foothold in the marketplace, and the same goes for small businesses.
It’s a rare small business that has a large marketing budget. Typically, a small business owner has to deal with the challenges of bare bones, bootstrapped marketing for quite a while before there are enough funds to justify a substantial marketing campaign. But that’s okay – if you employ guerrilla strategies.
This week, we thought we’d take things back to basics and highlight a campaign by a small business that encompasses everything a good guerrilla marketing campaign should be – cheap, simple and attention grabbing.
The Wallet Drop
In the spirit of paying it forward, the Philadelphia Federal Credit Union (PFCU) launched a guerrilla style promotion that ‘banks’ on the kindness of strangers. In a bid to encourage customers to open accounts, and raise their profile in the local community, they strategically placed 100 branded wallets around the local neighbourhood.
The lucky people that picked up the wallets discovered a PFCU-branded voucher inside, thanking them for picking up the ‘lost wallet’ and instructing them to keep it as a gift. They were invited to take the voucher into the local PFCU branch, to enter a raffle for a chance to win $250.
As an added incentive, the bank vowed to deposit $5 into the accounts of new customers, who present the voucher.
Local success
The goal of the Lost Wallet Promotion was to come up with a fun and unique way to attract local residents to open up new accounts, and the campaign is having the desired effect. Since dropping the wallets in mid November, eight people have been into the branch with vouchers and six of those have opened new accounts. That converts to $5,000 in new customer money.
These figures may sound low, but this campaign was very localised, and for a new bank, this was a great ROI – especially considering it cost Credit union less than $125 to buy the wallets and create the vouchers.
The benefits of Guerrilla Marketing for Small Businesses
Guerrilla marketing was actually conceived with small businesses in mind. It allows you to utilise the resources you have, rather than wasting cash that you cannot afford to spend.
A major benefit of guerrilla marketing is that a good campaign can become a talking point all on its own – and a campaign that encourages people to talk about your brand is a priceless thing, particularly if your business is yet to establish itself.
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.
