Guerrilla Marketing: small bits of free or cheap marketing that you can do with limited resources, but still get big results.

As with guerrilla warfare, you can take on much larger competitors and by being fast, mobile and cheap you can do things that they can’t imagine. The big guys don’t have the hunger, desire, or lenient legal department to win the same way a small business does.

There are plenty of good books written on the subject. I’ve read a few from Jay Conrad-Levinson. For 10 bucks I would recommend Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business.

**Warning** – Attempt at your own risk, I make no guarantees that these ideas comply with all business ethics or business laws governing those businesses. I believe they are OK, but I’m not a lawyer.

7 Guerrilla Marketing Ideas

1. Clever placement of business cards

put them at everywhere. Leave them on tables outside food courts. get a plastic holder for the side of your vehicle. put a coupon on them and hang them at convenience stores. Your Dr. Office, Dentist or anywhere people are stuck sitting in waiting rooms (stick them in the magazines). Chinese Food, pizzerias, libraries. I once bought several cartons of cigarettes and placed a few cards in each one along with a note to take one and a card. I then left packs of cigarettes everywhere I went at a convention. You might not love smoking, but I loved the attention it got me. You could also do that with breath mints, candy, etc.
You can get 2,500 double sided, business cards (on a nice stock) for under 50 bucks. If you need me to design them for you just say the word.

2. Stickers

again, cheap and easy. place them everywhere. I don’t like putting them on street signs or people’s property, but I’ve bought hand sanitizer and sun tan lotion and put my customers stickers on them. An alternative could be magnets. Same as stickers, but you can get people to put these on their cars a little easier, you can also place on cars without getting sued. The extra cost might get you extra visibility.

3. Give stuff away

You can have a contest where people need to spread your name around to get a prize. Make them add links or like your facebook page or follow you on Twitter. You’d be amazed at how many people would follow in the hopes of receiving a free t-shirt or chance at an xbox 360.

4. Sponsor local parties

Tell your facebook and twitter followers that you will help sponsor their next party or BBQ. in exchange for adding your stickers to all the soda bottles and placing all your brochures or business cards on the tables you’ll give them 25 bucks (or more depending on the size of the party). Make sure your shwag is funny and entertaining to get people talking about it. Official party sponsor, official toilet paper sponsor, official keg stand sponsor (you get the point).

5. T-Shirts

Get t-shirts made up and wear them. Make sure you carry your cards as well. Better yet, get beautiful people to wear them. If you can make your shirts cool, people will wear them for free. Cool enough and people will pay to wear them. Remember to get some girl styles. So many companies forget about women when marketing.

6. Car wraps

now these can be pricey, but if done right can be awesome. I love the idea of putting something weird on the side of a car that people will want to take pictures of. Don’t just wrap your car in your logo, wrap it in something odd that combines your business ideas, branding effort, and humor. Now you still have to drive your car, so let’s think of something cheaper and smaller that is removable: cardboard window inserts.

7. Temporary Tattoos

if you can make is slightly funny, sexy or bad ass it will go further. It really depends on your overall approach to branding and what you want on people. If it’s good enough people will take pictures of their tattoos and place them on their facebook or other social networks. hundreds or thousands of little ads out there – for next to no cost.

Be unique, interesting, funny, sexy. Connect with your readers and they’ll reward you!

Publicity stunts can be a great way of getting your name mentioned and bringing attention to your products or cause.

-But-

You need to think of the overall message. If you have someone doing jackass type stunts or causing people to get stuck in traffic they are going to be speaking negatively about your brand. Also, it needs to be legal (mostly).

Your publicity stunt needs to give people something to talk about that’s interesting and maybe a little weird. You also need to film it for youtube and other video channels as well as blog about it.

Get as much as you can out of everything you do.

Here’s a couple of cheap and interesting things you could do:

1. Easter is coming – Go hide some eggs.  Maybe buy 1,000 plastic eggs and put some wrapped candy and your business card in each. hide them throughout the city.

2. Get a mob of people to all wear shirts for your company and do something silly – You can find a lot of people on Craig’s List, Facebook, Twitter  that are bored and would do a bunch of silly things for a free shirt. Maybe all sing Tomorrow from Annie in Washington Park – could you imagine 100 people singing the sun will come out on a drizzly day?

3. National Pillow Fight day is coming in April – Get people to wear your shirt to the event. 10% unemployment means 10% of people are sitting around bored. They might love to go hit people with pillows.  You could also get pillows with your logo on them, but many of the organized pillow fight events already have sponsors for the pillows.