Guerilla and Grassroots Marketing

“Guerilla” and “grassroots” marketing sound appealingly, spontaneous, and they also sound like they might possibly be free. For these reasons, many of our clients inquire about whether these types of marketing might be right for their businesses. While these can definitely be a way to have some fun with your marketing, we also caution business owners that they are hard to predict and more work than you might think.

First thing’s first, though – what ARE grassroots and guerilla marketing? Both start with a ground-up approach. But grassroots marketing focuses on a small, niche audience, whereas guerilla marketing tries to connect with a wide swathe of the population. Both use unique approaches and social media to connect with people, and they rely on people spreading the message.

Guerilla marketing is associated more with clever, unusual tactics – like using city buses to advertise a zoo, or setting up a website purporting to be about the real “Blair Witch” (which ultimately helped catapult the Blair Witch Project movie to hit status).

But you don’t have to be so clever in order to reach people at the grassroots level. It can be as simple as posting on neighborhood message boards, putting up flyers at coffee shops and on college campuses, going to networking events, and sharing your charitable causes on social media. Basically, you want to speak directly to your target audience and hope that they do some of the work of spreading your message for you.

Drawbacks of Grassroots Marketing

One drawback of grassroots marketing is a lack of clear intention. You should think through what your goal is before launching into a grassroots marketing effort. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Help a charitable cause near and dear to your heart? Or are you trying to get people to actually buy something?

Having a clear goal helps, but it can still be hard to track whether a grassroots campaign is successful. If you post something on social media and it gets a ton of likes and shares, that is good news – but it can still be difficult to assess whether those interactions lead to real results.

We think trying some grassroots tactics is great, but just remember that it is very difficult to predict what will spread organically and what won’t, and even if you do achieve some level of “viral-ity,” this doesn’t necessarily result in more sales.

Want to talk through whether grassroots or guerilla marketing efforts might be right for your business? Contact Niki at [email protected] for a free consultation.