Blog—Top Five Lessons from Guerrilla Marketing

From fostering authentic engagement to igniting viral sensations, guerrilla marketing techniques offer insights into how to break through the clutter, provoke thought, and establish an emotional resonance that lingers long after the campaign has ended. Its very name forces you to stop for a moment and think—just what exactly is Guerrilla Marketing? Who is it for? And what’s so special about it, anyway?

I’ve been fascinated by this marketing approach since my college days and kept up with Guerrilla efforts from all types of companies. In this article, I will explore some of Guerrilla Marketing’s top values, as well as give real-life examples of successful Guerrilla-inspired campaigns, all to demonstrate that no matter what type of organization we belong to, the teachings of Guerrilla Marketing can apply to marketing departments everywhere.

A Guerrilla campaign won’t ask you to spend loads of money to run it. Though these campaigns do come in all shapes and budgets, their main resource is not money, but rather the creativity, energy, and deep understanding of your market that will take to run a successful campaign.

In the age of social media, all it takes to go viral is a well-timed tweet (or, well, whatever they are called at this point), TikTok, or Instagram post. Highly creative and out-of-the-box guerrilla campaigns can amplify their reach by generating a buzz and driving conversations and engagement, all without investing in paid media, or overrunning your ad budget.

Of course, you are still aiming for a profit (a successful campaign, X% of conversions, a viral piece, that sweet “sold out” sign on your product), but the costs of this reward are significantly lower than they would have been traditionally, had you followed a standard advertising formula, or used the same content tactics as before.

Good marketing is a delicate balance between well-placed analytic and process systems, and free-running, unabashed creativity (only constrained by those pesky marketing budgets, that is). But in a world that’s become flooded with relentless advertising noise, even our most creative efforts struggle to capture people’s attention. Heck—even we marketers have become desensitized to it, despite knowing the work it takes to get those campaigns up and running.

Anyone who works in a creative field understands how demanding it can be sometimes. Creative blocks are draining, even when no actual “work” is getting done, and the looming pressure of deadlines, unmet KPIs, and our conscience telling us that <<that campaign could be better>> don’t exactly encourage the much-needed inspiration.

That’s when we seek comfort in the “known” tactics, the marketing schemes that are proven to work for “everyone”. These safe havens may be ideal when the creative tank is running on empty, but they prove a far higher risk in the long run because they keep us from pushing the limits and challenging the norms of marketing—the very thing Guerrilla marketing invites us to do.

The Guerrilla way prompts us to leave these comfort zones and embrace risk—the good risk, the one that brings overachieving results. It invites us to find novel ways to connect with people. Guerrilla marketing needs engagement to thrive, which forces us to understand and connect with our audience so that we can not only captivate them but become memorable.

Working with a Guerrilla approach should feel free, and spark back the creative side of marketing through the collaboration with your colleagues, and the connections built with your audience. Once you are in it, you’ll find there are now plenty of spaces that fuel and foster creativity, helping you balance the scales for good.

Gone are the days when you needed a couple hundred thousand dollars to get your message across to millions. In 2023? A TikTok account, a phone with a camera, a fun video idea—and you’re in business.

The Guerrilla approach thrives in modern times because it’s now a lot easier to find the currency in which it trades: engagement.

Guerrilla marketing was never constrained by marketing budgets—because it never considered them in the first place. It was always about maximizing impact, whether you had $10, $100, or $100,000 to work with. The key has always been to be creative, not only in the campaign itself but in the planning as well. True Guerrilla marketing is resourceful to a fault, it challenges us to be innovative and engaging without relying on a traditional ad budget.

“Offline” dating app Thursday is one of my favorite examples of what resourceful, creative marketing looks like. Often using behind-the-scenes content and witty, unassuming cardboard signs, they drive attention to the soul of their product, whilst showcasing the company culture and helping connect with the brand on a human level.

You don’t get that kind of message from a billboard ad.

Conveniently connecting to the point above, Guerrilla marketing takes connecting with your audience a step further. As I mentioned before, it needs engagement. It can only work with engagement and conversations around it. It helps that Guerrilla campaigns have an inherent <<wow>> factor to them and that they often invite the public’s participation in what becomes a shared experience.

A successful Guerrilla campaign is memorable. It taps into people’s emotions and evokes surprise, laughter, empathy, or even nostalgia. We are emotional creatures, and we are open to hearing stories that align with our values or aspirations uniquely. Though your product may not always be the main character, your brand can still be at the forefront of creating these connections.

By making people partake in your campaign, you are also helping it go viral, thus increasing its overall reach. Online buzz is great for vanity metrics and to measure conversions, but don’t neglect the impact of offline virality: if people are talking about your campaign to their colleagues over the water-cooler conversation, you’ve made it.

Because of its uniqueness, a Guerrilla campaign has every chance to become a long-lasting memory in people’s minds, and the positive association of it with your brand cultivates a connection that is hard to break, even as time goes by.

Guerrilla marketing challenges the norm and continuously raises the bar for creativity. Success is not defined by mass-media placements or millionaire budgets, but rather by the reach and impact your campaign has even without those assets.

You are looking to positively disrupt the passive consumption of advertising content, and engage your audience on a more profound level. You know your audience well enough to create tailored content that speaks to them and actively invites them to participate in your brand’s narrative. Whether is hoping on a viral trend and twisting it, tapping into the conversations around culture, social issues, or the defiance of societal norms, the creativity you employ in crafting your message is what ultimately will determine its viral reach and, more importantly, the way it will be received—and remembered—by your audience.

Every single time a Guerrilla campaign sees the light, it sets a new bar for innovation and creative thinking. As marketers, we need to be adaptable, and move with and even ahead of the times if we want to continue bringing our brands’ value to the forefront of a world that is saturated with information.

The hope for connection between businesses and customers is not lost, but it does ask more from us as brand ambassadors. This <<more>> is not more money and is not more of the same old tactics that have “historically” worked. It’s not following the guidebooks written sixty years ago.

Instead is more creativity, more defiance of the norm, more risk-taking, and tracing new paths for the definition of marketing. It asks that we focus on connection with the user, truly understanding what their pain points are, and how our products can alleviate them. That’s what our message ought to be, and on how to share it, Guerrilla marketing (or a Guerrilla-inspired approach) is the best fit going forward.

It’s perfect for companies of all sizes and leverages the playing field for smaller brands with limited resources. Since it relies on the people for its success, it forces us to think outside the box to curate unique brand experiences that will have an ever-lasting effect in their minds.

Ultimately, Guerrilla marketing thrives on innovation, imagination, and strategic disruption—The very values marketers hold at the core of our work.