Guerrilla Marketing

by Bill Gallagher Ph. D.

Nearly every year for the past ten years over 750,000 folks across North America get that entrepreneurial spirit and start up a new business. No kidding, three-quarters of a million new businesses are begun each and every year. Wonderful news! Yes, but the sad part of this news is that, after four years, sixty-two percent of them are out-of-business!
The US Department of Commerce wanted to know why. After all the government was losing potential tax revenue and many taxpayers are going broke. After a thorough review and much field research it was found that the failing businesses all had three things in common:

1. Poor financial planning;
2. Poor marketing; and,
3. Poor sale skills.

The US Small Business Administration. in a study completed in 1992, concluded: "For most businesses marketing is critical, vital. If you don't market the odds are your business will fail."

Guerrilla Selling and Guerrilla Marketing address two of these three principle reasons for business failure. So let's take a look at what we mean by Guerrilla Selling and Marketing.

"Marketing" relates to everything you do with a product or a service to get it sold again and again to your consumers. It's a pretty big field, much bigger than most business people think. Most entrepreneurial folks figure that if they can put together a descent yellow-page ad they've got their marketing pretty much down. Not so. Advertising, including the yellow-pages, is only about two percent of your marketing. Of course, it's a very important, and fairly expensive, "two percent," but it's a small fraction of the other critical marketing tools and techniques we'll be discussing in this column.

By the way, many of the Guerrilla tools and techniques will cost you nothing. With the others, we'll show you how to save major dollars by being smart. We call it "Guerrilla" enlightenment. For example, when advertising in a newspaper don't ever be fooled by the myth of the ad rate card. No Guerrilla ever pays rate card rates. Ad rates are negotiated. Now aren't you glad you read this article?

"Sales" and "selling" are another very important two percent of your marketing. They refer to the face-to-face or telephone communication between you and/or your staff with customers and potential customers. Again, many small business owners decide that if they can say, "Hi, can I help you?" and, following the sale, "Have a nice day," they've got selling handled. Again, not so.

"Guerrilla" for us means, not doing it the way everybody else does it. Not doing your marketing and selling with the force of the big bucks those Fortune 500 people have at their discretion. For example, do you have $8 million to spend on some frogs croaking out your business name for the next thirty days? We thought not.

Unconventional Guerrilla tactics will work wonders for your small business. It's less expensive and demonstrably more effective. It's learning a bit more, it's getting the edge. In today's market, it's winning by a millisecond. Nevertheless, Winning!

We regularly see a 50 to 200 % increase in the gross sales of firms who adopt the Guerrilla philosophy and the unorthodox Guerrilla marketing tactics we recommend. you'll find all sorts of Guerrilla tactics in these weekly articles and the others areas of Guerrilla Marketing Online. Check 'em for your business sake!