Guerilla Marketing on the Internet

An Overview
By Wayne D. King

The Term “Guerilla Marketing” has become an oft-mentioned one in recent years. For the most part, it describes a state of mind in which one uses sometimes unorthodox, and always carfully-targeted, cost-effective methodologies for marketing a business.

One of the most effective mediums for this kind of marketing is the Internet. This has been true since the Internet’s inception. However, with the development of many new technologies now linked to the Internet, it is particularly true.

Understanding the way various technologies work and keeping up with the latest innovations is the key to effectively harnessing the technology for your guerilla marketing efforts. But keeping up with these technologies is nearly impossible for most small businesses. This article is intended to provide you with a better understanding of the technology available on the Internet and how to most effectively use it to enhance your marketing efforts.

Let me start by saying that Guerilla Marketing is NOT SPAM. If you are trying to keep your identity secret or using a fake return address or doing anything that prevents a person from removing themselves from your lists or making a direct inquiry, you are being a spammer, not a guerilla and probably breaking the law. A true Guerilla always provides a legitimate address and follows the letter of federal law when using the Internet.

The techniques, ideas and opinions below have been learned through a combination of experience designing marketing campaigns with an Internet component; and, most recently, through publishing magazines, websites and blogs that relied on advertising for their main revenue stream. The eye opening experience of being on the “selling side” rather than the buyer side of Internet advertising has revealed many of my previous efforts on the “buying side” to have been ill-conceived at best and wasteful at worst. Fortunately for me, most of the efforts were successful despite my inadequate understanding of the media. This article is intended to share with you some of those experiences to allow you to avoid the pitfalls and embrace the most effective ways of marketing on the Web. I’ll just touch on some of the basics here, but you can find much more detailed information by following the web links throughout this article.

Your Business Website
Do you even need a business website? The answer to this for almost every business is an unequivocal YES. What you spend to create this site and how it is used is another matter entirely, that will be addressed in a few moments.

More and more people are doing research, even local research, on the web before the make purchasing decisions for products or services. You may not see it. In fact chances are good that you won’t see it. However, these days when a customer walks into your business or showroom, or calls on the telephone, better than 65% of the time they have done research on the Web. They probably have a pretty good idea of who your competitors are, what they are offering for your product or service line. In short they are more informed than buyers have ever been before. If you don’t have a website consider yourself lucky that they are even visiting. Or thank one of the many websites like Google, Verizon, or Yellow Pages etc. , that have free business directories online.

Do you need a fancy website? Not necessarily. Most businesses can get by with nothing more than what is termed a “billboard” website. It simply provides basic information about your business and its products or services and information about how to find out more by contacting you or downloading more details. You don’t even necessarily need to have a domain name (www.yourbusinessname.com) although as you get better at employing the Internet for marketing, you’ll probably want this.

Website Primer - Frequently asked questions about Developing a Website

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Email
If you aren’t getting an email address from every customer or prospect that you come in contact with you are missing an opportunity to really keep in close contact with your business base and it’s costing you. For every letter you put in the mail, ask yourself if you could have achieved the same effect by firing off an email. This can be done for everything from invoices to marketing pieces. The key to using email effectively for your business is to minimize the intrusiveness and maximize the usefulness (to your customer) of your marketing efforts. An email is going to be more readily acceptable if it contains useful information as well as your pitch.

Develop different email lists that are for different things. The more you know your customers the better you will be at creating lists that are well targeted. For example, if you are a real estate business and you are sending commercial listings out to people who are looking for a residential home, it won’t be long before everyone has asked to be removed from your list. On the other hand, if you are sending out a weekly email with your latest residential listings and some tips on how to find the best rates on a mortgage one week and how to choose a home inspection company the next, you are both providing a service and encouraging the use of your services. If you are a beginner at this, take some time to learn the email system you have and how to utilize it in the least intrusive, most informative way that you can.

Website Advertising
Website advertising is by far the least expensive electronic medium for generating interest in your product or services. A banner ad or a skyscraper ad on a website with adequate traffic can generate substantial traffic for your own website, and leads for your business. The technologies associated with website advertising have come a long way in just a few years. While many websites are still charging for space on a monthly basis with their charges at least somewhat related to the number of overall visitors to the website, others have moved to more sophisticated systems that give the guerilla marketer opportunities to advertise on line far more effectively and at substantial savings. Those websites that have deployed newer technologies can provide the advertiser with the opportunity to place ads based on a precise number of views and the specific interest of consumers, even as specific as keywords. These are the kinds of websites that the guerilla seeks out for advertising online.

Lets say you have a sports equipment business. You can choose only those pages that relate to outdoor sports. You can be even more specific and advertise on only skiing related pages during the winter and hiking pages in the summer. Best of all you can specify how many times your ad will be seen and pay only for the actual number of views. No more buying ads and hoping that people will see your banner, you purchase 1000 or 10,000 views and then your banner ad runs until 10,000 people have seen it, whether that takes 10 minutes or 10 months. The guerilla likes this venue for advertising because it effectively targets the market and can cost as little as one-half cent per view.

One of the newest forms of advertising, contextual advertising links allows the guerilla to hone in on a keyword or words and have a single line text ad appear within the content of the story. So for example a company that specializes in foliage tours might choose the word autumn as a keyword, the website software would then identify stories where the word autumn appears and place a link like the one below

• 15% off foliage tours at Tourmasters.com [click here].

The ad is still an ad, and distinguished from the content by its placement and appearance, but it is so closely targeted to the content that the chances of a visitor clicking through are enhanced dramatically.

These simple tips alone will make a substantial difference in your marketing efforts.