Go guerrilla on social media

Guerrilla marketing in its purest form is about achieving conventional goals using unconventional means. There are a lot of people using social media as a marketing tool, but many are still approaching it as if it were a conventional marketing media. There are spending a lot of time, energy and resources blasting out content, pitches, and generic slogans and offers. In this extract from the book Guerrilla Social Media Marketing, authors Jay Conrad Levinson and Shane Gibson explain how guerrilla marketing on social media can be a huge advantage over the competition.

Since the term “guerrilla marketing” was coined in 1984, there have been more than 20 million books sold on the topic. It is literally a household name for many people in business. With the wide use of any term, there is always misuse or misunderstanding, and guerrilla marketing is no different. Many people have mistakenly used the term to describe brand hijacking, pirate marketing, and underhanded business tactics like domain squatting or well-organized web attacks on websites.

 

Brand hijacking and pirate marketing are designing a website, picking a company name, or using corporate colors of other businesses in an attempt to confuse the customer and capitalize on someone else’s hard branding work. Although this may be technically legal and difficult to dispute in a court of law, it is unethical and not part of the guerrilla way. Unethical actions are poisonous and once discovered will spread throughout your entire network, killing your credibility.

Three directions at once
To hit your lofty business goals you need a business growth strategy that is geometric, not incremental in its growth. Your business growth needs to happen in three ways all at once. These three ways are 1) more profitable transactions, 2) more frequent transactions, and 3) referral transactions.

More profitable transactions
Profit is a function of awareness and obsession. It is the measuring stick that guerrillas use to keep focused. Traffic, sentiment, popularity, or desire for coolness only lead you down the wrong path. If you have to work 18 hours per day to turn a profit, you’re actually broke. Time is money, and it’s also what life is made of. Search constantly for ways to become more efficient in your business and marketing activities. True profit is having a financial net gain plus the time and the relationships to enjoy the bounty. Some areas to focus on to drive profit:

# ROI on marketing activities. Constantly evaluate and tweak the type of social media you use and how you use it. Always look for best practices and ways to improve and increase your results.

# Efficiency in procurement and manufacturing. Technology and social networks can help you reduce your cost of procurement and manufacturing significantly. Find ways to improve your distribution and payment terms with suppliers. Also look at ways to carry fewer inventories using just-in-time inventory systems and manufacturing partners.

# Customer follow-up and retention. Repeat customers are more profitable than new customers. Once established, customer relationships can be perpetuated with much less investment than it took to get them started. Too many salespeople, marketers, and business owners are too focused on new business. They miss the diamonds scattered in their own backyard. Make nurturing and growing existing customer relationships a priority. It’s a very profitable act.

# Outsourcing and delegating. Question everything about your business processes. Are there expensive business processes that you can outsource and have done for less? Are there well-paid staff or executives doing things that should be delegated to more junior staff? Are there manual processes that can be automated? Find ways to get lean by outsourcing, automating, and delegating.

More frequent transactions
Velocity of cash flow is very important to business growth. Frequent purchases create that velocity. Frequent purchases come from ongoing value-added contact and because you always know what’s next. Plan your marketing strategy to intentionally expand use of products and services by your customer. After an initial purchase are you sending additional offers via e-mail? Are you engaging existing customers online and monitoring their activity for potential signs that they have a need for what you offer? Do you look for additional products and services from fusion partners that you could offer to your clients? Start thinking about ways you can create more frequent purchases.

Referral transactions
Generating business via referrals is another leveraged method of generating sales. Guerrillas have multiple ways for people to refer business to them. The most important factor is that you must be referable. To be referable is about keeping promises, supplying a superior product or service, and providing an incredible customer experience. All of these play a big role in how successful you will be generating referrals. You must also make it easy for people to refer business to you. Make sure all of your business information is easy to share and in multiple media formats online.

It’s about them
Most corporate blogs and websites are dry and boring. Traditional marketers tend to create a lot of content about them. They are Me Marketers. Most marketing is also too sanitized and a monologue. Social media doesn’t allow this to work. When someone hits your blog and it doesn’t talk about them, their challenges, and what’s important to their life, they leave and never come back. If you don’t allow them to make comments on your site or post negative feedback, they will use tools like Google Sidewiki, Yelp, Twitter, or Facebook to tell the world how they feel. Today you can’t sanitize your brand and no one wants a monologue. They want to be heard.

Guerrilla social media marketers get customer-focused by:
# Diving deep into online communities and answering and asking questions.

# Writing web content that doesn’t boast about corporate greatness but talks about solutions to the customers’ challenges.

# Listening, responding, and helping instead of using marketing monologues.

# Providing multiple channels for feedback through major social networks and tools like Live chat.

Mash up
Guerrillas mash up media, networks, and ideas to collaboratively create powerful marketing campaigns. Too many people are us vs them people. They tend to debate which media is best, contrasting print advertising vs web advertising, Twitter vs Facebook, or blogging vs YouTube channels. You need to understand that any of these tools alone will never be as effective as an integrated marketing strategy using multiple media and marketing activities. A mash up is a combination of multiple media, and those marketing combinations greatly increase the speed and effectiveness of your engagement strategy.

The Altimeter Group and Wetpaint did an in-depth study of the world’s top 100 brands using social media. Their findings indicated that those brands that used multiple social media weapons and marketing combinations developed a significantly higher level of engagement online than those that only used a few social media tools.

Don’t just stop at mashing up online media; take it a step further and ensure that you use traditional guerrilla marketing weapons to augment your social media attack. One of the things that makes Starbucks such a powerful social media brand is the fact that it has so much offline marketing, advertising, and brand exposure. It’s important that you as a guerrilla marketer have an overall marketing plan that complements and works with your social media plan.

Upside-down marketers
Guerrillas make sure their social media activity is 90 per cent connection and community contribution, and 10 per cent well-placed and customized marketing messages. When people think of marketing, traditionally it’s a well-crafted, sanitized, and polished message that is pushed out to the consumer. Social media is social. Much of your success will be based upon your ability to build social capital and trust with the community networks you’re part of.

People are overwhelmed with noise. From television to radio to direct mail and even to Twitter, there’s just too much chatter for the average consumer to focus. Some people argue that a well-written blog entry or a clever marketing piece can get above that noise and be the signal. The greatest beacon you can have in marketing that helps you permanently stand above the noise is relationships. When traditional marketers send out a tweet, a direct-mail piece, or an e-mail blast, the question is, “What can I get from these people?” The message is usually about why you should buy something from them and make them a profit.

The businesses that are profiting the most from social media purposefully and consistently look for ways to add value and deepen relationships with the online community. Sometimes adding value is as easy as simply listening to customers and letting them know they’ve been heard. Other times it may mean creating an entire community platform or social network that specifically talks to the needs and desires of your target market. When you’re putting together your contribution strategy, think about ways that you can help and contribute that are unique. In addition to being unique, contribute more than your competitors think is practical and get more intimate than other marketers feel is comfortable.

Reprinted with permission from Tata McGraw Hill Education Private Limited. Copyright © 2010 by Entrepreneur Media Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

GUERRILLA SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
AUTHORS: Jay Conrad Levinson and Shane Gibson
PUBLISHER: Tata McGraw-Hill
PRICE: Rs 375 
ISBN: 987007107435.