Guerrilla Marketing is an unconventional, often cheap way of doing marketing for your business that relies less on big budgets and more on personal (or company) work to promote. The goal is to be memorable, generate interest, and create WOM anyway that you can think of. At the core guerrilla marketing is about creativity, and has limitless possibilities which makes it a perfect fit for social media and is the basis for this series.
One of the items that Jay Conrad Levinson brings up in his book Guerrilla Marketing for Free is to create a benefits list for your business. This allows customers to see why your product is superior to your competitors. This bring up a question of context, and how can you market benefits without features? Naomi from the wickedly funny and informative Itty Biz (post contains swearing fyi) covers this topic in away I could not even begin to match. So if you don’t mind a wee bit of swearing give it a quick read.
For those of you who would rather grab the cliff notes here ya go, straight from the Naomi’s mouth “What you want is BENEFITS VERIFIED BY FEATURES.” Now that we have that out of the way how do we translate that into social media? How can you use these wonderful online tools to help create something that will create this great way of selling your business to people? I’m glad you asked, here’s a list I came up with, I’d love to hear yours in the comments below:
- Create a page / post on your companies site / blog displaying your perceived features and their benefits and leave it open for customers to comment on. Take the best ones and add them to the list, and link the list from your front page.
- This could even be handled in a UserVoice styled voting structure to see what your customers perceive as your greatest features and benefits.
- Install Disqus, IntenseDebate, or a similar social commenting system to allow what’s being said to spread to an even larger audience.
- Create a BackType account for your business and follow those who added a feature / benefit (this can also give you more insight into your users). If you’re using FaceBook add IEndorse, Testimonials, or Define Me to achieve a similar effect.
- Use all of your social media channels to announce the existence of the page and get your users / customers interested and involved.
- Use AddToAny to help your customers share your list any way they can. Include this list to any content aggregation or social bookmarking strategies you might have in place. If you don’t have one in place, now would be a great time to start.
The information gathered from your customers / users in this exercise is incredibly helpful in other marketing areas. You now have a list of what your customers see as your best features and benefits and can be used to assist with any of your other traditional / online marketing methods. Following your customers gives you insights into what else they are into and if there is a strong correlation to another product or service you now have a golden partnership opportunity laid out.
How I applied it: I have added Disqus (which has built in “voting”) to my blog to find out where else commentators are coming from and to discover new ides and content.
Your task: Add a FaceBook app, install a social commenting setup and create a features / benefits post, or get UserVoice and create your list.
What do you think? Have any ideas or input on this? If you do I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. If you already have a page like this, or if this inspires you to create one please leave the link in the comments below and I’ll link it from the main Guerrilla Social Media Marketing.
Resource page on Shuaism (hooray for free exposure!).
Thank you for reading,
Josh Peters
This is part of a year long project about taking offline guerrilla marketing ideas / tactics and applying them to social media. If you enjoyed this post and would like to host one of the Guerrilla Social Media Marketing series on your blog please email me shua (at) shuaism.com. To get the latest post in the series and easily follow which blog the new post is showing up on please subscribe to my feed via RSS or Email.
Josh Peters is a freelance social media consultant from Salt Lake City, Utah who, when he’s not frolicking in the fields of social media, enjoys working on his startup RoyalAnts, watching horror movies with his wife, and playing with his dogs. He blogs at Shuaism and would really like to connect with you on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter.
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