Guerilla marketing refers to an entrepreneur’s ability to get maximum marketing exposure from a minimal investment using unconventional strategies. For guerilla marketers, the best marketing campaigns and efforts are cheap or better yet, free! Here are some tips for using guerilla marketing to maximize your business!

While many articles these days focus on guerilla marketing strategies online like utilizing social networks, email campaigns, and the like these guerilla marketing strategies will work both online and offline!

Charity Begins At Home
Find a local charity you can help in some way with your business. As a business owner, you can give away product or services at a fraction of the cost of retail, so your investment is often minimal. But the buzz you can generate from supporting a local charity is priceless! For instance, a photography business could offer free photographs for kids in foster care or a veterinary clinic could offer free rabies vaccines for all new pet adoptions from the local humane society within a given month.

The great thing about working with a local charity is that it is newsworthy, so send out press releases to your local newspapers, radio stations, and television news programs, and you’ll probably get some great coverage for your efforts advertising you couldn’t begin to afford that doesn’t look like advertising at all! And whatever charity you’re helping will be glad to publicize your efforts for you, as well!

Partner With Another Business
Find another local business you can team up with to create a unique proposition. For instance, a graphic design company could offer a well-known restaurant complimentary design of new menus or table cards if they will permit the graphic design company to include a classy advertisement for their business somewhere on the menu to let diners know the menu is their creation. Or they could provide framed graphic art for display in the dining area either for sale or just for art to enable their graphic design company to get free exposure to their work.

Run A Contest
Contests and competitions always garner attention and excitement. Create a contest and send press releases about your contest to all the local media. Get creative by focusing on a combination of your business and a holiday or local theme that is newsworthy. For example, if the rodeo will be in town next month, almost any kind of business can run a rodeo coloring contest or rodeo poster contest kids can enter to win free tickets to the rodeo. Just make it a condition of the contest that the entries or posters must be dropped off at your business location to get people in the front door and make them aware of your business and what it does. You could even specify a parent has to come in with the child to drop it off and sign a release form to use the child’s art in future advertising or to display it in your business if they’re the winner.

Or, if you have a retail business that sells clothing, you could have a huge jar in your front window crammed full of something like boot spurs or lassos or horse brushes something that is eye catching and difficult to count and have a contest to guess how many of the objects are in the jar. The prize could be several pairs of fantastic new jeans to wear to the rodeo or cowboy boots, or whatever your business sells that could be related to the rodeo theme. You can get local media coverage about the contest usually your local free shoppers guide type papers will run all these kinds of things as a story in the paper and it will get people in your front door to see your products and create additional awareness about your business in the paper for minimal cost.

Think Outside The Box
One of the most effective aspects of guerilla marketing is that it is unconventional. So think of new, exciting, and innovative ways to attract attention to your business for minimal cost or FREE! Note: The great thing about the ideas included here? Every one of them can be publicized for free via email and on your social networks, as well!