I first connected with Nathan Dube in 2009 when I fell in love with his now-famous destroy your printer contest. This guy has a knack for making something out of nothing and is the ideal person to talk about guerrilla marketing and the social web on our next installment of Community Week on {grow}:
Guerrilla marketing is about eclectic combinations of music, mystery, art, culture, humor and social dynamics coming together into a sales pitch that doesn’t appear to be a sales pitch. It manifests itself as a hip invitation to join or to be part of a movement.
One of the most infamous recent examples of guerrilla marketing was when the adult swim Network placed electronic signs for its Aqua Teen Hunger Force show around Boston, resulting in a bomb scare and eventual arrests. It didn’t work, but you get the idea. I’ve had to resort to guerrilla tactics myself in my job with Expert Laser Services, primarily because I needed to sell more stuff, but had no money for marketing. I had to get inventive. I had to get guerrilla.
An idea sprang from my own frustrations of having to deal with office laser printers and copiers which simply didn’t work … when you needed them most. In fact, I genuinely developed a hatred for certain pieces of office equipment.
Through Twitter, blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn, I promoted a contest that would award a small prize to the video depicting the most creative destruction of a printer. People blew them up, tossed them out of windows and crushed them with a backhoe. In essence, the social web was providing my content. Remember, I had no budget!
Soon, the project was featured all over the web and was the top video story in an online trade magazine for several consecutive weeks. We actually generated sales leads and new customers from this promotion.
But the most fun guerrilla social media tactic had nothing to do with business, it involved my band, Jabooda.
When the band formed four years ago, I produced several thousand stickers that read “What is Jabooda?” Through friends of friends of friends, these stickers made it on to random spots throughout the United States and even Europe.
When we came out with the second generation of stickers I included a small URL on each one to help people connect with us on the web. In addition to hitting the streets with the sticker, we got guerrilla with the distribution process, too.
Two of the guys from the band worked for FedEx and started to put a supply of stickers in every truck they unloaded or loaded. Over the course of the year “what is Jabooda” became a bit of a sensation and we gained new fans at FedEx hubs in nearly every state and many countries around the world. FedEx had become our own personal social media network!
The stickers drove people to our website where we were able to collect names for our mailing list.
About two years ago some of our new fans built a page on Facebook to lobby to get us on the bill at the Wormtown Music Festival, one of New England’s longest-running and most popular music events. We did not get the slot, but we were moving in the right direction.
The following year the competition heated up and Facebook alone wasn’t going to do it. To get into Wormtown’s Strangecreek festival lineup the next year, we had to win a battle of the bands competition. We actually made it to the finals but to win, part of the criteria was the size of our fan base. It was time to use that mailing list!
We got the word out to all those crazy Jabooda fans and were able to attract a large crowd from several different states. In fact, it was the largest crowd of the night and we won, securing our place on the festival bill.
Don’t have a marketing budget? Don’t let it get you down. Go guerrilla!
Nathan Dube has been a long-time member of the {grow} community and is a marketing and sales professional at Expert Laser Services near Boston.