Business Insights

Jay Conrad Levinson is the creator of Guerrilla Marketing and he wrote more than 55 books on the subject. I personally found it more than useful, absolutely essential. Why is this?

If you are an entrepreneur, you need guerrilla marketing more than ever because the competition is smarter, more sophisticated, and even more aggressive than it was in the past.  But this is not a problem for guerrillas.  Why?  A guerrilla marketer, instead of relying on a “big bucks” marketing campaign, uses creativity, time, and energy.  And, in these areas, nobody can beat you.

Your marketing agenda, as an entrepreneur, is vastly different from that of an esteemed member of the Fortune 500.  You must rely on effective marketing, but much less costly, possibly even free.  This is guerrilla marketing.

The Guerrillas Manifesto

In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with a customer.  It must build trust and rapport.  It must understand the customer’s needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits.

The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits.  Whenever offering a product or service, he or she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer, and builds everything - the product, the delivery, the marketing – around the benefit. The consumer’s benefit is the starting point, but then you have to create your guerrilla battle-plan.

If you don’t have a plan, how will you know when you get there?  The single greatest mistake most entrepreneurs make is embarking on a business venture without a written plan.  Why is a marketing plan so important?  Unlike most other aspects of your business, marketing involves unquantifiable risks.  There is just no way to know how your ad is going to pull, how many people will come to your grand opening, or what sort of word of mouth you’ll be able to generate.

One way to deal with this uncertainty is to ignore it.   Many businesses blindly plod along, investing money in marketing when business is good, cutting back when sales go down. (Does that sound as silly to you as it does to me?)

The guerillas understand that a marketing plan is the first key to success.  The secret of a marketing plan is that it will enable you to see your ultimate goal with clarity, making minor setbacks and failures along the way unimportant.  Just as important, a plan helps you communicate your vision to employees, ad agencies, and investors.