Low budgets and unconventionality are among the prime hallmarks of the classic guerilla marketing campaign. Highly successful at making a company stand out, these efforts tend to produce the best result when they are surprising, witty, bold, or even better, all the above. In fact, if you nail all three, you’re very likely to find your idea will become a self-perpetuating entity. For this reason, employing guerilla marketing in furniture ecommerce is a great way to attract attention to a new site when you have limited funds with which to generate interest.
Planning Is Key to Execution
Just as with a conventional marketing campaign, your first step should be to set a goal for the effort. Maybe you want to attract more traffic to your site, increase your name recognition, or sell more of a product. Whatever it is, starting with a clear-cut goal makes success easier to attain and measure. Similarly, you want to target a specific audience to make it easier to craft a message with the greatest possibility of resonating with a demographic.
Going Viral
A message is said to have “gone viral” when it becomes self-perpetuating. The primary aim of the endeavor is to get people to share it without any prompting from the creator of the message. The key is to produce something about which people are delighted, surprised, enthusiastic or intrigued. This most often works with video, though photography can be employed to similar effect. Just make sure it’s genuinely shareable, interesting, entertaining or wonky enough to make people feel good about showing others what they discovered. The main thing you want to do is get a positive emotional response from viewers to which you can attach your brand. Shooting and editing a video is easier than ever these days. You can literally produce a viral video with the telephone you have in your hand.
Employing Stealth
Burying an ad for your business inside relevant content is one of the most common guerilla methods used today. Also known as content marketing, when you sell furniture online, it can be something like a story on how to make a studio apartment multifunctional with style. Buried within the story is a link to a landing page on your website with furniture perfect for outfitting a studio. Here, you must be careful to make sure the article provides a useful service, rather than merely serving as a venue to host the advertisement for your furniture store. If it comes across as too self-serving it will turn people off.
Thinking Unconventionally
If you’re trying to capture a slice of your local market, consider going with an offline physical campaign for your online store. Work out a deal with a local mall to set up a furniture display in one of its common areas. Using the studio idea as an example, create a one-room apartment right out in the middle of the mall with a sitting area, sleeping area and dining area—all contained within a minimal footprint. This is virtually guaranteed to attract the attention of passersby. Even more so if you have some of your friends occupy the setting as if they’re living there, in the middle of the mall, doing what people do when they’re at home.
Guerilla marketing in ecommerce can be fun when pursued with a bit of creativity. It’s also a proven way to generate attention for the spend. Just remember to make it useful, surprising, witty, bold, or any combination of the four. Whether you pursue the viral model, the stealth model, or an unconventional approach, guerilla campaigns present the potential for exceptional results when executed carefully.