To many of you, marketing means the activities you carry out to enhance and promote your businesses exposure. Activities like creating articles and submitting them to newspapers, PR Sources and online article hubs, creating free give away promotions and adding your website to directories and search engines online.

However to those of us who know and understand Guerrilla Marketing it’s much, much more than just weekly improvements on our website or offline business promotion. Here’s where you might want to begin jotting down some notes, or better yet, print this information out (and send it to your colleagues) so you absorb it thoroughly!

Marketing Is Every Single Contact, Communication And Exposure You Have With ANYONE About Your Business!

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a one person start-up, or a multi-million dollar organisation, every single phone call, message, fax, email, newsletter and conversation you have, whether you advertise in that or not, you’re marketing your business.

You need to really take this next section to heart, and it’s this “Marketing both online and offline is a never ending loop” and it needs to become a PERMANENT way of life for you no matter where you are, what you’re doing, or who you’re talking to, every interaction you have is either a positive or negative learning process from those who don’t know or understand what you do.

It’s YOUR Job To Make Every Interaction A POSITIVE One For Your Business!

Even the negative aspects of your business, for example, how you’re product / service might disgruntle the opposition needs to come out in the end, as a shining positive light for your prospects, clients and colleagues. And this is a skill that is learned like anything else, you’re not born a natural “Guerrilla Marketer” it’s an acquired technique and that takes time.

So what exactly is Guerrilla Marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is a way of strategizing and using non-conventional tactics to reach a conventional end result. And we both know that the end result in business is to increase profitability, and profit increase is the single-minded goal of guerrilla marketing, so everything you do MUST be geared around increasing your profits.

When I say everything you do must be geared around increasing your profits, I will add to that and say that every action you take and strategy you implement must also be highly principled and highly ethical.  So in essence, when you look at your marketing strategies, you only take those that are working, and those that are working in a way that HELPS others achieve what they want. All the superfluous, time wasting, profit sapping activities automatically become weeded out as part of the process in Guerrilla marketing.

I will also turn your attention here to the fact that I’ve mentioned profits and NOT sales per se, and the reason I have done this is, guerrilla marketing savvy students are not focussed on high turnover, high ticket sales. Because it’s not what you make on each sale, it’s what you keep that makes you successful as a business “PROFIT” is what it’s all about. So high sales turnover and profit-loss due to marketing that isn’t working, would simply not happen with guerrilla marketing processes and systems.

How is Guerrilla Marketing Different from Conventional Marketing?

You’re going to find there are at least 10 to 15 major differences with the guerrilla marketing processes, and here they are (take extreme notice of the last one on this list):

1. Guerrilla marketing is highly effective tactics that you can implement on a shoe-string budget and still beat the conventional, larger companies who have more money than they know what to do with when it comes to marketing.

2. It’s not a scary process for small start-up and medium sized businesses to use guerrilla marketing. The conventional marketing process is perceived as highly-complex and can be extremely expensive, guerrilla marketing attack plan is only several sentences long and incredibly effective.

3. Guerrilla marketers only need time, energy and creativity as their weapons for marketing, whereas conventional marketing requires the addition of money and complex strategies.

4. Guerrilla marketing is the most simple forms of marketing, as it’s ONLY yardstick to success is PROFITS. Conventional marketing talks about testing and measuring, conversion rate, response rate and gross sales as their yard sticks.

5. The guerrilla marketer uses psychology and the laws of human nature to create sales, the conventional marketer uses guess work (also known as trial and error) to make sales and this as we all know can be quite costly and with very little results.

6. The guerrilla way of marketing uses a little known tactic called “Permission Marketing” and therefore only markets to interested, receptive and reactive parties. Traditional marketing is geared only around making a sale (to anybody) and the funnel process to get someone from cold to warm to raving fan is extremely costly, time consuming.

7. Guerrilla marketing is focussed on the back-end support (after sales service and up-sell) and are passionate about keeping customers happy “Long Term” once they’re in the marketing funnel. Traditional marketing is often a one sale, move on to the next, numbers game type scenario.

8. The way of guerrilla marketing employs “Multiple” methods of spreading their marketing message and they know that certain combinations of marketing messages work better than single shot mediums. Traditional marketing uses these single shot mediums in a standalone way, such as website, advertising, seminar events as their only sources.

9. The arsenal of weapons in a guerrillas toolkit is over 100 marketing weapons and their focussed on small, concentrated groups of targeted individuals. Traditional marketing focuses on the larger, general audience, in an attempt to make mass sales in one hit.

10. Guerrilla marketing focuses on increasing “what they already have access to” and stimulating more sales, referrals and clients from that base. Traditional marketing is focussed on costly new client acquisition most of the time.

11. Guerrilla based companies focus on being “Complimentary” with their competition and helping stimulate growth for their organisations through working together in joint ventures. Traditional marketing mindsets teach “Annihilate The Competitor” which is a flawed mindset to begin with on many, many levels.

12. Guerrilla based marketing achieves its strength and growth through laser focus on being the largest specialist resource in their category or niche. Whereas traditional marketing employs “Diversification” tactics to stimulate growth, thus weakening them from their specialist counterparts.

13. Guerrilla marketers understand that every contact with clients, prospects and partner companies has an “INTENTIONAL” and “SPECIFIC” goal behind it. Traditional marketing often has unintentional results due to their focus on non-relational style of selling that doesn’t permeate the company at all levels.

14. Guerrilla marketers understand the POWER OF GIVING to their prospects and clients, where traditional marketing is based on what it can take from their prospects to make a sale.

15. Guerrilla marketers “EMBRACE” technology with their marketing and use it to its fullest in every way, shape and form. Traditional marketing by and large ignores quite a big proportion of what technology can offer.

I now want you to go away and begin thinking how you can implement what you’ve learned here today, from this new mindset of guerrilla marketing. Believe me, if you implement just some of these ideas (and we’ll be talking certain strategies more specifically in future posts) you won’t be able to avoid not gaining new levels of profit from it.