Back in the days before social media marketing, the king of the hill for micro businesses like ours was Guerrilla Marketing. I think it is high time for a little resurrection of our inner guerrillas, and apparently I am not the only one. Companies as large as Miller Brewing and Carnival Cruise Lines have jumped on the band wagon of thinking outside the box.

As you can see, Carnival unleashed a giant beach ball on the streets of Dallas. Next they tried a giant piñata filled with 8,000 pounds of candy. That didn’t go quite as well but still got a lot of attention.

As for Miller, it’s was all about the SuperBowl. Long the nearly private party of Anheuser Busch and outrageously expensive, Miller still wanted to play. So rather than go the traditional route of forking over billions to the network for a 30 second spot, their ad men got creative. Rather than spent $3m on 30 seconds they produced a series of 1 second ads and ran them on the local channels running the game in markets all across America. The spots ran throughout the game. There is an out of the box solution. They haven’t released how much they spent on the campaign, but I can guarantee you it was a better value than a single $3m spot would have been.

Sometimes you have to think differently to get noticed. Now I am not for one minute suggesting you commission a giant beachball or buy a Superbowl ad; I’m suggesting that you let your freak flag fly a little. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started.

How about those beach balls? Is there a local outdoor concert that draws people in the age likely to be thinking of getting married? Get some beach balls imprinted with your name, number, url and logo and send in a couple of people to start blowing them up and setting them flying. I’m not talking 3 or 4, more like 30 or 40. Heck, why not 100, beachballs are cheap. Extra score if they are in a really bright color. Can’t you just see all these beachballs being tossed around above the crowd all afternoon? I’ll bet you whatever local TV station is taping for the 10 O’clock news will get a nice shot of it. Repeat the stunt every chance you get.

Do the same thing with Frisbees. This time send your team off to the local college campus on the first pretty spring day and start handing those babies out on the quad. Oh yea, they’ll get tossed around and shared and kept. One day when those students get married, they will remember you as the wedding professional that was enough fun to think of Frisbees on the first day of spring. If you’re lucky the college paper will even cover it.

A group of wedding professionals in Indiana got local firefighters and police to volunteer for a men’s beauty pageant at their cities summer street festival. All the locals gathered to whoop, holler and cheer on the sexy men. Of course the formal wear portion was sponsored by the tuxedo shop and you know they all wore boutonnières. Yep, they got some nice publicity.
I don’t know what kind of events there are in your community, but find a way to make a splash.
Have you ever heard of Sir Richard Branson? Virgin Record, Virgin Air? Ring a bell now. Why do you think he keeps doing all the crazy stuff he does? It’s all guerilla marketing and it isn’t just for people without marketing budgets.
If you want to bounce your ideas off me, drop me a line.

This article appeared in the March issue of Think Like A Bride. If you aren’t already a subscriber, please join us.

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