Image via GrowSurf
Guerrilla marketing is a marketing approach where a business promotes a product or service through surprise or unexpected interactions.
Guerrilla marketing is less popular in the B2B arena. It’s often considered a B2C approach, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful and help your company develop sales leads and perform some creative branding.
What is B2B Marketing?
B2B (business-to-business) marketing is any marketing strategy used by one company to target and sell to another. Companies that sell services, commodities, or SaaS to other businesses or organizations employ B2B marketing.
Source: Professor Wolters
Your favorite clothing or bag brand, for example, is likely to get its raw materials from farms, and its fabric dies from chemical businesses. Your popular bicycle company most likely buys components or parts from third-party manufacturers and pays shipping companies to distribute the finished product.
How are these business partnerships formed?
The process begins with discovering B2B marketing opportunities and then personalizing your brand’s message to a business that needs your products and services.
While we are well aware of the effectiveness of guerrilla marketing, it is taking some time to reach the B2B market. This article will teach how to use guerrilla marketing in the B2B world for great results.
Here are a few guerrilla marketing ideas to help you increase your B2B sales leads.
Pop-up Shops in Business Parks
The best form of guerrilla marketing allows potential customers to learn more about you, and nothing beats meeting someone in person.
If you know of a business park where a few of your target customers are located, you may set up a small booth and hand out promotional materials while discussing with their workforce.
Image via Pinterest
Organize Local Events
There are always businesses searching for locations for their events, regardless of where you are in the world or what city you’re in – from private events to charity organizations.
You can use social media and traditional media to get your name out there and accomplish something beneficial for your local community (which can be excellent publicity).
Image via City of Midwest City
You can go above and beyond merely giving space if you can afford it. For instance, you and a local artist can collaborate to create a temporary wall painting or graffiti for the occasion. If you borrow a building wall, sidewalk, or roadway, work with your city or the business owner to avoid fines. Like most guerrilla marketing ideas, temporary art is about timing and location.
Trade Show
Next on our list will be trade shows, which have a lot of potential for B2B businesses and require a lot to stand out in a sea of similar businesses. Trade shows are ideal for meeting your customers and informing them about your products and services.
Image via ForeFront Packaging
Running a promotion that incorporates online and offline activities is one method to accomplish this. For example, you might share half of your discount code on social media and urge people to come to your booth for the other half. Because they already have half of your discount code, they will be more eager to visit your booth, where you can tell them much about your business.
Trade shows are an excellent way for any business to increase sales and create connections.
Interview from the Industry
Extending the scope of your blog is always a good idea. Start interviewing people in your business and publishing those interviews on your blog as a means to do this. It can help your B2B marketing efforts in a variety of ways.
Image via IntoTheMinds
Conducting these interviews allows you to get as close to an “expert” in your industry, going far beyond the usual discussions about marketing strategies and opportunities.
In addition, you may also rely on them to post their interviews on social media or even on their blogs, effectively increasing your exposure.
Join forces with Similar Businesses
Some B2B businesses provide a specialized service or product, which limits what they can offer their customers on their own. It can be tough to reach out to larger organizations in these cases because they prefer to engage as few partners as possible. One alternative is to partner with other B2B businesses in the same niche with complementary products or services.
Image via Forbes
If you’re a B2B company that sells beauty items and cosmetics, you may partner with one that sells designer sunglasses and promotes each other to your target customers. With this approach, your business can reach out to new potential clients at almost no expense. You can also profit from being recommended by someone who already supplies the target customer. Just make sure to focus on them being complementary and not competitive. Think peanut butter and jelly, not Peter Pan and Jiff.
For grabbing attention, guerrilla marketing relies on considerable originality and unexpected aspects. Guerrilla marketing is not impossible in the B2B sector; it simply requires more imagination and an emphasis on surprising and entertaining customers.
Below are some examples of B2B guerrilla marketing that worked:
B2B Guerrilla Marketing #1: Upwork’s “Hey World” Billboard Campaign
Billboards were used by Upwork Inc, a freelancing website, for their “Hey World” campaign. They used highly specific call-outs to produce pattern interrupts capturing people’s attention.
NASA, Elon Musk, and businesses that still utilized Comic Sans fonts were explicitly targeted. In addition, it brought much attention to Upwork and the concentration of businesses in need of freelancers. It was a total success.
Image via Duncan Channon
B2B Guerrilla Marketing #2: Salesforce’s Mock Protest
Salesforce, a B2B CRM company, took advantage of the element of surprise. Shortly after the launch of Salesforce.com, Benioff hired actors to appear as “protesters” at a large conference for his biggest rival.
They used guerrilla marketing tactics by mocking a protest at a Siebel conference. Paid mock protesters held banners that screamed, “The Internet is really neat … Software is obsolete!”
Image via Twitter
Salesforce managed a simple, effective, and precise brand positioning. Additionally, it redirected attention away from its main competitor by using this unique concept.
B2B Guerrilla Marketing #3: Slack’s Error Page
Another excellent strategy for the B2B sector is to convert error pages into interactive web pages in order to eliminate the standard error message.
Slack did this with their 404 pages.
At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a pleasant, grassy field to distract from the stress of experiencing a glitch. It does, however, serve as a winking throwback to Flickr and Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield’s short-lived MMO, Glitch, by recreating a level from the game.
Image via Figments
This simple guerrilla marketing technique efficiently gets users’ attention for Slack and drives them to contact the support center to fix the problem.
Is guerrilla marketing something B2B businesses should do more of?
I see why B2B marketers are wary about guerrilla marketing, if only because they don’t want to face backlash. But, I don’t think they’re looking at it in the right way. B2B audiences are still people, and they want to be inspired or have an emotional reaction to the content.
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