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4 ways you can use guerrilla marketing in paid social ad strategy

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4 ways you can use guerrilla marketing in paid social ad strategy

Traditional marketing is the conventional instrument to create a buzz around your brand. Analogue or digital, conventional marketing efforts thrive on compelling copies, eye-catching creative and other design elements to convey their marketing messages to the audience. But, rarely, some of them come up with something novel, heterodox or firebrand that takes the audience by surprise. This approach to marketing is called guerrilla marketing. 

Here, we would like to introduce how guerrilla marketing is used in paid social media advertisements. 


What is Guerrilla Marketing?


The term guerrilla marketing has been coined in a well-known book of the same name by Jay Conrad Levinson, who likened his heterodox marketing efforts to Guerrilla warfare, a kind of warfare that mainly thrives on ambush, elements of surprise and stealth. 

Likewise, guerrilla marketing conveys the marketing message with an element of surprise by creating a chain of sparks that go deep into the audience’s unconscious. 

Though there are many ways of executing the guerrilla marketing feat, there are only four that accord with social media ads or paid social media ads. Let’s take a close look at them. 


Four Guerrilla Marketing Strategies for Social Media Ads


A paid social campaign has ample space for incorporating guerrilla elements. Let’s look at the examples. 

  1. Astroturfing

Astroturfing is a guerrilla marketing mode where companies pay individuals or groups to appear as real customers and promote a product. 

But, in the context of social media ads, it has a little different implications and consequences. In a social campaign, the brand may post or invent fabricated conversations, comment threads, etc., that pretend to take place between two customers, a customer and another audience and so on. These kinds of imaginary exchanges, when orchestrated properly can create a murmur and buzz around your brand or even go viral.

For instance, Burger King literally staged a fabricated incident of break-up in a comment section between a couple. It all began with the man sharing a story about how his girlfriend took twenty minutes ordering in the drive-through. The comments caught fire, and in response, counter-comments all broke into one grand public break-up. This could be considered an example of Astroturfing. 



Ambush Guerrilla Marketing


Ambush guerrilla marketing is a way to hijack an audience from a large event or another gathering of a large audience. An example of this is the famous Pantone Color Commentary Campaign Launched on Twitter, which ran on #BigGameColorCommentary. Likewise, they succeeded in drawing attention and buzz from the Super Bowl event without being officially affiliated with it.


Experiential Guerrilla Marketing


This type of guerrilla marketing aims to actively involve the audience in the promotion of the brand. It perpetuates the marketing through user-generated content. An instance of it would be DiGiorno’s promotional campaign on Twitter, which they launched during National Pizza Month. DiGiorno requested the followers to tweet with the hashtag #DeliveryDiGiorno. Every customer participating in this promotion has gotten a frozen pizza delivered to their homes. This is how DiGiorno garnered around 55 million impressions on Twitter by delivering only 1100 pizzas.


Stealth Guerrilla Marketing


Well, this is the most disputable one: it consists of advertising without the audience realising they are witnessing an advertisement. In the analogue age, they could sneak in a brand in a scene of your favourite film. This is possible in the age of digital marketing as well; advertisements can blend in your favourite teasers, trailers and so forth. 

These are the four guerrilla marketing tactics you can cleverly infuse into your paid social media ad campaigns. Talk to a leading online marketing company to promote your brand using Guerrilla tactics. 

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