A few days ago I mentioned how I had been trying out a little bit of guerrilla marketing, as mentioned at ProBlogger.
As Darren says, guerrilla marketing “campaigns” may not result in great floods of traffic, but it can be fun having a bit of a dabble nonetheless.
For my part mounting such a “campaign” required very little “real” work, just a redeployment of some existing resources, and taking advantage of my close proximity to UNSW, one of Australia’s largest universities.
Here’s what I did.
First up I created some A4 flyers. The “hardest” part was preparing the flyer to print specifications… that is using CMYK colours (instead of RGB), and a resolution of 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi, the usual web resolution.
This meant I had to draw a new heart shape from scratch, since nothing else I had would scale properly. While the bigger version turned out just a slight tad wonky, I was otherwise very happy with the flyer.
As you can see the flyers have convenient “tear off” tabs, so the thousands of interested flyer viewers can look up disassociated.com as soon as they reach a computer!
Ze next step was to arrange some business cards. I needed these anyway, but realised they could also play a part in my guerrilla marketing.
Places such as Whirlwind Print here in Sydney, allow you to design your own cards and then send them the design as a “pre press” file in PDF format, all for a relatively modest outlay.
The shrewd (ha, if I say so myself) design of these cards allows me to cut off my contact details while leaving the logo and truncated URL intact, which then forms a handy “calling card”.
If you happen to live near UNSW you may have already noticed some of these babies around the place…
As well as of course the flyer, which I placed on a couple of boards around the campus. When I checked back a day later, a number of the “tear tabs” had been torn off, so there had been some interest!
While it is difficult to gauge exactly what sort of response, in terms of traffic, this campaign had (I was checking my web stats for visitors from Sydney and/or UNSW servers arriving via “no referring link”), it was by no means overwhelming.
Still it was relatively simple to pull off, didn’t require huge resources of time or money, got me out of the house and away from the blog for awhile, plus gave me the chance to get back to UNSW and check out the girls campus again.
For some edgier examples of guerrilla marketing check out Web Urbanist, and if you’ve tried out any guerrilla, or off-line, marketing yourself please leave a comment and tell me what you did, and how it went.
Nice business card design! Really digging the look of disassociated in its current manifestation too.
Thank you ben! Perhaps you could get some bucket fountain cards made up… using a photo of one the fountain’s buckets as the “masthead” image maybe?!
I really love the design of the cards John, they look very clean and professional.
Just a side-note, the link to the CMYK in your post leads to a dead end!
Thanks for the heads up re the CMYK link… it should have pointed to wikipedia like the RGB link. Don’t know what I did there! Thanks also for the compliment re the cards :)
Wow nice idea mate! And really nice designs. Who did this for you? Good luck with your business anyway.
If nothing else I think the ‘getting out of the house’ makes this kind of thing worthwhile - maybe gets you thinking differently about who is or could be reading. Great simple idea John.
Throw some Analytics (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.) on your site and you can see who’s visiting, when, from where, and so on….a good way to gauge how successful your campaign is.
well, you just got digged. so congratulations on your guerilla marketing work!!
@BD - thanks! They’re my design.
@Kurt - Cheers! A simple and fun idea!
@Andrew - I can see visitors by physical (or server) locations, just not whose arrived via a tear tab that’s all! :)
@David - so it looks like it works then ;)
Idea: You should rip off one or two of your own “tear-offs” just so people get the impression that it’s already gaining traction.
Hitting the university was a good idea. Did a similar thing in 1998 to promote our student film, but branched out to the town as well. Actually got stopped by the police for fly posting too, which is (apparently) illegal.
Who knew? Still, it worked. Had nearly a full house for the screening.
I went to UNSW for a semester in the late 80’s. :)
(I’m from the US)
Here’s an idea (would obviously require trust) to build on yours. Bloggers could swap services for each other putting up these flyers for each other in their respective parts of the world.
@Dabe - I could try that next time. I wanted to leave them intact to see exactly what interest there was. Better go for another wander over there actually and see how they’re faring, and if they’re still up!
@Darren - Yeah, “fly posting” (on lamp posts and the like) is illegal here also (but you have to be caught in the act thereof to be charged here). I’m mainly using public noticeboards up at the uni, which judging by the other material on them, appear to be “free for all” to use. Good to hear your idea was a success :)
@AgentSully - you ought to check the snaps I have on my Flickr page of UNSW! I was thinking of placing a zipped version of the flyer online so people could put it up somewhere and then post a photo on their blog, or email it. Some sort of “exchange” could work… a few details would have to sorted out in advance though.
[...] Surpringly (to me at least) a fairly entertaining picture collection of tree porn was buried shortly after becoming popular. A nice abandonment photo set on a newer blog did quite well - probably in part because the pictures were original and the story personal. Some Diggers didn’t read the headline on this article, and were disappointed - but it delivered exactly what the headline said: a brilliantly simple and cheap guerilla marketing strategy. [...]
i love your design style!
[...] of some super useful articles that can help you today in the following areas: 1. Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing by John Lampard of disassociated.com. Describes with words and pictures an offline marketing idea [...]
I’m doing my masters at UNSW and I saw some of these! I didn’t find the website that way though but great idea :-)
@Tyler - thanks :)
@Stoat - would that have been in the Social Sciences building foyer? Most the other flyers have “disappeared”… Great to hear from someone at UNSW who has seen them though :)
I haven’t done this, but i have seen flayers in the bathrooms on my college. And anytime I pie it’s in my face ;)
very nice. Few of my mates have used this technique before, main thing to remember is the website address :)
First time I’ve seen the tear off tabs used in that way, damn good idea.
Keep up the hard work
Cheers Steve, a few people have been mentioning those tear tabs!
[...] read more | digg story [...]
To be honest, I am not surprised your traffic didn’t go up. It is a great design but if I saw this, I would ignore it. I have no idea what disassociated is or means (in this context) so why would I bother? If the URL was something like http://www.unofficialUNSWblog.com or had a short description like ‘disassociated.com:the place for hip clothing trends’ then I might be more inclined to go to your URL.
Hey Bill. It was hard to gauge what traffic, if any, the flyers actually generated. I received a couple of comments and emails from people saying they’d seen the them, and we know only 1 or 2 per cent of a blog’s readers leave comments or send in emails.
I was very interested to see what results a very basic flyer, utilising really only an oversize version of my logo would generate, hence no explanation as to what anyone would see should they visit the URL.
Unfortunately I never got around to a second, more thorough, flyer drop. On the flip side this story did make the front page of Digg, so ironically quite a few people did end up visiting disassociated in the end.