Guerilla Marketing: Battlefield Basics

War is war while business is business. However, many of us would argue with that, saying today’s business in many ways resembles the good old battlefield: with thousands of cutthroat competitors fighting for the attention of the same target user.

The good news is even if your business niche is occupied with reputed heavyweights, a well-targeted and elaborated marketing strategy can give you good chances of succeeding. However, if your small business essentially lacks resources, it is wiser to follow Carl von Clausewitz’ advice and start a guerilla war.

Guerilla marketing is a complex of marketing practices aimed at effectively promoting and advertising your services or goods, attracting new customers and increasing sales without having to invest heavily. Guerilla marketing requires a great deal of imagination to produce some really cool out-of-the-box solutions and method-target concentration.

Here are some non-standard guerilla marketing practices and tactics that can help you achieve good results without much pain:

1. If you are selling a niche app, an average user might take little interest in it, so you have to find your target audience at first and make yourself known to them. The best thing you can do here is to get out of your niche or extend it to cover a wider audience. Apart from being informative, your content has to be funny, entertaining, touching and even provocative.

! Don’t be too quick to make a pitch for your product. Hustle will do you little good. Your first goal is to make your users feel something for your product.

2. Don’t be afraid to ask your users for feedback. From day 1, we heard great stories about how people were using our app to accomplish various tasks such as constructing a theme park or building an oil platform. However, each time we approached these companies and requested feedback from them, some legal issues appeared, also we frequently heard the ?What will I get if I do?? question. So, we had to change our methods and stopped intentionally seeking contacts with users, instead we decided to work with people who came to us.

Each time we received an email with a technical support request from one of our users or companies we were interested in, I took up the phone and called them. Just imagine it: you send a query and within 10 minutes, the app developer himself calls you back to provide help. After discussing the problem with the user, I usually asked them about why they chose to work with our app, how it helped them be more productive, and then I asked their permission to write about that.

In less than 2 weeks, we managed to collect some amazing stories about mine designing in Brazil, construction of a new children’s hospital, music theatre, and other exciting objects.

! This is why I want to give you a piece of advice here: the sooner you call, the more chances of successful collaboration you have. I had this great ?One-hour? rule that worked well for me: I always did my best to call back the user who contacted me within one hour after receiving their email.

3. Each startup, even the most successful one, has its downtimes, failed versions, and terrible mistakes and that is exactly when you’ll be needing a reliable direct channel for contacting your users. Whether or not to ask my users to leave their email addresses during the registration process was one of the most difficult decisions I ever had to make. Eventually, it cost us about 10% of our users. However, I believe it paid off when we had a downtime waiting for a new version of our app to be released and another one when Amazon remained shut down for quite a long time. In situations like these, the majority of users usually do not check the developer’s blog or Twitter for news, but go directly to the App Store to one-star your app.

! By using emails and app message board, we were able to directly inform our users of the problem and keep them posted all along. Not only did our users show their full understanding, but we were also surprised to detect user activity increase after sending out emails to our customers where we told them the app was working fine again. Any developer’s worst nightmare is to see the rating of the app that they’ve worked so hard to achieve falling down by 4.5/5 stars because of some temporary breakdown or system failure.

4. Whether it is a free or paid application, when it comes to mobile playing field, figures always matter. Every single download is important no matter who makes it: a New Yorker or a peasant who lives in a Chinese village so small that no Google Maps can find it. App localization was the first step of course, but we really detected that the number of downloads doubled only after we localized our marketing materials. We started with localizing every pixel of the content at our App Store’s page. For us, it was not enough to just translate the description of the app into a particular language. We wanted our Russian users to see the app screenshot written in Russian; we made sure our Brazilian customers could read the same description in their native language. We did our best to ensure that our Chinese users could easily find the app contacts list with Chinese email addresses. Localizing our app for each country, we designed and utilized a unique set of marketing tools. Thus, for example, we contacted bloggers and sent them the description of our app written in their native language, we selected different app screenshots to send to different regions of the same country; we also provided our potential users and partners with comprehensive data on the number of downloads made in their country.

! Here is some advice for you: we saved all language settings for different devices so that we could later share news with our customers in their own language.

5. Marketing helps create the history of your product. Sometimes, provided you are selling something more complex than image-sharing services, you can face difficulties while trying to promote your product. Our app was an outsider for quite a long time. When you take the product that has a 30-year track record of working successfully on stationary PCs and try to introduce it to mobile platforms and cloud environment, you can hardly expect to be ?the most popular pupil in your high school?. We kept fighting for what we believed to be important and finally achieved the results we were aiming at.

! While there are hundreds of thousands of such ‘outsider’ apps looking for their customers in App Stores worldwide, I’m hoping to see more of such marketing battles won with the help of new and original methods and hear more success stories told by app developers.