Going offline: a guerrilla marketing campaign for my website
16 August 2007
A few days ago I wrote about 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 colours), and a resolution of 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi, the usual resolution of images served to the web.
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.
The next step was to arrange some business cards. I needed these anyway, but realised they could also play a part in my guerrilla marketing.
There are a few shops that allow you to design your own cards and then send them the artwork 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 visit 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 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.
Originally published Thursday 16 August 2007, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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