Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your SmallBusiness

Product Description
When Guerrilla Marketing was first published in 1983, Jay Levinson revolutionized marketing strategies for the small-business owner with his take-no-prisoners approach to finding clients. Based on hundreds of solid ideas that really work, Levinson's philosophy has given birth to a new way of learning about market share and how to gain it. In this completely updated and expanded fourth edition, Levinson offers a new arsenal of weaponry for small-business success including

* strategies for marketing on the Internet (explaining when and precisely how to use it)

* tips for using new technology, such as podcasting and automated marketing

* programs for targeting prospects and cultivating repeat and referral business

* management lessons in the age of telecommuting and freelance employees

Guerrilla Marketing is the entrepreneur's marketing bible -- and the book every small-business owner should have on his or her shelf.

About the Author
Jay Conrad Levinson is the author of more than a dozen books in the Guerrilla Marketing series. A former vice president and creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising and Leo Burnett Advertising, he is the chairman of Guerrilla Marketing International, a consulting firm serving large and small businesses worldwide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What Is Guerrilla Marketing Today?

Marketing is every bit of contact your company has with anyone in the
outside world. Every bit of contact. That means a lot of marketing
opportunities. It does not mean investing a lot of money.
The meaning is clear: Marketing includes the name of your
business; the determination of whether you will be selling a product or a
service; the method of manufacture or servicing; the color, size, and shape of
your product; the packaging; the location of your business; the advertising,
public relations, Web site, branding, e-mail signature, voicemail message on
your machine, and sales presentation; the telephone inquiries; the sales
training; the problem solving; the growth plan and the referral plan; and the
people who represent you, you, and your follow-up. Marketing includes your
idea for your brand, your service, your attitude, and the passion you bring to
your business. If you gather from this that marketing is a complex process,
you're right.
Marketing is the art of getting people to change their minds — or
to maintain their mindsets if they're already inclined to do business with you.
People must either switch brands or purchase a type of product or service
that has never existed before. That's asking a lot of them. Every little thing
you do and show and say — not only your advertising or your Web site — is
going to affect people's perceptions of you.
That's probably not going to happen in a flash. Or a month. Or
even a year. And that's why it's crucial for you to know that marketing is a
process, not an event. Marketing may be a series of events, but if you're a
guerrilla marketer, marketing has a beginning and a middle but not an ending.
By the way, when I write the word marketing, I'm thinking of your
prospects and your current customers. Nothing personal, but when you read
the word marketing, you're probably thinking of prospects only. Don't make
that mistake. More than half your marketing time should be devoted to your
existing customers. A cornerstone of guerrilla marketing is customer follow-
up. Without it, all that you've invested into getting those customers is
like dust in the wind.
Marketing is also the truth made fascinating.
When you view marketing from the vantage point of the guerrilla,
you realize that it's your opportunity to help your prospects and customers
succeed. They want to succeed at earning more money, building their
company, losing weight, attracting a mate, becoming more fit, or quitting
smoking. You can help them. You can show them how to achieve their goal.
Marketing is not about you. It's about them. I hope you never
forget that.
Marketing, if you go about things in the right way, is also a circle.
The circle begins with your idea for bringing revenue into your life. Marketing
becomes a circle when you have the blessed patronage of repeat and referral
customers. The better able you are to view marketing as a circle, the more
you'll concentrate on those repeat and referral people. A pleasant side effect
of that perspective is that you'll invest less money in marketing, but your
profits will consistently climb.
Marketing is more of a science every day as we learn new ways
to measure and predict behavior, influence people, and test and quantify
marketing It's more of a science as psychologists tell us more and more
about human behavior.
Marketing is also unquestionably an art form because writing is an
art, drawing is an art, photography is an art, dancing is an art, music is an
art, editing is an art, and acting is an art. Put them all together, and they
spell marketing — probably the most eclectic art form the world has ever
known.
But for now, brush aside those notions that marketing is a
science and an art form. Drill into your mind the idea that at its core,
marketing is a business. And the purpose of a business is to earn profits. If
science and art help a business earn those profits, they're probably being
masterminded by a guerrilla marketer — the kind of business owner who
seeks conventional goals, such as profits and joy, but achieves them using
unconventional means.
A bookstore owner had the misfortune of being located between
two enormous bookselling competitors. One day, this bookstore owner came
to work to see that the competitor on his right had unfurled a huge
banner: "Monster Anniversary Sale! Prices slashed 50%!" The banner was
larger than his entire storefront. Worse yet, the competitor to the left of his
store had unveiled an even larger banner: "Gigantic Clearance Sale! Prices
reduced by 60%!" Again, the banner dwarfed his storefront. What was the
owner of the little bookstore in the middle to do? Being a guerrilla marketer,
he created his own banner and hung it out front, simply saying "Main
Entrance."
Guerrilla marketers do not rely on the brute force of an outsized
marketing budget. Instead, they rely on the brute force of a vivid imagination.
Today, they are different from traditional marketers in twenty ways. I used to
compare guerrilla marketing with textbook marketing, but now that this book
is a textbook in so many universities, I must compare it with traditional
marketing.
If you were to analyze the ways that marketing has changed in
the twenty-first century, you'd discover that it has changed in the same
twenty ways that guerrilla marketing differs from the old-fashioned brand of
marketing.

1. Traditional marketing has always maintained that to market properly, you
must invest money. Guerrilla marketing maintains that if you want to invest
money, you can — but you don't have to if you are willing to invest time,
energy, imagination, and information.
2. Traditional marketing is so enshrouded by mystique that it intimidates
many business owners, who aren't sure whether marketing includes sales or
a Web site or PR. Because they are so intimidated and worried about
making mistakes, they simply don't do it. Guerrilla marketing completely
removes the mystique and exposes marketing for exactly what it really is —
a process that you control — rather than the other way around.
3. Traditional marketing is geared toward big business. Before I wrote the
original Guerrilla Marketing in 1984, I couldn't find any books on marketing for
companies that invested less than $300,000 monthly. Although it is now true
that many Fortune 500 companies buy Guerrilla Marketing by the caseload
to distribute to their sales and marketing people, the essence of guerrilla
marketing — the soul and the spirit of guerrilla marketing — is small
business: companies with big dreams but tiny budgets.
4. Traditional marketing measures its performance by sales or responses to
an offer, hits on a Web site, or store traffic. Those are the wrong numbers to
focus on. Guerrilla marketing reminds you that the main number that merits
your attention is the size of your profits. I've seen many companies break
their sales records while losing money in the process. Profits are the only
numbers that tell you the truth you should be seeking and striving for. If it
doesn't earn a profit for you, it's probably not guerrilla marketing.
5. Traditional marketing is based on experience and judgment, which is a
fancy way of saying "guesswork." But guerrilla marketers cannot afford wrong
guesses, so it is based as much as possible on psychology — laws of
human behavior. For example, 90 percent of all purchase decisions are made
in the unconscious mind, that inner deeper part of your brain. We now know
a slam-dunk manner of accessing that unconscious mind: repetition. Think it
over a moment, and you'll begin to have an inkling of how the process of
guerrilla marketing works. Repetition is paramount.
6. Traditional marketing suggests that you grow your business and then
diversify. That kind of thinking gets many companies into hot water because
it leads them away from their core competency. Guerrilla marketing suggests
that you grow your business, if growth is what you want, but be sure to
maintain your focus — for it's that focus that got you to where you are in the
first place.
7. Traditional marketing says that you should grow your business linearly by
adding new customers one at a time. But that's a slow and expensive way to
grow. So guerrilla marketing says that the way to grow a business is
geometrically — by enlarging the size of each transaction, engaging in more
transactions per sales cycle with each customer, tapping the enormous
referral power of each customer, and growing the old-fashioned way at the
same time. If you're growing your business in four different directions at once,
it's tough not to show a tidy profit.
8. Traditional marketing puts all its effort on making the sale, under the false
notion that marketing ends once that sale is made. Guerrilla marketing
reminds you that 68 percent of all business lost is lost owing to apathy after
the sale — ignoring customers after they've made the purchase. For this
reason, guerrilla marketing preaches fervent follow- up — continually staying
in touch with customers — and listening to them. Guerrillas never lose
customers because of inattention to them.
9. Traditional marketing advises you to scan the horizon to determine which
competitors you ought to obliterate. Guerrilla marketing advises you to scan
that same horizon to determine which businesses have the same kind of
prospects and standards as you do — so that you can cooperate with them