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You have a new idea, product or service. What’s the first thing you want to do? Share it with someone! In business terms, you want to share it with the world and hopefully make a profit. When it comes to marketing your product or service you have several options on how to go about it. You can stick to traditional, cut and dry advertising efforts, such as print, television and radio - or you can take a more creative approach and use some more modern agile approaches to marketing.

In 1983, Jay Conrad Leninson was considered the pioneer of guerrilla marketing with his take-no-prisoners approach to marketing for small and medium size businesses. Individuals make guerrilla marketing more complicated than it really is far too often. Guerrilla marketing is simply a more effective way to stimulate an idea, using both traditional and non-traditional methods. Being able to combine both traditional and non-traditional marketing efforts is what makes guerrilla marketing so unique. In doing this, you fast track your message to the public.

Standards still exist in guerrilla marketing even as a low-cost alternative, more so than in traditional marketing. The planning, insight and execution involved in guerrilla marketing often takes more attention to detail than traditional marketing.

Through the evolution of guerrilla marketing, agile marketing has aroused. One could even draw a parallelism to agile development, a process of sending web applications to the market faster. Agile marketing is focused around using preexisting relationships along with flexible ideas and tactics through the internet to deliver significant information to potential and current clients. Social networking, business blogging, wikis, forums, email branding, web site communication and newsletter campaign management are all outlets in which agile marketing is made possible.

One big mistake people have when using this approach is that fundamentals go out the door. Whether it’s a newspaper ad or a social networking event planned within Second Life (see Second Life blog) it is important that you still have a clear understanding of your customer, the market(s) you’re in and what you want to accomplish.

Whether it is guerrilla or agile marketing you chose to pursue to penetrate your idea or service to the public, it is important to have clear business goals and measurements. Having these defined will help you decide on which traditional and non-traditional marketing options to select. Clearly defined goals and measurements coupled with an open mind and researching will allow you to have more options and uncover greater possibilities in your marketing direction.

Friday, October 19th, 2007 Both comments and pings are currently closed.

By Haley January Eckels