Search engine optimization (SEO), social media campaigns, email, paid advertising—these are the usual suspects when we talk about marketing. But marketing is about sifting through a world of possibilities and finding unique ways to get in front of your target customers.
That belief is at the heart of guerrilla marketing—a scrappy, unorthodox, and aggressive approach to getting your brand in front of could-be customers by establishing your presence in the physical world around you.
In this article, you’ll learn the different guerrilla marketing types, and get unconventional marketing ideas you can use to increase brand visibility and generate buzz.
What is guerrilla marketing?
Guerrilla marketing is a low-budget promotional strategy that involves using unconventional tactics to generate interest in your product or service. Specifically, guerrilla marketing campaigns leverage public spaces and person-to-person connections and often include an element of surprise.
Guerilla marketing can make quite the impression: Jolie Skin Co.’s unconventional takeover of ad space on New York City delivery trucks drew attention to its product (filtered shower heads). It became the most successful marketing the brand has ever done.
Advertising executive and author Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term “guerrilla marketing” in the 1980s. Its name references guerrilla warfare, whereby smaller military groups can defeat larger, better-resourced armies with surprise attacks. In that vein, guerrilla marketing allows companies to make an impact with limited marketing resources.
Guerrilla marketing is often used to grow top-of-funnel brand awareness. But you’ll want to pair it with lower-funnel marketing strategies, like email marketing and targeted ads, to engage and ultimately convert the new customers you reach with guerrilla tactics. Use a marketing plan template like the free one from Shopify to map out a thorough, multichannel approach.
Guerrilla marketing vs. online marketing
Guerrilla marketing is a type of offline marketing, but it’s a perfect bridge to bring consumers into your online marketing ecosystem. If your guerrilla marketing tactics are interesting, customers who have an offline experience with your brand might generate word-of-mouth buzz on channels such as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or blogs. Guerrilla marketing can also help drive traffic to your website.
While most online marketing strategies follow a “do, measure, improve” framework, guerrilla marketing (and buzz marketing strategies in general) don’t always work within those guidelines.
You likely won’t be able to target ultraspecific segments of your marketing funnel like you can with digital channels, like bottom-of-the-funnel retargeting ads or top-of-the-funnel brand awareness Instagram ads.
You also won’t be able to track results with the same level of clarity. While you can measure the success of digital marketing campaigns with conversions or add-to-cart rates, for example, you’ll measure the success of your guerrilla marketing ideas by the excitement they drum up about your brand. Tracking social posts or online mentions about a guerrilla campaign is one way to approximate this. You can also use social listening tools to more broadly track conversations happening online about your brand, which might be amplified by guerrilla campaigns.
Guerrilla marketing vs. viral marketing
A successful guerrilla marketing strategy will attract lots of attention, and, with a little luck, it may even go viral on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The main difference between guerrilla and viral marketing, however, is that guerrilla marketing focuses on creating interactions with your brand in real life. Viral marketing, on the other hand, creates those interactions online, since it involves creating digital content specifically designed to go viral.
Types of guerrilla marketing
There are five core types of guerrilla marketing:
1. Outdoor
Outdoor guerrilla marketing happens outside, in public. Think unusual uses of outdoor advertising like billboards, posters, and trucks and murals, sculptures, and other eye-catching outdoor art installations.
For example, the olive oil brand Graza promoted its new extra-virgin olive oil popcorn by setting up an eye-catching booth on a New York City sidewalk to distribute samples. The surrealist visual style of the booth created an unexpected experience in a public space—a key guerrilla tactic.
2. Indoor
Like outdoor guerrilla marketing, indoor guerrilla marketing happens in public places. The main difference is that indoor campaigns happen inside—for example, in train stations, malls, office buildings, or airports.
One example is skin care brand Kiehl’s pop-up at New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall. The company built out a storefront in the commuter hub to promote holiday gift sets and bestselling skin care. To garner extra excitement, they also offered limited-edition totes, custom gift wrapping, and hot cocoa and cookies via a pop-up cart.
3. Ambush
Ambush marketing involves attaching your brand or product to an event without officially sponsoring the event, kind of like crashing a party. For example, strategically placing relevant billboards or posters near an event location, handing out related merch nearby, or organizing a flash mob.
Ambush marketing allows you to capitalize on the draw of a major event without signing an expensive sponsorship deal.
For example, the hip-hop duo Snotty Nose Rez Kids promoted their music and merch by ambushing basketball tournaments. “We’d be going up aisles holding merch up and saying, ’Snotty Nose Rez Kids, new band on the scene,’” says Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce on Shopify Masters.
Quinton and his cousin Darren “Young D” Metz, the other half of Snotty Nose Rez Kids, also placed flyers with images of the merch and where to buy it on telephone polls near the tournaments.
“In small towns, that’s kind of unheard of,” says Quinton. “It would catch your eye because it wasn’t a big city where you’re going to a corner and it’s loaded with [flyers].”
4. Experiential
Experiential marketing involves creating an immersive environment for your audience to interact with. For example, the beverage brand Liquid I.V. staged a bodega-themed pop-up, where visitors physically browsed products and interacted with staff members behind the counter.
A photo-worthy set up encouraged visitors to post about the event online, and an Instagram giveaway campaign drew attention to the event by encouraging social media users to post about Liquid I.V. on their Stories and tag friends in comments.
Another example is Flamingo Estate’s holiday pop-up in Los Angeles, made entirely of gingerbread. Visitors walked through the space, looking at the brand’s artistic gingerbread creations.
5. Ambient
Ambient marketing is a type of experiential guerrilla marketing that involves creating a marketing campaign around the features of an existing environment. This form of guerrilla marketing works by introducing an element of surprise to an environment the consumer is already familiar with.
For example, Spanish renewable energy company Iberdrola ran a Turnstile Turbines campaign that reimagined a familiar environment: subway stations. The company replaced six subway turnstiles in the Miromesnil station in Paris, France, with mini wind turbines that actually generated energy (0.2 watts per person) as people walked through them.
Guerrilla marketing campaign examples
- Heyday Canning Co. bean swap
- Jolie Skin Co. truck
- Graza “Wanted” flyers
- Supergoop’s New York City Marathon showing
Guerrilla marketing can be riskier than other marketing strategies. Because it relies on surprise, it’s hard to know how your customers will react. But a successful guerrilla marketing campaign can pay off.
Here are some examples of how small businesses have used guerrilla marketing to promote their businesses:
Heyday Canning Co. bean swap
To make a pop-up guerrilla, you need to add something unconventional and keep it relatively low-budget. Take Heyday Canning Co.’s bean swap pop-up.
Instead of opening a regular pop-up shop to promote her flavored canned beans, Heyday cofounder and CEO Kat Kavner Woolf decided to do things a little differently. “[My brother] had this idea of doing a bean swap, where you bring in a can of whatever beans you have at home and we swap you one-for-one for a can of Heyday,” Kat said on the Shopify Masters podcast.
“We don’t have a huge marketing budget, but the money that we do have, we really want to focus it on one thing and take a risk on doing something that we think is really creative and fun and has the potential to cut through the noise and help us grow some brand awareness for Heyday,” Kat says. “And with that in mind, we were like, ‘OK, so what could we do?’ And I kept coming back to that idea of the bean swap.”
The bean store attracted a line around the block and quickly sold out of its stock—and, more importantly, it created buzz for the brand on social media. “I think we got honestly quite lucky on this one,” Kat says. “To come out of the gate with a viral TikTok success is pretty darn good.”
Jolie Skin Co. truck
Jolie Skin Co. makes filtered shower heads to address the theory that shower water is the root cause of most skin and hair issues. To promote its products in a guerrilla way, Jolie launched an unconventional campaign using ad space on delivery trucks.
“Any brand can take ad space on delivery trucks,” said Jolie founder Ryan Babenzien on Shopify Masters. Jolie chose to use ad space on trucks shuttling laundry to and from hotels in New York City. With 15 trucks on the street in a small area, the campaign created the illusion of density, suggesting Jolie was a bigger brand than it really was.
The ads themselves were designed to make the trucks look dirty, accompanied by the tagline: “What if we told you that your shower water was dirtier than this truck?” The “dirty” truck attracted plenty of attention.
The campaign was a success, and Jolie has since deployed additional 15-truck fleets to new markets. According to Arjan Singh, Jolie Skin Co.’s cofounder and head of brand, it was the most successful form of marketing the company has done.
Graza “Wanted” flyers
Olive oil company Graza promoted the re-release of its extra-virgin olive oil potato chips with a classic outdoor guerrilla technique: flyering. The brand cleverly used the format of a lost pet flier to catch pedestrian eyes: “EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL POTATO CHIPS Missing Since March 2024.”
The flyer was a guerrilla lead generation tool, as passersby who scanned the QR code on the tear-off section were directed to Graza’s email newsletter sign-up page.
Supergoop’s New York City Marathon showing
Sunscreen brand Supergoop showed up to the New York City Marathon to cheer on runners with an attention-grabbing ambush marketing campaign.
A Supergoop brand representative cheered for marathoners with a bright yellow sign that read, “If you can run 26.2 miles you can reapply SPF!” She wore a coat adorned with mini bottles of sunscreen. Meanwhile, other brand representatives dressed in bright yellow (Supergoop’s signature brand color) distributed free samples of Supergoop products.
Read more
- The 13 Best Dropshipping Suppliers in 2024
- How Slyde Handboards Landed Shark Tank Investments from Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher
- How This Tree-Planting Charity Is Helping Reforestation Efforts Around the World
- How One Couple is Making $600,000 Per Year Selling Digital Products
- Get Inspired- 8 Great Small Business Stories from Shopify Workroom
- Closing the Social Distance- How These Businesses Are Creating a Sense of Community
- Christmas Crazes- How a Few Unlikely Ideas Changed the Toy Industry Forever
- How Two Friends Turned Up The Heat and Sold $170k Worth of Spicy Honey in 10 Months
- The Art of Streetwear- How the Legends League Turned a Creative Outlet into a Brand
- Meet the Cult Film Superfans Who Turned Vinyl Soundtracks into an Empire
Guerrilla marketing campaigns FAQ
What is an example of guerrilla marketing?
An example of guerrilla marketing is Graza’s popcorn-shaped booth that distributed free bags of the company’s new extra-virgin olive oil popcorn across New York City. The tactic was both unconventional (because of its unique popcorn-shaped booth) and low-cost, both key features of guerrilla marketing.
Why is it called guerrilla marketing?
Guerrilla marketing comes from the term “guerrilla warfare,” which means using small-scale, fast-moving tactics to fight against a larger, better-resourced military. Guerrilla marketers use surprising and unconventional methods to make a big impact with a small budget.
Is guerrilla marketing legal?
Guerrilla marketing is legal, however, you need to be careful you are not breaking the law while you’re creating the campaign or event. For example, you cannot graffiti or otherwise deface any wall or street. You must get permission from the city or owner of the building before adding promotional material to it.
Is guerrilla marketing the same as stealth marketing?
Guerrilla marketing is different from stealth marketing, in which a company creates campaigns so discreet that consumers might not know they’re interacting with one. Guerrilla marketing, on the other hand, is overt.
