Guerrilla Marketing:

Jay Conrad Levinson, who coined the term Guerrilla Marketing in the 80s, describes it as, “the unconventional way of performing promotional activities on a very low budget.”

In a war “Guerilla” means that inferior troops engage in a special way of combat to fight a big and superior army force. It is mainly based on the idea to take advantage of surprise tactics and of the greater mobility of smaller combat units.

In analogy to warfare those Internet marketers would use Guerilla tactics who are only equipped with a small budget but have to compete against big companies with unlimited promotion budget.

Guerilla Marketing, then, would consist of the effective ways to maximize profits and minimize investments.

The way a guerilla marketer can compensate the low budget is to step up his investment in time, effort and creativity.

Out of the almost unlimited number of possible applications of guerilla tactics in Internet marketing here only one example:
”Mortgage” is a very profitable niche with almost ½ million search engine queries per day, a lot of money to be made and a lot of competition. For a little Internet marketer affiliated with some mortgage company who wants to refer potential customers via PPC traffic it is almost impossible to enter the PPC market like Google AdWords for the keyword “mortgage” because the bigger companies have no problem to pay around $10 to 20 for a click and daily advertisement  costs of several ten thousand dollars. Hardly an affiliate would be able to spend such a huge amount of money for PPC ads. But he can compensate his lack of funds by investing time and effort into a thorough keyword research to come up with more specific, long tail keywords such as e.g. “best adjustable mortgage rate”, which get a lot less searches per day, of course, but also the competition is much lower because big companies don’t care to find these keywords. So he can get away with CPCs of around $1 and thereby create a profitable affiliate campaign in a highly competitive market, especially if he not only relies on this one long tail phrase but also looks for and targets other ones as well.

[Guerilla comes from Spanish guerra = war. The diminutive ending –illa is used to indicate small things. Therefore ”little war”;

Marketing comes from Latin mercatus = trading, market]

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