"Guerilla Marketing and Joint Ventures" - Business Book Club overview
Publicado 2021-09-28
For those of you not familiar, guerilla marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson is a pretty classic marketing book made decades ago. Decades before the Internet, startups were at a huge disadvantage when it came to trying to get any marketing traction and this book came in and became the guiding light for tons of entrepreneurs during a time where being an entrepreneur wasn't as cool as it might seem today.
For those of you that might've heard the term, one thing that caught me by surprise is that even though I've read some of his stuff before, I had the wrong idea about guerilla marketing in my head. I thought of it simply as some inexpensive and unique ways to do a marketing stunt. But, that's not really what it is. It's what I explained earlier- inexpensive ways to get a disproportionate return on your marketing investment as a small business. This covers everything from how to write ads and get referrals to doing things like not putting your phone number on your business card and then handwriting it in later when you hand it to someone.
Although I originally got it for the joint ventures idea, I found it being a strange mish mash of the original guerilla marketing stuff with Sohail Khan trying to mesh in his joint venture brokering firm, to be honest. At the end of the book I wanted to buy the original Guerilla Marketing and go down that path more, rather than the joint venture part, even though that was what I originally got it for.
But, that's not to say that there isn't value in this book. It really does cover a lot about joint ventures. A joint venture in this book is just meant as a business partnership that is mutually beneficial and financially rewarding for you. So, you find someone who isn't a competitor but has a customer list of your target audience and you find a way to be valuable to that organization and get access to their customers (and oftentimes also giving them access to yours, but not necessarily).
The book covers how to find them, how to pitch them, how to write a proposal and cover payments, and the whole nine yards.
But... I found it really disjointed. It felt more like the original Guerilla Marketing concepts were copied and pasted and that there was just a lot of fluff and irrelevant things. For example, despite being published in 2015, there's still tons of talk (even opening chapters with) what to do with the Yellow Pages. Now, that's not to say that there isn't hidden gold in the thought process behind their Yellow Pages tips and tricks or how they talk about classifieds. I really do think their classifieds stuff could work really well in today's marketing. But, it just shows to me the lack of effort in really trying to get things to go smoothly and to be relevant and tie things together more.
Some of the most valuable stuff I found was just from an included interview between the two authors earlier in the book. The 10 steps to Guerilla Marketing and the 7 sentence marketing plan are both genius in their own rights and still relevant and would likely serve any modern day marketer.
Those are:
Step 1: Research
Step 2: Make a benefits list that is long and exhaustive of everything that my company has to offer. And, I must have a competitive advantage and include that here as well.
Step 3: Select the "guerilla marketing weapons" I'll use. Prioritize that list and put a date to launch each of those, along with who is responsible for each
Step 4: Create a 7 sentence marketing plan
Sentence 1: The purpose of your marketing
2: The competitive advantages you'll stress
3: My target audience
4: List the weapons I'll be using
5: My niche in the marketplace, my position, and what I stand for
6: My identity
7: My budget expressed as a percentage of projected gross sales
Step 5: Create a guerilla marketing calendar that has 12 rows and 5 columns
Column 1: months of the year
2: Which marketing thrust are you focusing on that month and talking about the most?
3: Which forms of media are used that month
4: Any money invested
5: Grade each month A, B, C, D, F. Be honest with the grades and next year eliminate all but A's and B's and try other things. Usually within 3 years you will have a calendar with all A's.
Step 6: Find fusion partners/Joint Ventures
Step 7: Launch your guerilla attacks.
Step 8 emphasizes this: Maintain the attack. Even big campaigns take over one year.
Step 9: keep track of everything. Find out where all of your customers come from.
Step 10: Improve in all areas. Improve the message, the media, the budget, the results and profit.