Guerrilla marketing is not traditional advertising—it is not taking out an ad in your local student newspaper or running radio spots. But while guerrilla marketing is street-level, grass-roots marketing, it is more than just standing on a street corner passing out flyers, water bottles, and other swag.
As consumers become more sophisticated in how they experience media, marketers are finding that consumers are also becoming immune to large marketing campaigns. As sophistication grows, consumers tend to tune out the constant barrage of advertising, causing businesses of all sizes, advertisers, and marketers to turn to alternative methodologies to achieve brand awareness and increased profits. An increasingly popular way that marketers are capturing consumers’ attention, creating a buzz around their products, and increasing brand identity and value is through guerrilla marketing.
The term “guerrilla marketing” comes from the seminal book on the subject, Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson—the foremost authority on this type of low-cost, high-impact, nontraditional marketing. But what is guerrilla marketing? And how can the student housing industry implement guerrilla marketing tactics to increase brand awareness, buzz, and ultimately, leases?
As Levinson puts it, “Guerrilla marketing is going after conventional goals using unconventional means.” It’s utilizing your resources and network in nontraditional ways to create buzz about your products, services, and brand. Guerrilla marketing is marketing based on the premise of thinking outside the box, going against the grain. Louis Cater, CEO of the Best Practices Institute, says, “The term guerrilla marketing is easily traced to guerrilla warfare, which utilizes atypical tactics to achieve a goal in a competitive and unforgiving environment.”
Great Guerrilla Marketing Campaigns for Student Housing
- Host a food truck/music festival in your parking lot instead of holding a traditional open house. Get a local radio station to cosponsor the event and do a remote concert and, if possible, get some prominent student athletes to participate in a kissing booth that raises money for a local charity. Having athletes sign autographs is common, but having them run a kissing booth is unexpected.
- Organize human billboards. As your teams are out on the streets passing out fliers, water bottles, and other tchotchkes and swag, take it a step beyond just wearing property T-shirts: Paint your entire street team in your branded colors, put on some crazy wigs, get “funkdafied”—make passing out collateral fun; make it a party! If your local college football fans can do it, so can you! Better yet, get your staff to attend the big game of the year painted in the school’s colors but, instead of wearing the school’s T-shirt, wear your property’s T-shirt.
While these guerrilla marketing campaigns may or may not be appropriate for every property, the point is to look at the resources you have and figure out a way to leverage them to increase your property’s brand awareness within your local community. By utilizing guerrilla marketing tactics, student housing properties will be able to connect with prospective residents on a more personal level and advertise to them in a way that doesn’t feel like advertising, thus capturing their attention in a way that traditional advertising cannot.
A well-planned and executed guerrilla marketing campaign has the potential of achieving thousands of dollars worth of PR on a limited budget. Here at Catalyst, we understand how to use these tactics to create buzz about your property, leading your property to become known as the “it” property to live at and resulting in increased brand awareness, identity, and most importantly, leases.