Guerrilla Marketing: Using Cross Promotion to Reach New Customers

We think of guerrilla marketing as any way we can promote our business to new customers without having to spend money. It requires a little thinking outside of the box and forming partnerships with like minded businesses in your area that share your particular customer demographic.

When we owned pizza places we would rotate our box toppers a few times a month with other local businesses in the area. This provided they drop one of our fliers in their customer’s bags at check out. We had great success with dry cleaners, car washes and liquor stores. Give the dry cleaner down the street from you a few hundred door hangers to put on the hangers and you place his coupons on your pizza boxes. It’s a win-win as the cost is limited to you printing off extra specials at Staples. The ROI is much higher than most other forms of direct marketing for new customers and customers seem to see this as a recommendation from that business owner that they also like your business and they will too.

This can be done in every business market we can think of. Make sure the offer is targeted to the audience, carries and expiration date and includes your text message marketing call to action to passively build your list. Make these offers unique with the ability to track them so you can learn which business cross promotion brings you the most sales and traffic. Either increase your efforts with this business or expand the circle with other similar businesses.

Other business owners are receptive to the idea because of the free traffic it brings them and you aren’t coming off as a salesperson to them, just one business owner to another wanting to help each other out. Take an hour next week to visit other owners in your area and start using this guerrilla marketing cross promotion method to reach new customers.