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When you start a business without much capital, you have no budget for marketing.
The early sales won't come from paid ads, influencers and affiliates, social media or TV.
Your first sales will come from your friends and family. Your existing network. Your neighbors and their friends.
You will have to rely on old-school tactics that don't require a ton of cash to generate sales.
Things like cold calls, cold-emails, flyers, business cards, and physically knocking on doors.
But then what? What happens when you exhaust your network of friends and family? What happens when you’ve served your first, most obvious customers and then you need to find more?
Where do you go and what do you do to get the word out about your business?
That’s when it’s time to consider guerrilla marketing.
The way people think about marketing (and the way marketing majors are taught marketing) is wild to me.
They immediately jump to spending money on ads. Branding. Flashy commercials. Highly edited videos. A beautiful website. $100K+ budgets.
That stuff is important for mature companies, but it is totally out of reach for your everyday broke entrepreneur trying to get their first venture off the ground.
Here is the cold hard truth:
In the early days you must do things that do not scale. The hard stuff. The common things that everyone knows to work but that most people are unwilling to do because they are difficult.
For example, we didn’t spend a dollar on main-stream marketing at my company until 2017, six years after we began.
By then, we were doing $2 million + in annual revenue. It was then, and only then, that we ran our first Google Ad and did our first paid promotion on social media.
Instead, we got scrappy.
In the spring of 2013, we bought a 16’ box truck that was 10 years old on the south side of Chicago for $2,200.
We loaded it with supplies—20,000 flyers, 40 boxes of sidewalk chalk, tape, t-shirts, and moving boxes.
I drove from Chicago to Boston where my girlfriend, now wife, was doing a clinical rotation at Harvard to become a registered dietician.
I crashed on her couch for two months and spent eight hours a day sneaking into dorms sliding a flier under every door.
I personally have been in every dorm in the city of Boston at MIT, Northeastern, Boston University, Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, Emerson, and a few others.
I know these campuses like the back of my hand still to this day.
We did the stuff that didn’t scale.
I got up many mornings at 6am to write chalk advertisements in high traffic areas on campus where we knew our customers would walk at 8am.
Instead of drawing elaborate ads that took up too much time, I simply wrote “Student Storage, StorageSquad.com” over and over and over again.
I’ve written those words a few thousand times in my life, and when I got going, I could lay down three ads in a minute.
I’ve worn holes in the knees of my jeans many times. I’ve handed out popsicles along with coupons for storage in high traffic areas of campus.
None of it was sexy. Not a single one of these strategies has ever come up in any marketing class…ever. None if it was scalable and easy. None of it was new.
But it all worked really well.
Signups began rolling into our inbox faster than I could believe, and by mid-April I had to switch the chalk advertisements to recruiting employees:
My text read: “$15 an hour + tips. Flexible schedule. StorageSquad.com/Apply”
That worked, too. We found great employees with these chalk advertisements on all of our campuses over the following years.
Through guerrilla marketing, we got our entire business off the ground.
But it’s not just us.
My brother runs a lawn care company in Bloomington, Indiana.
Every April he buys about 100 bandit signs— those little signs you stake into the ground near intersections—that read “Lawn care and weed control. Great prices and quality work.”
He puts them all around town and replaces them when they’re taken down. Do they work? Yes!
More than half his new clients cite the signs as the way they found out about his company.
He uses guerrilla marketing to attract employees, too. He puts up flyers at gas station pumps and advertises $20/hour for lawn care help. He’s hired more than five employees that way. No job boards. No LinkedIn recruiting.
I’m a partner in a pest control company that operates under the brand names Spidexx and BugShark. We have one main competitive advantage: Door-to-door sales.
Not scalable. Not flashy. Not sexy. No crazy branding.
Just groups of clean cut, smooth talking sales people who go door-to-door with a clipboard asking people to sign up for pest control services. It works wonders.
In this day and age, where it feels as if all of life has gone online, a crew of 8-10 salespeople can still sell $1 million worth of contracts in one summer and drastically grow a business. It is wild.
The big idea here is that everything you think you know about marketing is not applicable to your small business.
The marketing books are wrong. Large social media ad budgets. Flashy branding events. Company swag. Giveaways. Commercials and paid media.
What actually works for small business:
Figuring out where your customers are and getting in front of them in unscalable, common, sweaty ways.
I knew exactly where my customers lived and went to class. So I simply got in front of them in as simple of a way as possible.
Most people are not willing to do this work. Getting rejected is hard. And getting rejected in person is brutal.
People would rather spend more money on Google Ads or Facebook Ads. They don’t like managing teams who go door-to-door. They don’t like putting bandit signs out at 5am. They don’t like running around campus with sidewalk chalk.
You are not most people. Your competitors aren’t willing to do the hard, non-scalable stuff. If they do it, they’ll stop it as soon as they get a full schedule or a few more customers than they can handle. Make it a priority. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. If you are willing to do it you can grow your business beyond your wildest dreams.
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