Guerrilla marketers know that success involves not only choosing the right guerrilla marketing weapons, but also using them as effectively as possible. Appearance plays a major role in the effectiveness of your guerrilla marketing program. You must always be “on,” projecting yourself in as favorable a way as possible.
Graphic design plays a major role in determining the identity you project in your marketing materials. From the appearance of your ads, brochures, business cards, newsletters, presentation visuals, and web site, prospects will make instant decisions about your credibility and ability to satisfy their needs. Accordingly, it’s vital that you become aware of some of the subtle influences that can promote or hinder the identity you project to clients and prospects. After analyzing your current marketing materials, you may want to redo some of them in order to project a fine-tuned and positive identity.
Appearance plays a major role in the effectiveness of your guerrilla marketing program.
This chapter also focuses on the identity you project to clients and prospects who meet you face-to-face.
Are you best described as neat and clean or casual? Is it possible to figure out what you had for breakfast yesterday from your shirt? Do you need a haircut? Appearance plays a major role in determining the identity you project in print, in person, and online.
Describing Your Business to Your Prospects
You can have the best product or service in the world, but many potential clients won’t be interested in your professional services unless you can convince them in a very personal way. There are two steps you should consider to define your marketing message. Let’s take a short quiz to see how well you accomplish this.
Step 1
Describe your business in ten seconds or less, using seven words or less. The goal here is to create focus and to arouse curiosity.
Example 1: “We coach businesses to increase their profits.”
Example 2: “We sell computers at the lowest prices.”
How would you describe your business in seven words or less?
Step 2
After engaging a person’s interest, you can describe your business in more detail, using an interactive conversational style. Be sure to address the benefits of your service and your competitive advantage. Use words that inspire.
How would you describe your business in more detail?
Presenting Yourself
Guerrilla marketers realize that their clients and customers judge their competence at every point of contact. So guerrilla marketers pay constant attention to the way they present themselves and strive for constant improvement. There are two categories of presentations: time-lapse and realtime.
Time-lapse presentations are characterized by a delay between the time the guerrilla marketer prepares his or her message and the time clients or prospects read it.
Time-Lapse Presentations
Time-lapse presentations are characterized by a delay between the time the guerrilla marketer prepares his or her message and the time clients or prospects read it. The message may be prepared hours, days, weeks, or months ahead of time. As a result, time-lapse presentations are one-way communications: They cannot be changed on the fly because they can’t observe every reader’s reaction.
This delay between creation and reading places a great burden on the appearance or formatting of the guerrilla’s message. The entire message must compensate for the facial expressions, gestures, and vocal intonations that readers can’t see but use to judge messages that are delivered face to face. As a result, time-lapse communications are extremely detail intensive. Formatting errors, such as the random placement of text and graphics on a page, the inconsistent use of color and type, or constantly changing typeface and type size undermines the message. Likewise, editing problems like transposed words or spelling errors destroy the identity of competence and professionalism guerrilla marketers strive to project at every point of contact.
There are three categories of time-lapse communications:
1. Print. Ads, brochures, business cards, newsletters, proposals, and reports.
2. Online. Your web site.
3. E-mail. Including e-mail sent to clients as well as postings to online forums.
We discuss web sites and e-mail in more detail in a later chapter.
Real-time presentations are two-way communications.
Real-Time Communications
Real-time presentations are two-way communications. Guerrillas not only enhance their message with gestures by varying their tone of voice, but also drive home their point by maintaining eye contact and occasionally smiling. Guerrillas can alter their real-time presentation by observing their client’s reaction to their words. They can read their client’s body language and react accordingly.
There are two types of real-time presentations:
1. Telephone. Using incoming or outgoing calls to communicate with clients.
2. Face-to-face. One-to-one or group presentations in a conference room or at a speaker’s podium.
“You only have one chance to make a good first impression.”
You Are Always On-Stage
Whether you know it or not, you’re marketing yourself every day. And to lots of people! You’re marketing yourself to make a sale, warm up a relationship, get a job, get connected, and get something you deserve. You’re always sending messages about yourself—either intentionally or unintentionally.
Intention
Guerrillas control the messages that they send—it’s all about intention! Non-guerrillas send unintentional messages, even if those messages sabotage their overall goals in life. They want to close a sale for a consulting contract, but their inability to make eye contact or the mumbled message they leave on an answering machine turns off the prospect.
There are really two people within you—your accidental self and your intentional self.
Guerrillas send no unintentional messages. Unintentional messages erect an insurmountable barrier. Your job: Be sure there is no barrier. There are really two people within you—your accidental self and your intentional self. Most people are able to conduct about 95 percent of their lives by intent. But that’s not enough. It’s the other 5 percent that can get you in trouble—or in clover. We’re not talking phoniness here. The idea is for you to be who you are and not who you aren’t—to be aware of what you’re doing, aware of whether or not your actions communicate ideas that will help you get what you deserve.
Take a personal inventory. How do you send messages and market yourself right now?
• Your appearance
• You also market with your eye contact
• Body language
• Your habits
• Your speech patterns
• Your letters, e-mail,