Week 6 – MBA6101 – Guerrilla Marketing

In Guerrilla Marketing's Chapter 6 Selecting the Most Lethal Marketing Methods, Levinson shares how crucial it is for an organization to have a marketing calendar that clearly plans and tracks all marketing activity, by channel, with the cost and description for each. The book is quite dated and today the calendar is often referred to as the Tactical Media Plan, which has the paid media channels; however, one should also have view that includes owned (marketing you control that includes your website YT channel, social, etc.) and earned (when someone mentions your brand/company or posts an image or vid to social that wasn't created by or paid for by you)--all should have performance metrics that should be tracked, reported and adjusted according to the business activity that is generated (or not!) as a result.

Levinson is spot-on when he says that of the two, reach (# of unique people that saw your ad) and frequency (now called impressions), it is frequency that is best since this is the # of times the ad was displayed, regardless of whether or not it was clicked. If an ad gets 50,000 impressions and had a reach of 10,000 people, that means that 10,000 unique users saw the ad approximately 5 times.

In addition, the message being delivered that reaches the customer with 'x' frequency is also very important because "it is not necessary to say everything to everybody, nor is it possible". This is so very true. And even Fortune 100 companies know this as budgets are sometimes constrained and choices must be made that take into account past investments in media channels and focus must drive what is chosen for activation. Which ones do you choose? He provided an answer to that: "choose as many as you can do well." I cannot stress this enough to my own clients, past and present. Which ones are working hardest for you? Which is most effective at driving customers to your retail outlet, to your website, to schedule a service with you? What does customer behavior tell you in terms of what their needs and wants are? Knowing the needs and wants, should that be in the marketing message or advertising--it might influence a new customer to close the deal with your product or service. Track, learn, adjust, and (hopefully!) grow.

Lastly, Levinson stresses the importance of convenience to the customer in the context of providing as many varying forms of payment for your organization's product or service. Making it a hurdle will cost you more, in loss of customers. Getting and retaining customers is something a strong Tactical Media Plan can assist with delivering.