Some forms of marketing can be prohibitive and sometimes do not generate the results you need for your company. If you are operating a small business, ineffective and expensive marketing efforts can considerably erode your financial resources and at the same time, you won’t be able to generate enough returns to cover the losses. Marketing efforts need not be expensive to bring desired results. If financial resources are limited, a company should strive to be creative and resourceful to ensure that a campaign will generate returns. This is the idea behind guerrilla marketing.

This marketing tactic promotes a good or service by infusing their campaigns with the element of surprise or make use of interactions that consumers might think is unconventional. What sets guerrilla marketing apart from traditional marketing methods is that it has a much smaller budget, and it puts emphasis on having smaller groups of promoters who will get the word out in a specific location instead of a wide-spread media campaign. Guerilla marketing is not for all goods and services though. In most instances, these techniques work for more “edgy” products, and are usually targeted to younger buyers who are more receptive to these kinds of advertising campaigns.

There are plenty of activities attributed to guerrilla marketing, and some of them can be used to generate some needed buzz for your store. One would be viral marketing which takes advantage of the high traffic and pass-along rate of social networking platforms to introduce or bring attention to a particular product or business. Advertising material using this technique can be delivered via word-of-mouth communication or through sharing of different media, like video clips, online.

Live-in marketing is also used by a number of guerrilla marketers. This activity involves handing out samplers of your store’s offerings to old and new customers with the intent of establishing or strengthening client’s relationship to the brand. The intent behind this approach is for the buyer to initiate free word of mouth promotions and referrals, and to make him or her loyal to the brand.

In addition, you may try using packs of tissues or napkins to introduce your company’s offerings. As the term suggests, it makes use of personalized napkins to deliver advertising material. The use of customized napkins for marketing purposes started in Japan, and promoters usually hand out these customized napkins in high-traffic areas, the subway station for instance.

There are a number of advantages to the use of custom napkins, and one of them is that they are more likely to be accepted by customers because of their utility. Unlike flyers which are tossed into the nearest trash bin most of the time, personalized napkins are kept by consumers. Also, the advertisement on the package is more likely to be retained since they are repeatedly exposed to it every time they use the napkin.