What is Guerrilla Marketing?

‘Guerrilla’ – a word so intense, it drives you to think strong, focus undivided, imagine quick and smart with atypical tactics. When put together with the word ‘Marketing’, it gives you a whole new world of unconventional advertisement strategies to promote a product, a service, or a brand.The term ‘Guerrilla Marketing’ was coined, introduced, and popularized in the year 1984 by Leo Burnett’s Creative Director – Jay Conrad Levinson, which is used as a publicity and promotion tool by many small and medium-sized business ventures.                         

Guerrilla Marketing for Your Business

Always remember: If people don’t know what you do, they can’t buy from you. But if people don’t see what you do, they won’t buy from you. The journey from can’t – to – won’t is very short and can easily be demolished permanently if you give the audience extra chances to see you. And what can be better than an interesting guerrilla marketing technique – Promotional T-Shirts for Business.

Why Choose Promotional T-Shirts for Business?

There are three types of Guerrilla Marketing:  Ambient, Ambush, and Viral. While Ambient Marketing is a way to advertise your product on nearly every available physical surface around you to catch as many eyeballs with intelligent and effective use of atmosphere; Ambush Marketing and Viral Marketing stand a little behind in the competition.

Now, we are not here to give you 101 marketing tips but to drive your focus to a unique and trendy guerrilla marketing choice – ‘Promotional T-Shirts’.

Guerilla marketing is all about creating a high impact in exchange for low cost and customized printed promotional t-shirts are a great tool for successful business campaigns. In fact, promotional t-shirts for business are one of the most effective and oldest techniques for marketing.

Reasons: Why Promotional T-Shirts Are an Ultimate Tool for Guerrilla Marketing

As stated above, show your audience that you exist and soon you will have a queue outside your window. Let’s have a look at the simple reasons that make promotional t-shirts the first choice when it comes to effective guerrilla marketing without being obvious about it.

1. Cost-Effective

To not sound rude, let’s use the word cost-effective instead of cheap. Yes, promotional t-shirts for businesses are a low-cost resource to catch the attention of your potential customers. Don’t get it?

Well, typically, standard physical billboard costs average $750 to $1,500 per month in rural areas, $1,500 to $2,000 in small to midsize cities, and $14,000 and up in larger markets. Whereas, digital billboards can cost more than $15,000. Of course, several factors affect outdoor advertising costs, including location, format, circulation, demographics, impressions, length of play, etc. but these are short-lived advertisement techniques due to their limited shelf life.

However, promotional t-shirt printing starts from just $3.95 per unit (for large quantities) and $20-$30 per t-shirt if you are purchasing a very small amount. Again, the cost may increase a little depending on several factors like base color, number of colors used to print the design, etc. but unlike outdoor advertising, promotional t-shirts don’t have a limited shelf life. Extra colors will (obviously) cost extra money but that can be an increased difference of merely $2-$3 per t-shirt. However, due to the long shelf life, you can wear them for a much longer time and they are a low-cost and low-maintenance advertising investment.

If you see it like this – getting a dozen staff to wear your promotional t-shirts for business means getting a dozen walking billboards for your company at a very affordable price. (Now who’s smiling!)

2. High Visibility

How many times do you read a billboard while driving? Or while returning from a hectic day at the office, do you have the interest to look out of the metro train to again see a big rectangular screen? The answer is very simple… No.

Nobody likes to see another screen with bright lights staring at you with an advertisement that doesn’t concern you.

And thus, again, we say that promotional t-shirts have a better and brighter future. For good, if a person is standing next to you wearing a printed promotional t-shirt, chances are that you will notice it if it is vibrant in color, has some catchy message, or simply your brand logo. And all you need is a glance. That one look… and your brand has already entered their mind. Well not to be very ambitious, at least the logo and the message were delivered. And if one sees your brand logo or the message, again and again, it gets stuck somewhere in the mind and thus creates a retention value for your product due to the ripple effect.

Have you watched the2015 movie ‘Focus’ with Will Smith in the lead role? In the film, there was a scene where he (Will Smith) explains how he conned a man by showing him one particular number over and over again in different places to later profit from his focus on that number. It is the same game, just ethical!

A promotional t-shirt carries your logo, a message that you want your potential customers to read, and/or the advertisement that you want to spread. And nothing is more visible than a promotional t-shirt worn by anybody in the public. You must have seen that brands try and get their people, wearing customized promotional t-shirts, sitting in key seats in the stadium to maximize the opportunity of their logo being seen by the crowd.

Or you must have seen in swarming central parks, representatives in promotional t-shirts with logo and message, handing out promotional products, free samples, or flyers. Don’t get fooled with that smile, all they want you is to read their t-shirts.

3. Flexibility

The best thing about customized promotional t-shirts is your ability to share a message. You can decide how long or short it can be. You can have a long message as much as you want but limit it so that people can (actually!) read it. Your logo can be resized according to the rest of the content. Also, you can add a call to action to your printed promotional t-shirts by adding your business address and contact number.

You can be creative too, you can play with your choice of colors, you don’t have to limit to a defined size. Of course, you can’t go beyond the total t-shirt size but you can have your design without making it look cluttered. The flexibility with this guerrilla marketing technique makes it stand out from other similar ideas in the group. The opportunities are endless if you have a perfect idea.

So, what are your waiting for?

Get ready with your promotional t-shirt design for an effective, long-lasting, and catchy guerrilla marketing technique for your business and let it flourish!