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FOLLIS GUERRILLA MARKETING
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Marble Church (in NYC) wanted to get on the radar of hip, young, affluent New Yorkers. The minister wanted the marketing effort to start late summer. Though the church was Manhattan-based we knew the target audience spent weekends in the Hamptons. Our solution was an airplane banner flying over those beaches during that last, long, Labor Day weekend of summer.
See the The New York Times press. This Mobile Billboard cruising around Manhattan was another low cost, high concept element of our effective Guerilla Marketing effort. Like the airplane banner it was the perfect marriage of media and message. 
The untraditional effort not only attracted the attention of our target audience, it also attracted national press in The New York Times and ADWEEK, TIME magazine, USAToday, The New York Daily News, the international press, and is a featured case in a college marketing text Principles of Marketing (Prentice-Hall).  We also got on TV. (View the "God Squad" TV interview about the campaign.)
More importantly, Marble reported a 31% membership increase two years after the campaign began. What was initially slated as a one-shot marketing effort in '98 is now a highly successful, on-going 14-year campaign. The Marble minister called the campaign "brilliant" and said it was "doing great things for the church." (Hear full interview.)  Another effective Guerrilla Marketing tactic utilizes postcards listing the many church programs. But rather than incur the time and cost of mailing thousands of postcards, we opted to do something cheaper and smarter: use the church membership as a sales force. Have the 6,000 passionate church goers become "Johnny Appleseeds" for Marble. We know the members love the campaign, so we knew they'd be happy to be part of the effort. 15,000 cards were be printed for disbursement -- in pew racks and at church events during the next several months.
And, here's another way we distributed some cards. __________________________________________________________ Street Marketing is another form of Guerrilla Marketing. Our client "The South Street Seaport Line" was a much shorter, and better, NYC boat tour that competed with the more famous, and longer, "Circle Line" tour.  Our Street Marketing Swat Team passed out promotional barf bags to tourists who were about to buy Circle Line tickets. Free shuttle buses would then whisk them down the road to "The Better Boat Tour" of New York. __________________________________________________________ Viral Marketing and Viral Videos Online Viral Marketing is another type of Guerrilla Marketing. ("Viral" means spreading and multiplying exponentially -- like a virus.) In the fall of '08 Follis Inc combined its passion for public service with expertise for marketing and created an email ad (that could be easily forwarded) that encouraged voting. Over a two month period the viral ad quadrupled site traffic on follisinc.com. Presumably, it also got a few folks to vote. And, this Viral Video campaign for our client, DiResta Speech Communications, got written up in The Wall Street Journal. Video 1 Video 2 Video 3
Client Letters / Marketing Therapy for Small Business |