Local Social Guerilla On The Beach - Is That a Drink?

Guerilleros, the battle has been taking the best of me – not because I’m losing, but because I’m fighting too many

But I’ve got some interesting stats to show, and if you’re trying to conquer ground in your local market, light up your best cigar and join me for the kill.

I’m going to briefly analyze the highlights of two completely different companies that we have DOMINATED their local market (the same market, by the way) through smart, interactive, social media guerilla.

First, the market: we’re talking of a highly-scattered, hugely diverse population of about 20k residents in the Outer Banks of North Carolina (Northeastern NC). If you’ve been to any beach towns outside of NJ, you know the deal: middle-class locals, broke surfers, and the rich retired make for a tough crowd to target.

But…. what brings people together better than TV these days?

If you said accidents on the highway, you’re probably right too, but I’m talking about Facebook!

So let’s get to the nitty gritty:

The Outer Banks Gym

Community Interaction Fuels Viral Exposure

Their campaign actually started with PPC, and that brought the good-ol’ ppc lead: mickey mouses, john does, jane eres.. Probably because the gym was already established on the beach, the “hit-em-over-the-head” PPC approach did not work very well. The market had been introduced to the product and made up their mind about. (It did work very well for Turists, but let’s save that for later)

When PPC started to get annoying & expensive, I felt it was my duty as social guerillero to set them up with a blog – and since I was there quite often, I took pictures and footage of what was going on in the gym from time to time.

Do you see any work of genious here? Me neither.

What do you, smart guerillero, think happened? Well, a series of things:

Internally, the gym members were all excited to have a place where they could see each other (anybody said online community yet?), and they were even more excited to see our posts going to Facebook – where their friends and family could see how much weight they lost, blah blah..

Externally is where the fun began – It was great having the gym’s profile on Facebook feeding video and news all over the place, but it wasnt until one of their students, completely impartial to their marketing efforts, started posting his own videos of the training, the races, etc… that things really kicked off.

See what happened here? A happy member, posting about his good time at the gym, on his own Facebook profile, started a massive viral reaction!

Suddenly, a great part of their own community also started posting their stuff – and the mess was made.

Now, we’ve got people asking on Facebook about the gym’s rates and how they can sign up. And people in other cities asking about our programs, to see if they can find something similar in their places. It’s creating more buzz than PPC ever did. And all it’s taken is a bit of time to take pictures and videos! Check out the gym’s youtube channel:

Now, for the second case:

The Outer Banks Wedding Catering Service

Videos Are Incredibly Powerful For Marketing - Surprise Your Customers!

Again, we also started with PPC – which brought some results, but infimal, and highly volatile – and since they didnt have an actual sales staff to work on those leads, it was up to me to make sure the leads were extra hot so they could close them easy.

This company also owns one of the best restaurants on the beach, and they already had a decent group page on Facebook before my guerilla services were summoned.

The problem here was that all of their prospects came through word-of-mouth (very effective on this tiny market), so they had ZERO marketing material or experience. Again, there I was with the social guerillero’s killer tool: my camera.

We started shooting their really awesome caterings – this one wedding in corolla was a big hit, and most recently, the owner guided us through the entire footage of this wedding in nags head.

Again, nothing even close to being work of genious, but check this out: footages like this one are still a hot novelty in the industry (specially here in the beach), and we sent the entire restaurant community to go check it out.

They loved it: the company got amazing feedback, and the community received a new influx of members at a very impressive rate. But that wasnt all.

The videos were breaking the seal on that market, but the wedding industry here, specially in the summer, has been dominated by large hotels and event planners. This catering company did not want to compete against a Hilton or a Ramada, but they wanted their piece of that pie.

And where can you compete as equals, without a budget? Exactly – ONLINE!

When we started their Party Catering Blog, the idea was to put all of their knowledge and experience out there, offer great advice to brides and dominate the market through SEO.

At this point, webmaster tools tells me that NONE of the blog’s pages were indexed yet – but thanks to the Facebook exposure, a ton of local websites (realtors, convention centers, towns) have already published our posts on their blogs and our videos are all over the net with “yum” comments.

Can you say Screw Google? Frank Kern would love that!

So there you have it – two small companies, beating old time market leaders because of smart social media guerilla marketing.

I will post more details of our campaigns here as often as I can. If you’re really interested, leave a comment with your question and I’ll answer it really fast. (promise)

If you’re not excited by going into battle alone, I’m available for mercenary work – my guerilla skills are yours, for the right price. That include video editing and distribution, social accounts management, blog set ups, etc…

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