I grinned when I read this in a client’s email today:

We need ideas that bring in revenue….any ideas?

I sent the following back to my client:

How to increase revenue? Print off this list: Guerrilla Marketing’s 100 Marketing Weapons and circle some new weapons.

We’ve all heard of Jay Conrad Levinson’s book GUERRILLA MARKETING. Levinson’s idea is to get you to promote your business the way successful guerrillas conduct warfare–using cheap or even free tactics that are really effective. Jay got even more practical in GUERRILLA MARKETING WEAPONS. On his website, www.gmarketing.com, he has been kind enough to post the book’s table of contents (which is a list of the weapons) on his website.

Here are some of my personal favorites:

  • Weapon #68: Online marketing – As Mitch Joel reminds us, spend money on advertising that catches your prospects when they’re motivated to buy!
  • Weapon #28: Giver vs Taker Stance – Customers like it when they gain surplus while interacting with a company, whether or not that surplus is “economic.”
  • Weapon #2: Marketing plan and Marketing calendar – Marketing by nature is multi-touch. Salespeople use alerts and reminders and all that to get their client interactions just on time…marketers should too.

Every single one of these weapons will technically help your business. However, randomly picking ideas and trying them is the definition of ad hoc marketing. To paraphrase Mitch Joel in Six Pixels again: “Don’t start with HOW we are going to use a particular marketing tactic. Start with WHY should we be using it in the first place?” What we’re talking about is weapon #1.