14 Questions to Identify Low-Cost Marketing Tools

Jay Conrad Levinson was the father of guerrilla marketing, the concept that businesses can reap greater rewards through the strategic use of no-cost and low-cost marketing tools. He claimed that there are at least 100 guerrilla marketing tools available to any business.

Beyond the standard tool list that Levinson uses, I’ve found it helpful to get marketing teams to work through a specific exercise with fourteen questions to identify marketing tools unique or at least specific to their own businesses.

14 Questions to Customize Marketing Tools for Your Organization

Use the list of strategic thinking questions below with your marketing team. One way is for a team member to identify as many answers to a specific question as possible within a 3 minute period, and then rotate the question to the next team member to build on the list:

1. What do we want to promote?
2. What are our features, benefits & competitive advantages? Which are most meaningful?
3. What communications vehicles are in place?
4. What ideas/words/phrases do we use?
5. Who are experts/partners? What’s notable about them?
6. Where do our audiences congregate (geographically or virtually) and/or receive our messages?
7. What motivates our audiences?
8. How can we get permission and the info to keep marketing to our audiences?
9. What business & personal relationships do we have that could be of assistance?
10. Who would like to be involved with us in growing our business?
11. Who could we help make more successful?
12. What interactions do we have with our audience?
13. What new interactions can we create?
14. What tools or ideas can we steal?

I’ve had a team of 8 to 10 people build a list of more than 200 tools (many of which they'd never thought of using) within a 25 minute period as everyone worked individually using the rotating question approach.

Give this exercise a try at your next staff meeting or planning session, and then go back through your marketing plan to make sure you’re using as many of the tools as possible that you've identified.  – Mike Brown

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