Guerrilla marketing is a great strategy when you are tight on budget and want to do something out of the box that could potentially generate a lot of publicity. It can be in many forms—street art, posters, stickers, packaging, installations—but can they take the shape of paid search?Definitely! Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

You’re a new company:

People are not yet familiar with your brand; therefore search volume for your brand terms is low and bidding on non-branded keywords could be quite costly, especially if your industry is a saturated marketplace on paid search. Think of a promotion that can be described with a single word or short phrase and then put up posters or stickers in busy public areas (or even create street art) that ask people to search that word or phrase online. Consider excluding your company logo from your creatives so that you can stimulate even more curiosity. When they search that word, voila—your ad appears!

You’re a more mature company:

You need to boost sales but want to do something different. Consider launching a five-day campaign that leads to an exclusive sale in which there’s one ad per day and each ad is the clue as to when the next ad (clue) will appear. The ads will contain numbers that when combined, make up the actual date and time of the sale. Include a countdown timer in each ad that mentions something like “X-hours left until this clue disappears!” in order to increase urgency and encourage people to take note of the ad.

You’re an established brand with a loyal following:

Let’s say you’re doing a promotion to maintain fan engagement in the form of a local scavenger hunt. Announce on your social media that clues will be dropped in certain locations of the city. Each clue could be 1-2 words that are spray painted onto a sidewalk, and when combined, all of the clues form a sentence that the person searches. It is only this exact sentence that will trigger your ad to show and it will lead them to a landing page where they complete the rest of the scavenger hunt.The key is to choose a word or phrase that has a low cost-per-click and low advertiser competition, so remember to do your research before launching a paid search guerrilla marketing campaign!Tip: Use exact match for your keywords to reduce irrelevant traffic.

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