Start Small, Think Big: The Essentials of Grassroots Marketing

For anyone just starting out in the business world, marketing and advertising are essential. Often, small businesses have a tight budget at their disposal and not a lot of it can be dedicated to marketing purposes. That being said, new entrepreneurs are often being forced to rely upon alternative, more cost-effective marketing methods.

One such method is the so-called grassroots marketing. This post will try to examine some of the main principles behind the concept of grassroots marketing and teach you how you can implement it into your own marketing strategy.

What is Grassroots Marketing?

Originally, the entire “grassroots” concept didn’t have much to do with marketing. It was first used in politics. A grassroots movement uses people in a specific area or community as a base for a political movement. Throughout history, such movements inspired smaller groups of people (let’s say community members) to contribute to their cause through self-organization, thus “organically” spreading their ideology.

The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement perfectly exemplifies the grassroots concept. It all started with a spontaneous group of people fed up with the practices of Wall Street and ended up involving millions of people protesting for the same cause.

A similar principle applies to grassroots marketing. Marketers use grassroots campaigns to target a specific audience, hoping they would spread their campaign message organically, via word of mouth or in any other (cost-)effective way.

Grassroots marketing campaigns are often characterized by the use of unconventional marketing techniques. In most cases, they cost less than traditional marketing but can yield great results (though sometimes they are a hit or miss).

Grassroots Marketing vs. Guerilla Marketing

Grassroots marketing and guerilla marketing are often used interchangeably to mean the same thing. But still, there are some important differences between the two marketing approaches.

According to Investopedia, guerrilla marketing is defined as

“a marketing tactic in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service. Guerrilla marketing is different than traditional marketing in that it often relies on personal interaction, has a smaller budget, and focuses on smaller groups of promoters that are responsible for getting the word out in a particular location rather than through widespread media campaigns.”

In other words, companies using guerrilla marketing use the occasional in-your-face promotion to share their brand message via word-of-mouth or viral marketing so as to reach wider audiences at a low (or no) cost.

In their guerrilla marketing campaign, Axe Body Spray used stickers to alter the classic “exit man” sign so as to appear to be running away from a group of women chasing him. If you’re looking for additional inspiration, here are 20 more guerrilla marketing campaign examples.

Grassroots marketing, on the other hand, starts from the ground up (as its name suggests). Instead of shocking or surprising a large pool of people, you target a smaller, specific group, hoping they would spread your marketing message to a greater target audience.

Why Grassroots Marketing Really Works

– It’s cost-effective. If you’re looking to start a marketing campaign on a tight budget, grassroots marketing might just be the thing for you.

– It targets smaller, highly-segmented audiences (at first). Unlike guerrilla marketing campaigns, which are often designed to reach as many people as possible, grassroots marketing campaigns usually target a very specific demographic.

– It enables audiences direct interaction with your brand. This makes it more likely to lead to the so-called word of mouth promotion.

How to Start a Successful Grassroots Marketing Campaign

1. Get to know your target audience

Before you even think about starting your grassroots marketing campaign, you need to determine your target audience.

Keep in mind that your initial efforts need to target a specific, niche group that already has a certain interest in what you have to offer (as you want them to spread your campaign message further on).

The better you know your target audience, the easier it will be for you to create content that will stick with them and, even more importantly, spread like wildfire. That being said, you should start your campaign by creating your ideal customer personas and/or reaching out to the top influencers (Instagram influencers influencing the most these days) in your niche.

2. Play the emotions card

More often than not, people make decisions based on their emotions. And marketers and entrepreneurs have been using this to their own advantage ever since the dawn of marketing.

Emotions play an important role in creating viral content. Emotional appeal is one of the key components of a perfect quiz. And, of course, emotionally-driven content plays an important role in grassroots marketing too.

Great marketing campaigns will appeal to people’s emotions and boost their ego. Usually, content that causes people to feel joy, amusement, or awe is much more likely to influence their decision to pay for a particular product or service.

Let’s take WestJet, the Canadian airline company, as an example. They created a holiday campaign that capitalized on emotions. They managed to play the emotions card by creating a campaign around two things that make people happy and all emotional – holiday season and adorable kids.

The result? More than 48 million YouTube views and a campaign people are still talking about with the smile on their face. How did they manage to do it? By leveraging the positive emotions.

3. Pull off a unique publicity stunt

When I wrote “a publicity stunt”, what instantly came to my mind is Red Bull and their amazing PR stunts. From extreme sports videos to daring leaps from the edge of the space, Red Bull has mastered the art of leveraging publicity stunts for their marketing efforts.

Of course, it’s easy to grab attention if you can afford to send a man to the edge of space and have him free-fall out of a ship that carries your logo on it while the entire world watches it broadcast live. Just like Red Bull did with their Stratos publicity stunt.

But what if you’re not Red Bull-rich and can’t afford such high-level publicity stunts? There are still ways to grab your audience’s attention by performing smaller stunts that show off the uniqueness of your company or brand.

A viral video, a great piece of content, a street performance, as long as it’s shareworthy (whether on social media or as the word of mouth), it’ll be a great starting point for your grassroots marketing efforts.

4. Start a trend or a movement

Okay, I know it’s not as simple as it sounds, but in the world of social media, now it’s easier than ever. In some cases, all it takes is for several people to share a piece of content and you could be looking at a trend in the making (which is, in fact, the pure essence of grassroots marketing).

Remember the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? The whole world went nuts for it! And, rumor has it, all it took to start it was a post by Pete Frates, a former baseball player who suffers from ALS himself.

The results? More than $115 million raised for ALS research. Grassroots marketing 101.

Extra tip – if you don’t feel you can start a trend on your own, jump in on one. The diverse Reddit community can be a perfect source of what’s trending and what not, so make sure to keep an eye on all those popular reddits and subreddits and leverage them for your marketing efforts.

5. Back a cause or support a charity

Backing a cause outside your scope of work is an excellent way of improving your brand’s image and showing to the world that you care. Charity work is noble and beneficial for numerous reasons, but from a strictly marketing perspective, it’s an extremely effective outreach method that enables you to target a specific community.

Let’s say you’re a company that deals with promoting a healthy lifestyle and you’ve decided to support a charity marathon. Once your audience learns that you’re backing causes that are aligned with their interests, they’re more likely to favor your brand in the long run.

That’s why numerous brands and companies choose to team up with a local shelter, a charity organization, or to support a specific cause or event. Whatever you decide to support, make sure it matches your audience’s interests.

Do a proper job at it and grassroots marketing will start to kick in, causing the word of your charity work to spread like wildfire.

Some of these examples and ideas show that you don’t necessarily need a huge budget to start seeing results with your marketing. But what you certainly need is a lot of creativity and patience. Do it right and grassroots marketing could create enormous buzz around your company, organically growing your audience and increasing your brand awareness.