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Energy Services: Guerrilla Marketing - Low-Cost Tactics Maximize Marketing ROI
E SOURCE, May 2004, Pages: 16
In an era of shrinking marketing budgets and rising expectations, energy services marketers have little money to spend and less time to demonstrate the viability of their marketing campaigns. More than ever, the return on any marketing investment must be swift and significant. To address this dilemma, a number of energy service providers (ESPs) are turning to a strategy known as guerrilla marketing.
Unlike traditional marketing, which uses expensive conventional sales and marketing tactics to reach large numbers of prospective customers all at once with the same message, guerrilla marketing relies on a host of low-cost and no-cost tactics to slice through the clutter and quickly establish meaningful customer contact. Imagination, psychology, time, and effort are substituted for the shortfall in available funding.
Rather than relying solely on bill stuffers, billboards, and newspaper advertisements, ESPs are now using contests, kites, coffee, and free television shows to get their messages across. One West Coast utility includes walking tours, table-top events, and fax machines in its arsenal of inexpensive marketing tactics. Body paint, spotlights, and an art contest are just a few of the innovative options being used by a Florida utility. In the Midwest, one multistate ESP deployed a set of stickers that helped it more than double its direct mail response rates. In the Pacific Northwest, an electric cooperative doubled green energy revenues by arranging guided tours of the regions wind farms.
These and other creative efforts are exemplary components of a focused marketing strategy that emphasizes engaging customer experiences, coordinated company activities, two-way customer-to-company communications, and one-to-one relationships that can be expanded over a lifetime to win additional sales, outside referrals, strategic partnerships, or marketing alliances
This report examines how utilities are using guerrilla marketing, a tactic which relies on a host of low-cost and no-cost techniques to quickly establish meaningful customer contact, maximising the return on their marketing investments.
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