In the marketing world, the “out with the old, in with new” saying tends to ring true, especially as the social stratosphere continues to evolve and adapt to its audience (think MySpace vs. Facebook). This July, we decided to throw a little curve ball in our marketing efforts and hit the streets.

Street marketing, sometimes considered guerilla, has been around long before the internet and yet, is still highly effective for reaching a company’s target audience. As we ran two guerilla marketing campaigns in unison with a strong social media push, these two marketing tactics proved to be a deadly duo.

Because one of our clients, Pinkberry, is very close to North Avenue Beach, we coordinated with Chicago Sport and Social to hand out flyers for 50% off their Pinkberry to the beach volleyball league players after a Thursday night league. My friend, who plays volleyball on Thursdays, tweeted to me the same night (not knowing I had anything to do with this promotion):

Leading up to the night the flyers were distributed, we were using Pinkberry’s Twitter account to reach out to people tweeting about volleyball in the Chicago area, letting them know of the awesome froyo experience that was yet to come. The response was overwhelming! And the best part, I went in to Pinkberry this week with my friend so she could use her coupon. YUM.

We are also in the process of implementing a combined guerilla and social marketing campaign for WilliamPaid, an online rent payment service. Since we are based in Chicago and it’s an extremely busy rental season, we created some sweet postcards to drop off at popular apartment finding services. We used social media to form relationships with the apartment locators, asking them if it was okay for us to drop off some postcards for their waiting room. We are awaiting some amazing results since the offer is $20 off your rent for the first month and we’re reaching people that are just about to sign a new lease.