Online Gorilla Marketing

So how can you publicise your event or campaign without a big budget or lots of resources?


Well the answer is using volunteers and thinking outside the box. Whatever you want to promote you need to think about who your audience are and where they are going to read about it. Your website, enews, Twitter and Facebook are obvious and your “warm” audiences will read your stories, but you need to work much harder to ge to new audiences.


Think about what you are promoting. If it is something to do with animals or pets you need to find the websites of people who love that animal, if it is an outdoor event then think about the people who participate or watch that event.


A perfect job for a volunteer; search for that audience and create a spreadsheet or database with the website, email, name and any other contact details they can find. So if you want to organise a duck race then who uses the river, what outdoor sports take place there, which community and local groups are around. If you are organising the sale of a set of paintings of a horse race then where are the racing enthusiasts.


Once you have a list of websites and emails put together a set of resources for them to use, either to be emailed to them or load the resources onto a web page. Resources would include name, description, date, time, directions, maps, logo, maybe a paragraph suitable for email newsletters, printed materials or the web, maybe a poster or leaflet they can print, a contact address – whatever you can offer.


Then send a polite, short, informative email to all the webmasters or admin contacts of the sites you have listed asking them to talk about the event, publicise it to their members, and directing them to all the resources you have thoughtfully put together for them.


There are a huge number of amateur groups out there with website, blogs and email newsletter who really have very little to say to each other because they “do” whatever the group is about , so they are desperate for content. And if you think that’s mad think about how many organisations struggle for news stories to keep their websites fresh or to put in their enews.


Send them something on topic, interesting to their readers and outside their normal conversation and a very large number will publicise it for you.