Guerilla Marketing for a Good Cause

This is a brilliant strategy for getting an incredible amount of publicity for a relatively small amount of money (or none, read on). This is especially good if your business is something that resonates with people who listen to Public Radio. The idea is simple:

Offer a Challenge Grant on Public Radio

The process is simple:

1. Pick an amount: $500 or $1000
2. Pick a long time-frame, say 5 - 9AM (Morning Drive-time)
3. Pick a reachable, yet not-to-small of a goal (like 100 new members, or 100 renewing members, or 100 people from your profession)
4. Sit back and listen to your company name repeated over and over and over during key times of the day to a very targeted, loyal audience.

Here are the cool parts:

1. If your challenge is not met, you received several hours worth of free advertising since you were not required to pay out on the challenge. My suggestion is to let it ride... do that all day long until the challenge is met. Ideally you will actually end up donating the money; you want the challenge to be met, its just that if it isn't the first time around, that is just more publicity for you the second, or third times around.
2. When the challenge is finally met, your "advertising dollars" are tax deductible (see your tax professional of course!)
3. and you help a great cause
4. oh, and you build your brand with a very faithful audience

I spent a great deal of time in the car one day during KERA's (DFW Public Radio) last fund-raising drive and I listened to a yoga studio's name all day long (their challenge was not met while I was listening, but they kept letting it ride...)

Go do it tomorrow! Help end the fund raising drive faster (always a good thing) and get some inexpensive, yet very valuable marketing at the same time!

As always, don't forget to follow @keratx and @lincolnmurphy