Guerilla Marketing Strategies To Unlock Growth With Jason Myers

 

Struggling to get quality leads and clients? 

Not after you listen to my interview with Jason Myers titled: “Guerrilla Marketing Strategies to Unlock Growth.”  

Our guest is Jason Myers, and he advocates for the proven method created by Jay Congrad Levinson, called Guerrilla Marketing that helps you get more clients and leads without expensive mistakes.

He’s put a NEW twist on timeless principle based marketing and business building strategies you won’t want to miss.

 He is the Chairman of Guerrilla Marketing, an owner/investor in several companies, and a best-selling author.

Jason has introduced the Guerrilla concepts into many companies where he had “skin in the game” and helped them accelerate from startups to multi-million dollar companies and also selling. 

In this episode, Jason discusses the stages of growth as well as the breakthrough that these strategies can bring to other entrepreneurs.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

Guerilla Marketing Strategies To Unlock Growth With Jason Myers

How valuable would it be if you could learn proven, time-tested Guerrilla Marketing strategies to help you move the needle to tip one domino that tilts 1,000 to have the little hinge that swings a big door to grow your leads, grow your sales and grow your profits? If that is of interest to you, then you’re going to love this episode. If that’s not of interest, you might want to read something else. I know there are a lot of blogs available you can read now, but if you’re looking for a way to grow your business, we’ve got a definitive expert, arguably, probably the most definitive expert on the concept of guerrilla marketing. He’s the Chairman of Guerrilla Marketing and owner/investor in multiple companies. We got introduced by a mutual friend of ours, Ric Thompson.

Jason is a lifelong guerrilla marketer, a product of the product so to speak. He’s a best-selling author and a mentor. He helps people like you, entrepreneurs, business owners build an entrepreneurial lifestyle design on purpose. He’s a mentor to help you be able to do that. He’s introduced the Guerrilla Marketing concepts into a lot of companies where he’s also got skin in the game and he’s helped them grow from a small startup to a multimillion-dollar revenue. He’s also helped implement these strategies for 7, 8, 9-figure companies as well as helping companies be able to exit with greater growth potential, greater ROI and a whole lot more, even Fortune 50 organizations. His name is Jason Myers. Jason, welcome to the show. How are you?

It’s awesome to be here.

It’s a pleasure to have you on. Jason, you’ve been a product of the Guerrilla Marketing strategies. You’ve now sold over 23 million books in 63 languages. Why are you doing what you’re doing, Jason?

It’s because I owe my entire professional trajectory to the brand. I started Guerrilla Marketing back as a teenager shortly after the first book came out and I realized that the principles work. Human psychology is an interesting thing. As marketers and salespeople and business owners, human psychology and what triggers and motivates people to take action and to buy and to do the things that we want them to do, which is to spend more money with us and be happy about doing that. That stuff has never changed but the tools over time change. When I started doing that book, I said, “This is going to work.” It helped me become successful with my first business and I’ve used it ever since.

Both of us have done this for a couple of decades and there are all kinds of learning curves that we go on. Can you think back to your younger days, maybe your biggest business failure to put some context around this a little bit, maybe the biggest business mistake and what you learned from it and then what others can learn from it too?

My second business was a business because I was so successful with the first one, I thought I knew everything. It happens to a lot of us. We’re smart, we work hard and we’re dedicated. Things go right, we get lucky and then we’re like, “We know everything.” My second business, I applied Guerrilla Marketing to it, grew it fast and promptly grew it into an explosion. That was a big lesson for me that operational excellence is as important. As you start to drive the business’ top line, you create these operational bottlenecks that can explode on you. I dedicated the rest of my life to balance the power of marketing with effective and efficient operations.

'Guerrilla Marketing is about using time, energy, effort, and knowledge over that of money.' Jason Myers Click To Tweet

If I hear you right, we need guerrilla marketing and we need guerrilla operations too. 

It takes both because think about it, as soon as you start growing a business, you create operational bottlenecks. As soon as you start to scale the business up, you run into scaling challenges. You run into those proverbial ceilings, those glass ceilings, and you encounter different crises in the business and you handle those, you handle them well, you get to move to the next level.

If you’re struggling with bottlenecks, you hit a plateau or maybe you’re at a place where you feel like you’re sitting on a gold mine or you’re like the world’s best-kept secret. You’re going to want to stick around because Jason shares some of his insights and wisdom of what he’s learned in many decades. Jason, for somebody who may not be that familiar with guerrilla marketing, which was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in around 1994-ish, what is guerrilla marketing for the laymen reading? 

I’d go back ten more years, 1984. Guerrilla marketing is misunderstood. I speak all over the world mostly to small business owners and entrepreneurs. People have heard the term and they see it in the news all the time. I get Google Alerts every time something is called guerrilla marketing. Most of what gets attributed to as guerrilla marketing is not guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla Marketing is about using time, energy, effort, and knowledge over that of money. It’s all about effective and efficient marketing that’s always focused on profit. A lot of times, people confuse that with marketing stunts. I used an example of one of my presentations, we’ve all heard the story of someone who took off their clothes and ran through a stadium and got arrested by the police. That got called a guerrilla marketing stunt but it was a stunt and it was illegal. If it was illegal, it’s not guerrilla. Guerrilla is about being ethical and always doing the right thing and focusing on getting your message out there, competing against the big boys. I can give you the origin of the term and how he came up with that and why it’s applicable.

Jay was one of those big ad agency guys like a Don Draper kind of person, Mad Men if you’ve seen the series. He worked on all of those big brands: Tony the Tiger, Jolly Green Giant, Michelin Man, Sears DieHard battery, Good Hands of Allstate, Fly the Friendly Skies. You go on and on all of these long-lasting iconic things he and his teams worked on and he retired. He started teaching university at UC Berkeley. When you’re teaching at university, who are you talking to? You are talking to students and people earlier in their careers. What they kept telling was the stuff you’re teaching us is great for a big ad agency and big Fortune 500 budgets, but not for the small guy. What is there for the small guy? There was nothing, which is why he wrote the book and it came up with over 100 things that you could do for lower, no cost to compete against the big brands.

Let’s speak to that a little bit because, at the end of the day, technology platforms give the little guy. That diamond in the rough, so to speak, that hidden gem, that person who if more people knew who they were and would give them a chance to have a bigger business overall. What are a couple of steps somebody could take as a little guy to get started right away to start having a bigger reach, getting more leads, having a bigger impact?

It’s completely overlooked but the truth of it is that everybody’s trying to be cute. Everybody’s trying to be complicated and people forget the basics. It doesn’t matter what part of the business you’re in or what part of life you’re in. When things aren’t going well or you’re not getting the results you want, it’s because you’re not sticking to the basics. If you go back and look at your business and say, “What are the fundamentals that I’m not executing on?” You can execute a handful of those and leapfrog your business. It’s amazing to me as I go around to events, I run into how many people don’t have business cards? If they don’t have a business card, how am I going to follow-up with them? How are they going to follow-up with me if I don’t have anything for them? Does that business card do what it should do, which is to get them in touch with me the way I prefer to be contacted? Is there a compelling reason on that card for them to take some action to engage with my brand? Most people are not doing it. The ones that are doing it are not doing well. It is fundamentally basic.

 

As you’re reading, what’s one step you could take looking at the basics of your business that compels someone, your ideal prospect, your ideal client to want to do business with you? What’s one step that you might be overlooking that if repackaged, repositioned would give you an immediate advantage at low or no cost? Jason, in some of the work that you talked about, you alluded to it a little bit about the idea of profit, marketing stunts versus strategies, these things you can do. I’ve heard some of your work where you talk about a big difference between the focus of profit versus growth. Can you speak to that a little bit?

It’s an affliction in the digital sphere where people want growth at all costs and they sometimes don’t realize what that means. There’s a Harvard Business Review article that came out that talked about the trap that people get into trying to grow fast. We see it with all the unicorn companies out of the Silicon Valley, Venture Capital-backed businesses where they plow a ton of money into them. It’s all about growth rate because we’re trying to drive to an exit before it’s ever worth anything before it ever generates revenue sometimes. For the small guy, you can’t do that. You’ve got to be focused on profit all the time. What I like to talk about is in all of your activities, especially marketing, what you’ve got to be focused on is what are the things I should do more of, less of, and none of? The only way you can answer those questions objectively is you have to be able to monitor and measure what it is you’re doing. Advertising campaigns and ways of marketing that you leverage in your business need to be as trackable as possible.

In the digital sphere, we’re able to track things with query parameters and Google Analytics and all these different ways of measuring pixels and different whatnot. As soon as you go offline, that’s where people lose their marbles. They’re like, “I don’t know how to track that.” It’s simple. Most of the time, you can use a vanity URL, like a short friendly URL. Instead of using one of those URL shorteners like a Bitly or something like that is buy a domain name that is related to what it is that marketing piece is about and forward that to a landing page on your website. That way you can track exactly how many visitors came from that specific marketing piece. That marketing piece could be something that is a banner at a softball field. It could be the URL that is on your fleet vehicles. It could be anything like that rather than your standard company website address, which would look like an organic visitor to you and you’d have no way to attribute that to the $3,000 you spent wrapping your truck, for example.

It’s amazing how many businesses don’t follow this idea that you brought up. This simple idea of tracking either the URL but even another one is the phone number.

I’m a big fan of tracking phone numbers. That was the next piece of that. The friendly URLs, trackable phone numbers, two high-leverage, are effective ways to track stuff.

You might be wondering, “How do I get these things?” You can get a trackable phone number for $1 to $2 each number. It’s not like you’re spending a lot of money, but more importantly, what does it cost you not having the optics, the ability to see where the money you’re spending is producing or not producing results? Wouldn’t you like to have it? Follow Jason’s advice. Set up a simple URL, set up a simple phone number that’s trackable for you to be able to do that. In other work, I’ve heard you describe the growth stages of business. The way you articulate the growth stages of a business is simple and easy to understand. Speak to those growth phases. Maybe it relates as you’re reading, maybe you’re at a place where you’re in startup early-stage mode, but maybe you’re also at a place where you’ve grown and you hit a little bit of a plateau.

Maybe you have a deep desire to free yourself from the business where it’s not predicated on you making it rain every day. In other words, you’d like to delegate, you’d like to have other people responsible for your income as a true entrepreneur or advanced business owner or maybe you’d even one day like to sell or exit your company for a lot of value. Speak to the stages of growth and how they relate to entrepreneurs, business owners now?

'Advertising campaigns and ways of marketing that you leverage in your business need to be as trackable as possible. ' Jason Myers Click To Tweet

There are different ways that I come at this one, I’m describing it and I’ll start with one and I’ll transition to the other because they dovetail. The first is that as you’re getting started and beginning to grow your business, there are certain levels of business where you’re going to have to reinvest in retool and evolve what you’re doing. This is the power of the 1’s, 3’s and 10’s. You start a business, making the first dollar counts. Everybody’s shooting in that business to get to a $100,000, $300,000, $1 million. Everybody wants to be an eight-figure business that we want to get to $10 million. The truth of the matter is that a business that’s at $100,000 of revenue is a job. It’s a hobby that throws off some cash. It becomes a job at $300,000. It becomes a business at $1 million. That business to become a $3 million sustainable business has to evolve substantially from the $1 million business. Evolve to become a sustainable $10 million a year business. Those are the 1’s, 3’s, and 10’s that impact all businesses. I’ve seen it personally up to $30 billion and it keeps repeating itself and it’s completely amazing, but it does.

Along that journey, your business starts as an idea. It’s a glimmer in your eye. You’ve got this fleeting notion, you’re flirting with the idea. Once you circulate that idea around, you take some action, you birth the business. You’d have a newborn business. The question is, can you nurture that newborn? Can you incubate that newborn so that it can become a toddler? You’re going to have trouble when you get to the toddler phase because you’re starting to have to delegate. You need help watching the business and tending to the business and then up through adolescence. Most people reading are at adolescence or earlier. What I tell people when they’re looking to exit the business eventually is always begin looking for the exit before you think you should. Do it while your growth rate is strong, do it while you are enamored with the business. Don’t do it when things get hard and when things start to slow down, that’s the wrong time to try to be selling it.

What is some strategy somebody can put in place similar to the couple of simple ideas you gave with trackable phone numbers, the transparency there? What would be a couple of things that you see as a common factor to help companies grow easier, faster, better?

The single biggest one that I see holding people back is we all have the same plan. The plan is to sell whatever it is we sell and receive value in exchange for that, money hopefully. To do that, it requires people. The customers are people, the people in your business are people and that’s where things break down. The more you can do to systematize and build processes into your business, standard operating procedures, systematizing the business that you make it to where it’s insulated from the rotation of people. It helps you as you’re beginning to scale and you’re bringing on more people. Those people can get up to speed faster. If somebody leaves, it’s not as big of a hole to fill because the person is coming in, grabs the procedures and the processes and they’re off to the races. That’s the single biggest thing everybody needs to do earlier. I get involved sometimes in businesses where they’re looking for the exit and they haven’t done any of that. It is quite a mountain of work with a business that is a thriving going concern with lots of moving parts to document all of this as an exercise. If you do it as you go, it’s far less painless.

As you’re reading, how would you like to be in a place where you could have better processes around your business, about marketing, tracking things, being able to have at least 100 different ways with low cost or no-cost marketing strategies you could put in place to generate more leads, sales and profits? Ideally, you’re starting to get a glance or a glimpse of some of the insight that Jason and Guerrilla Marketing can have for you. In other work, I’ve heard you do and share the idea of the difference between a fluffy horse and a Trojan horse in marketing to attract clients. Speak to that a little bit.

Interestingly, it creates a whole tangent and whirlwind of a storm in my head. Fundamentally, people are trying too hard to focus on what it looks like and feels like as opposed to how effective it is. I was working with a client and they’re concerned about the look of an email being pixel perfect. The right amount of spacing between this button and these letters and whatever. The reality of it is that it isn’t what makes that email effective. What makes that email effective is getting it into the inbox. It has to be opened and then it has to work. The URLs, the links need to work and people sometimes major in the minors. They’re worried about all of this stuff. How many times have you heard that ugly converts better online?

Everywhere. 

 

It’s a true thing with Guerrilla, we’ve had people tell us, “Your landing page for your event sucks.” I’ve had multiple people funnel all these funnel experts and all these graphic design people try to beat that control and they can’t beat it. It’s ugly and I don’t like it, but it works and therefore I don’t care. You have to release the ego of it. I don’t care what it makes us look like if it works, because something that’s pretty that doesn’t work doesn’t do what you needed to do, which is convert people into buyers.

Are you more interested in vanity or getting paid?

That’s the fluffy thing versus the Trojan. You need the hard-hitting stuff that works. Sometimes you’ve got to trick yourself into that and say, “I’m going to let the data prove what works because I don’t know.”

It doesn’t matter what we like, it matters what works. I encourage you as you’re reading, there’s so much wisdom in that one statement that Jason shared that if you tune in on it, you can go on back to basics. It can change the trajectory of your business. Jason, we scratched the surface with some of the insights of Guerrilla Marketing, what you stand for. If people want to go deeper, you’ve got dozens and dozens of books. You’ve got dozens of courses, you’ve got events. You’ve got a whole spectrum for all types of business at all kinds of levels that they’re at. Where can they go to get connected to you, your resources and more?

The best way is at GMarketing.com.

I would encourage you to jump over to GMarketing.com. You’ll find dozens of books, courses, events regardless of where you’re at as a business, whether you’re a 5, 6, 7, 8, 9-figure business, there’s a wealth of resources available to help you get on track to accelerate your business. To set it up to be able to exit it, to get yourself free in the business and also if you’re planning on selling as well. Jason, you’ve worked with hundreds of thousands of clients over the years. Things change at a rapid pace. In short, what do you see as the biggest mistake most business owners, entrepreneurs are making in their marketing?

The biggest mistake that I see is people are relying on one channel, one thing. It’s big on the digital side that everybody talks about Facebook marketing, market on Facebook, forget all the other stuff. The reality of it is that the Bing, Yahoo!, Gemini platform works well. There are plenty of other places to do that. One of the things we teach in Guerrilla is to add one marketing thing per month. Over a year, you’ve got twelve that you’ve added to the ones you already had and you can begin to go back and grade those, improving the ones that don’t work. You’ve got to know what to do more of, less of a none of. If you’re tracking it, that’s easy.

'Find a way to track more of your marketing so that you know what to do more of, less of, none of.' Jason Myers Click To Tweet

That’s super easy. As you’re reading, what would you have to put in place to add one new marketing vehicle that’s trackable and measurable that you can work with each month? Keep it simple. What’s a new vehicle that you could add in, test and use? Ideally leverage and then turn it if it’s not working, either keep it, advance it or kill it. As Jason mentioned, his terminology for that, do more of it, do less of it or none of it. In the work that you’ve done in the last few months with clients, your stuff, you’re an Angel investor, you also put skin in the game with companies. What are 1 to 3 major breakthroughs that you’ve seen for either yourself in the businesses as you’re involved in directly or with some of the clients you’ve worked with that could likely benefit entrepreneurs and business owners here too?

They’re all intertwined but what I see that’s amazing is there’s so much trapped value in each person’s business that they do not see. Whether you want to sell your business or whether you want that business to become a legacy family heirloom that you hand down to the generations regardless of what path do you think that’s going. You want to look at your business and figure out what byproducts in that business could be spun out of it to create incremental value or alternate exit liquidity for you? As I talked to the different businesses, we find intellectual property and know-how, different things that we can pull out of the business, put into a different entity, monetize that, then that creates a separate revenue stream and a separate what I called geometric, a wealth trigger event.

How would it impact you if you had a geometric growth tool in your business right here, right now? What is an untrapped asset that you’ve got sitting there? A gold mine in the waiting, so to speak, or the world’s best-kept secret that you were able to unpack it and leverage it would create potentially infinite momentum for your business? Years ago when I sold one of my businesses, part of the reason the partner came in is that they saw how the client lead generation, which we had built up a database of over two million subscribers. We had over 250,000 clients in certain education categories, how they could parlay that into their business and it would give them infinite and exponential return. What could you do to have something like that?

A lot of businesses have those little businesses within the business. Sometimes those are worth more than the core business.

It’s almost like the packaging of offers. If done right, your bonus can be more valuable to the person on the end of it that they’ll buy the program for the bonus more than they will the actual thing that you’re offering.

That’s an important distinction if we’ve got time because the distinction here is that if it is part of your business and it’s not a separate encapsulated thing, it can’t be a bonus. It can’t be this other business that creates value. It’s all part of the blended thing. If you took like in the digital product space, if that bonus was part of the core product, it wouldn’t be a bonus and it wouldn’t be an enticement to buy. The same thing with your business, find out what’s in your business that you can pull out. Create more value for yourself.

I encourage you, check out what Jason is doing. Go to GMarketing.com. Check out all the amazing resources there. Jason, I like to shift to some personal things a bit. If you can think back to your childhood, what was either a couple of people that were your earliest influences, books or things that were as early as somebody that you can track back and go, “That set me on the path to do what I’m doing now?”

I tell the story quite a bit. Maybe you’ve heard it before, but your readers probably haven’t. My mother worked industrial construction seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. One day she taught me how to use a screwdriver and I started promptly taking everything apart. I became a little terror, everything around the house. I took apart all my toys, everything. You got to a point where I wouldn’t get any new toys for any reason, a holiday, birthday, whatever. Eventually, I learned how things ticked, what made them work, and I started being able to fix things. That was a pivotal change for me when I was able to fix things by recognizing that the pattern was off.

I started learning computer programming as a 12, 13-year-old. Once I started taking computer programs and reverse engineering them and changing them to work the way I wanted to, which I mostly did with video games, I started using that same philosophy with business. It’s those two things that create the mindset that I have of looking at a business and going, “What’s not quite right here? Let’s make this little tweak. Let’s make that little tweak. Let’s make it better.” A lot of my experience doing turnaround in many stuff, you see a lot of issues and you learn to spot these patterns. Those are the two big things.

 

As you learn that, I don’t know if this hops in your mind, but think about it. A screwdriver is a simple tool, you can use it to fix things or you can use it to take things apart. You can use it as a tool or a weapon. There are a couple of ways everything can work. In your marketing, as you’re marketing the tool for you, if it’s not a tool for you and you’re not as effective at marketing as you could be. You may want to check out what Jason shared with the intern, the tool that’s designed to be an asset for you like a screwdriver can be and use it in your business. You can do that at GMarketing.com. Jason, you mentioned video games. What was the first video game that you remember playing as a kid that got you juiced?

This is going back quite a ways. I’m old now. Pong was there, but on the computer, I had this video game and it was the first video game I bought from my computer. It was a motocross game and I didn’t like the way the jump feature worked, how you would jump the hills on the race track. I took the video game, the code apart and said, “I’m going to build in super jump capability and all these other things.” I started doing that with more video games and selling them to my friends.

You and I have some weird similarities. I love that. We’re in a similar age category because there was a range of video game platforms that came out during our age. Describe your favorite platform, if you can remember?

We had a Sega. There were some games on there that I liked. The Nintendo 64 was fun. On the television was one of my friends. We spent a lot of time at their house.

Did you play a sports game on television? Were you into some of the other games?

I’m more of role-playing or whether the mazes. The different maze games where you can unlock stuff, that was always a lot of fun for me. Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac-Man when you started getting into those and the big games as well.

What is something I should have asked you that we didn’t get a chance to cover yet?

What’s next? Something interesting to some people I’ve mentioned it too is I have a book coming out that is completely different than anything I’ve done before and it is about rituals for success and many facets of life. I’ve told people some of the chapter content and stuff and they’re blown away and they don’t think of me as that kind of person. I believe that everybody successful has rituals. They may not be that woo-woo, but they have rituals and there are things you can do. Maybe your ritual is that you read a book a week or whatever. These rituals add up and they create who you are and they fuel the success that you achieve throughout your life.

If you want to stay connected to Jason, get connected to Jason, and find out all the incredible resources they’ve got available. Take the first step by going to GMarketing.com. Jason, what would you say would be 1 to 3 action steps you hope our readers, our viewers take as a result of our time?

Find a way to track more of your marketing so that you know what to do more of, less of, none of. Add one new marketing channel or vector to your business every month. Don’t overwhelm yourself and prune the stuff that isn’t working and systematize your business with processes and procedures.

Track more. Add one new method of marketing every month, prune what’s not working and systematize your business. How would that impact you if you committed to start this now and implement these things over the next week, 4, 8, 12 weeks? Where would you be in the next quarter? I believe you’d have more leads. You’d have more sales and most importantly, the keyword. You want that P-word, the profit in your business. It’s built on profitability, sustainability. When the economy takes a dip as it will in the next few months, what are you going to do to prepare? These strategies give you a way to be able to sustain when the economy goes down or it goes up. That’s the beauty of it and I encourage you to go deeper with what Jason’s been sharing with you and check out what he’s up to at GMarketing.com. Jason, it’s been awesome to have you with us. I look forward to us getting a chance to help each other more.

Dan, it’s a pleasure.

Thank you. I encourage you, take action with what Jason’s been sharing with you. Number one, start playing more video games. Number two, start rewriting a program. Take action with what you’ve shared. Apply the principles. Simple, actionable principles can transform the game for you. If you never want to miss an episode, go to GrowthToFreedom.com/Subscribe. Share this with someone, a business owner and entrepreneur who you think gets some incredible value of it to get connected to Jason, all his great insights, wisdom strategies and more. Seize the day. Make it a great week. We’ll see you next time on GrowthToFreedom.com.

Important Links:

• Guerrilla Marketing
• Ric Thompson – past episode
• GMarketing.com
• GrowthToFreedom.com/Subscribe

About Jason Myers

Jason Myers – Chairman of Guerrilla Marketing and owner/investor in several companies. Jason is a life-long Guerrilla Marketer, Best-Selling Author, Mentor and Expert Entrepreneurial Lifestyle-Design Mentor.

He has introduced the Guerrilla concepts into many companies where he had “skin in the game” and helped them grow from startups to multi-million dollar revenue generators and towards exits. He has used Guerrilla Marketing methods and mindset in startups and 7, 8, 9 figure businesses and even Fortune 50 organizations.