How Hard Is It To Get A Marketing Job?

Friday, 5: 19 AM

The answer is I DON’T KNOW!

I got this question recently, and I understand why.

Most people think of my “work” as being a corporate job that I once put on a suit & tie for, walked into an office in some corporate building, handed over my resume, and answered some mundane questions about why I should get hired…

Not the case.

The marketing that I do is not corporate marketing.  Not by a long shot.

The best term to describe the type of marketing that I do is “Guerrilla Marketing”.  And the first time I learned about guerrilla marketing was when I picked up a famous book by Jay Conrad Levinson by the same title.  It’s much like guerrilla “warfare” for the small business owner.

A wannabe small business owner like myself, or even Joe the Plumber (who in reality is probably never going to be one, but that’s a whole other story) we have to play a whole different ball game to sell our products and services compared to a big firm with millions of dollars in its budget.

But Joe has a serious advantage (in his fantasy world of being an entrepreneur)…

What Jay Levinson in his guerilla marketing book explains is that a small business owner has 12 distinct advantages over the corporate world:

1. Time, energy and imagination are our investments to market our business instead of money.

2. Big firms have so much going on, that their measurement on effective marketing is often just SALES.  For guerrilla marketers, the primary measuring stick is bottom line PROFITS, which the guerilla can measure much more easily and closely than a big company.

3. Corporations rely on past experience and judgement, and a lot of guesswork to use good marketing.  But wrong guesses are too costly for the small guerilla business owner, so he or she must rely on psychology – laws and patterns of human behavior.

In other words, he or she can follow very closely the purchasing patterns of consumers to know for CERTAIN what will work and what will not work in marketing.

4. Traditional marketing used by big companies will often “count receipts” at the end of the month to see how many sales were made.  Guerilla marketing techniques, particularly INTERNET guerilla marketing, counts how many relationships you’ve made every month – and each relationship with a consumer will lead to many sales in the future.

5. Traditional marketing uses just a handful of marketing tools that cost a lot, while a guerilla marketer will use hundreds of weapons for marketing, most of which are free.

6. Simply put, small business owners can use guerilla marketing ideas to deliver SUPERB customer service and one-on-one service to consumers.  The big company simply cannot do it nearly as effectively or as quickly.

There are 6 other advantages that you can read about in Levinson’s powerful book.  Frankly I don’t have time to go into all of them, and you probably don’t want me to either because I think you get the point.  I will say this though…

The biggest advantage, in my opinion, as a small biz owner/guerrilla marketer is that I can adapt to changes and new technology almost INFINITELY faster than a big company can.  This is so huge that I have to leave it for another blog post to explain it.

- Shiraz

aka Mr. Nocturnal