Don’t play nice: guerrilla marketing for SaaS startups

Disrupting a market is tough, but it’s even tougher when you fail to use every weapon in your marketing arsenal. My startup recently launched a guerrilla marketing campaign that showed me how valuable this type of marketing could be for early-stage Indian software-as-a-service startups.

We organized a flash mob at our largest competitor’s biggest conference in Washington DC. It was a success – we found more prospects, created noise, got media attention, and we generated a mostly positive reaction. Here’s how we did it.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Taking on the market leader

Ambush marketing or guerrilla marketing is as old as marketing itself. The rivalry between Pepsi and Coca-Cola has created some wonderful case studies of how this kind of marketing works. More recently, Samsung trolled Apple during the launch of the most recent iPhone 14.

Freshworks has also run many campaigns along these lines – examples include the famous Freshworks versus ServiceNow campaigns and, of course, the #Failsforce blimp campaign.

However, it seems to me that early-stage India SaaS startups have rarely attempted such guerrilla marketing tactics.

There is a cultural mindset that we need to overcome: In India, we rarely see brands taking each other on openly and there is a belief that we need to play nice.

But that isn’t enough if you want to disrupt a market – which means taking on the strongest player in the industry. Guerrilla marketing allows you to take on the leader and grab the attention of customers and the industry.

The industry leader has already done the work of getting customers and partners to attend the event, so if you run a well-tailored “gatecrashing” then you build brand recall among prospects and also win the respect of the competition.

Blueprint to a gatecrashing

How you should organize your “gatecrashing” will depend on what it is you’re trying to achieve, but here’s what we did:

• The first step was deciding on what we wanted to do. We chose a flash mob, as we wanted to bring a smile to the faces of our customers and competitors.
• We hired a choreographer in Los Angeles and brainstormed our choice of music.
• We had t-shirts printed in Los Angeles and our choreographer brought them to Washington DC.
• We hired dancers in Washington DC and our choreographer trained them the evening before the flash mob.
• Our team scouted the venue and identified areas where attendees would most likely see the flash mob.
• We told the dancers they had to be respectful and stay outside the venue.
• The first dance happened as attendees were entering the venue. Subsequent performances happened as people stepped out, and t-shirts were also distributed by the dancers at the end of the flash mob.
• We had a videographer record the performances. We created some promotional material with the footage and promoted them on social media to increase impact.

Find the pain point

However, you can’t force a campaign. There needs to be a clear pain point that the competitor’s customers feel that you can capitalize upon. You can’t just pull something out of thin air.

For our recent flash mob, we took on Kaseya, which had acquired another competitor, Datto, earlier this year. The managed services provider market was shocked by the acquisition and some feared the impact on Datto and its work, so we focused our messaging on our respect for what the firm had built.