Lessons from Guerrilla Marketing for Remember Your People app

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to use a guerrilla marketing approach to get the first 50 users for Remember Your People - the web app to take helpful notes about people you meet. I will write about my campaign's expectations and outcomes in this article.

For the campaign, I decided to affix tear-off tab flyers to traffic sign posts in my neighborhood's busy intersections with many young, trendy people on weekends. Traffic lights force people to stop every half a minute, and there is nothing else to do but look around and notice the flyers.

The tear-down tabs contained URLs and invitation codes. They were like call-to-action buttons, prompting scarcity and a sense of exclusivity for those who took action. Remember Your People is now invitation-based, to use word-of-mouth recommendations and control the growth.

So, I built a Funnel:

1. People stop at the traffic lights for half a minute and see tear-off tabs flyers.
2. They tear a tab with an invitation code.
3. They visit the website immediately on their phones or later at home.
4. They enter the invitation code.
5. They sign up.
6. They use the web app, and I build new features based on their requests.
7. They subscribe for unlimited access (later when paid subscriptions are implemented).

I could inspect each funnel step, find the bottlenecks, and adjust them in a few days. I wanted to act quickly and fix any mistakes as they occurred.

The night before my campaign, I asked ChatGPT to generate copy texts for my ads and grouped them according to the types of target audiences. One of the main target groups was people who like socializing and want to make memories, and another target group was professional networkers who make contacts for business-related reasons. I used Inkscape to lay the ads with a catchy image and six tabs on A5-sized sheets of paper (2 ads from an A4 sheet). Then, in the morning, I affixed the ads to the posts with tape.

The weather conditions were not very favorable. There was rain forecasted now and then during the weekend. But I didn't want to lose my chances.

I had a few iterations of posting those flyers and updated them as I saw any issues:

1. In the first iteration, I had "remember-your-people.app" written on the flyer, so that might have been confused with an iPhone or Android app that doesn't exist. Later I changed it to "https://remember-your-people.app".
2. As I was working late at night on this, I made a spelling mistake in the URL on the tabs (a dot instead of a dash).
3. Two people reported they couldn't proceed to the signup page - there was a bug related to CSRF tokens and cookies - appearing randomly on certain browsers. I had to work fast to fix that.
4. Many visits didn't result in signup, so I later shortened the invitation codes for visitors' convenience.
5. One of the ads' text was misleading, as I heard people commenting on the ad in the street among themselves. So I replaced it with a better one later.

Interesting facts: I learned at which traffic lights the ads attract the most attention after observing the outcomes. I made photos for my logs to see which ad copies led to "calls-to-action" most: I might later use those texts in online and offline advertisements. Also, it was nice to have a few conversations and positive feedback about the initiative with people while affixing the ads to the posts.

The stats: after two weekends of such a campaign at two busy locations in my neighborhood, I attached about 80 flyers in total, had over 180 unique visits with an average of 3.8 actions online per visit. 54% of website visitors bounced immediately. There were 6 registrations via this campaign, which makes up 3% of unique visits. So, the landing page seems to be my bottleneck in the funnel, and also, many potential users could be lost during the first iterations containing my mistakes and unexpected bugs.

If you have some statistics on your online advertisements, please share the numbers in the comments for comparison.

My advice: if you can, have some beta testers and proofreaders before doing anything like this because your assumptions and automatic functional tests might not be enough.

You should act fast. In busy streets, the signposts are updated with new posters, flyers, and stickers daily, and the weather conditions are not always favorable.

Finally, don't forget to clean up after yourself when the campaign ends.