TL;DR: Guerrilla marketing is high-impact, low-cost, and available to any community — whether you're a registered organization, a volunteer collective, or a loose group of people who love the same thing. But none of it works if you don't know why you're doing it, or if you have nowhere worth sending people when it does.
You don't need a marketing budget to market well. You need creativity, consistency, and a clear sense of what you're trying to accomplish.
That's the whole idea behind guerrilla marketing — scrappy, unconventional tactics that punch above their weight. And it applies just as much to a roller derby league, a burlesque collective, or a group of punk rock fans who find and attend shows in their city as it does to anyone else.
#What Are You Actually Trying to Do?
Before you spend a dollar or a Saturday, answer this honestly: are you selling tickets to a specific event, or building general awareness that your community exists?
Both are valid. But they call for different tactics, different timing, and different measures of success.
More importantly — every tactic needs a call to action (CTA), and that CTA needs to go somewhere worth arriving at.
This sounds obvious. It isn't always. A community that participates in a local parade — great visibility, real exposure to new people — but whose website hasn't been updated in months and lists no upcoming events has wasted a Saturday. People pulled out their phones, looked them up, found nothing useful, and moved on.
Participating in the parade didn't fail. The follow-through did.
Whatever you point people toward, make sure it's current and gives someone a clear next step. And make sure it's somewhere anyone can access without creating an account. If your CTA leads to a Facebook Event and someone doesn't have Facebook, they're gone before they start.
#Is a Times Square Billboard Actually Out of Reach?
Here's where perception and reality diverge.
Some things sound expensive and aren't. A Times Square billboard is the classic example — the kind of thing that feels like it's reserved for companies with Super Bowl budgets. It starts at $150. Your image plays for 15 seconds every hour for 24 hours.
Is Times Square foot traffic your audience? Mostly not — it's tourists. But that's not the point. The point is the photo, the story, and the social post that follows. "We put our community theatre show on a Times Square billboard" is a headline. It's shareable. It earns attention in a way that another Instagram post doesn't.
Some guerrilla tactics are about reach. Some are about generating a story. Know which one you're going for.
#Physical Tactics That Still Work
Posters and flyers — old school, still effective. The key is placement: you want to be where adjacent audiences already gather. Gyms, music venues, comic shops, dance studios, climbing walls, board game cafes. Anywhere that attracts people who might be into what you do.
If the goal of that piece of marketing is to drive people to a specific event, a QR code makes it easy. Just make sure it goes somewhere specific and current — directly to the event listing or your upcoming schedule, not a homepage where someone has to hunt.
Community festivals and street events — high visibility, genuine presence, often free or very cheap to participate in. Same condition as everything else applies: have your house in order first. If you're investing a Saturday and the cost of matching t-shirts, make sure there's something worth finding when people search for you afterward.
#Digital Tactics With Actual Impact
List your events everywhere — on the open web.
There's an old marketing principle called the Rule of 7 — the idea that people need to encounter your message multiple times before they act on it. Modern research puts the real number closer to 10-20 touchpoints. The point isn't the specific number. The point is that showing up once, in one place, is rarely enough.
Every additional place your event lives is another door someone can walk through — and another exposure that moves someone from "vaguely aware" to "actually going."
The important qualifier is where those places are. Social platforms are great for your existing audience, but they're walled gardens. Someone without a Facebook account can't see your Facebook Event. Someone not following you won't see your Instagram post. Search engines can't index most of it.
Open-web listings — your own website, community calendars like Events In Plain Sight — are discoverable by anyone, with any browser, no account required. Search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo index them. That's how you reach people who don't already know you exist.
Claim your Google Business Profile.
If your community has a home venue or a regular location, claim it on Google Maps. It's free. It shows up in local searches. And it reinforces consistent name, address, and contact information across the web — which is exactly what search engines reward when deciding whether to surface you in results.
Even if your location changes event to event, a Google Business Profile for your organization is worth having.
Cross-promote with allied communities.
Your audience and a compatible community's audience overlap more than you think. Find groups in your area doing adjacent things and build reciprocal relationships. Share each other's posts. Mention upcoming events.
For communities where multiple organizers or performers share a stage — roller derby doubleheaders, burlesque showcases, drag revues — Events In Plain Sight lets you list co-organizers and performers directly on an event. Their community sees it. Your community sees it. Everyone benefits, and the marketing work gets distributed across the people who have a stake in it.
#Relationship Tactics — and Why Market Size Matters
Local media, community boards, and bloggers can all move the needle. But the effort-to-impact ratio is very different depending on where you are.
In a smaller city: the local paper might be genuinely read by a meaningful portion of your potential audience. Community radio might reach people who'd actually show up. A local blogger covering arts and events might have real pull. These relationships are worth building.
In a major metro: the calculus changes. The city-wide paper serves millions, most of whom aren't your audience. Radio is expensive and reaches a diffuse audience. In Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal, hyper-local channels will often outperform city-wide media for grassroots events — neighbourhood newsletters, community centre boards, district-specific groups. Smaller audience, much better fit.
#The Multiplier Effect
None of these tactics are magic in isolation. The value compounds when you stack them.
When someone sees your poster, then searches you up, finds your website, finds your event on a community calendar, and sees you're active and organized — each touchpoint reinforces the others. That's the Rule of 7 in action: not one loud message, but consistent presence across multiple places over time.
The single lowest-effort addition to that stack: listing your events on Events In Plain Sight. It takes minutes, it's indexed by search engines, and it puts your events in front of people actively looking for things to do in your community — no account required to find them.
Ready to add an open-web discovery layer to your marketing? Create your community on Events In Plain Sight and make your events findable to anyone searching for them.
And if you want the full framework for getting all your channels working together, the Multi-Channel Event Marketing Guide is free — built specifically for volunteer-run and community-driven organizations.