Increasing sales, attracting new customers, and building brand awareness—these are all common business goals often achieved by traditional marketing strategies. But what if you need to change consumer purchasing criteria? Or bring a new type of customer into your market? In those cases, you might consider grassroots marketing—an approach rooted in political organizing that’s uniquely suited to changing what audiences value.
Learn what grassroots marketing is and how it works, and discover seven strategies for launching a successful grassroots marketing campaign.
What is grassroots marketing?
Grassroots marketing is a word-of-mouth marketing strategy in which each campaign has two target audiences: a small primary (or campaign) audience and a larger secondary (or general) audience. Grassroots campaigns inspire members of the primary audience to promote an organization to other members of its target audience. In other words, you go after the small group to get to the big group.
How grassroots marketing works
Grassroots marketing can be an affordable way to attract new customers and influence customer priorities in your market. Here’s how it works:
1. The business defines campaign goals and audiences. The business sets goals for its grassroots marketing campaign and identifies a primary audience—typically a subset of its overall target audience or a group with a shared interest in the marketing message.
2. The business plans and executes a grassroots campaign. The business researches its target audience for the campaign and develops marketing materials to encourage its members to spread the word about the brand.
3. The campaign audience promotes the business. The primary campaign audience engages in social groups, refers new customers, and shares campaign materials on social channels, raising brand awareness within the broader target market.
Grassroots vs. guerrilla marketing
Grassroots marketing and guerrilla marketing both raise awareness by getting people talking about your business, but the two strategies differ in approach:
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Guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing targets a broad audience with unconventional or surprising marketing tactics designed to evoke strong emotional reactions, increasing the likelihood that consumers remember the brand and discuss it with others.
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Grassroots marketing. Grassroots marketing targets a small subset of a business’s overall target audience using conventional or unconventional marketing tactics. The defining goal of a grassroots marketing campaign is to motivate this niche audience to promote the brand to a larger audience.
Many small businesses use a combination of guerrilla and grassroots marketing strategies to make the most of a limited marketing budget. For example, olive oil company Graza used guerrilla marketing tactics when it distributed olive-oil-flavored popcorn in New York City from a kiosk topped with a giant piece of popcorn. The brand also took a grassroots approach by targeting cooking creators, who then promoted the olive oil on their social media platforms.
How grassroots marketing benefits your ecommerce business
Grassroots marketing can help ecommerce businesses cut marketing costs, improve brand reputation and positioning, and gain market share. Here’s more on these three key benefits:
1. Decreased marketing costs
Grassroots marketing cuts marketing costs by targeting efforts on a small group of customers. Instead of paying for ads on mass-reach marketing channels (like billboards) or on multiple campaigns for different audience segments, you can use low-cost strategies like connecting with a specific group of customers on social platforms.
“If you have a truly innovative product and you have a really great brand—the product is really good, and the brand is really strong, and it looks attractive and appealing to people and translates over social media—the marketing will come very, very cheaply,” says Becca Millstein, founder of tinned fish brand Fishwife, on an episode of Shopify Masters. “Because people will be so excited about your product that the network effect will spring into action.”
2. Improved differentiation
Conventional marketing follows this basic process: Find out what customers say they want from brands like yours and say that’s what you deliver. This approach can be effective, but it can also lead to generic messaging and market positioning.
Grassroots marketing, on the other hand, flips the script: You decide how you want people to see your brand and then find the subset of your target audience who cares about that. This approach lets you highlight what makes your company unique.
This is what Sandro Roco did when he launched sparkling water company Sanzo, which features Asian fruit flavors. On Shopify Masters, Sandro recalls working in an office stocked with different brands of sparkling water, all with the same generic flavors, like lemon-lime, grapefruit, and mixed berry. “I felt like, ’There’s got to be something more here, with flavors that I grew up with and have not had their place in the limelight,’” Sandro says.
Instead of trying to appeal to a mass consumer base, Sandro started making flavors that felt important to him, and then found an audience that connected with them. “In many ways, Sanzo is very much a manifestation of my own personal journey as an Asian American,” says Sandro. “I’m growing to learn just how much other Asian Americans and even folks outside of our community are growing to really resonate with that messaging.”
3. Increased market influence
Conventional marketing efforts respond to customer needs, while grassroots marketing can shape them. Successful grassroots efforts draw in new audiences and encourage legacy consumers to rethink what they value in your products or services.
When Sanzo launched in 2019, flavors like lychee and yuzu weren’t on many grocery store shelves. Trend predictions in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry didn’t forecast these flavors becoming popular, but Sanzo launched with these niche products anyway. Sandro hoped they would resonate with Asian American consumers and that customers outside of this audience would approach the flavors with a sense of discovery and excitement.
“If folks were already heavy operators in the CPG industry, they probably wouldn’t have launched that way,” Sandro says. “But because we did, it allowed us to establish a bit of a first-mover advantage.”
7 tips for effective grassroots marketing
- Start with your micro community
- Show up in person
- Support a cause
- Perfect your branding
- Build brand affinity
- Seed your products
- Try brand collaborations
Grassroots marketing is a flexible, scalable marketing strategy that you can use alone or alongside other types of marketing in a marketing plan. Here are seven tips to help you plan and launch a successful grassroots marketing campaign:
1. Start with your micro community
An effective grassroots marketing campaign can start with your friends and family. This micro community can be especially important when you’re launching your business and gearing up to make your first sale.
“You’re not going to go from zero to 60—you’re not necessarily going to have all the biggest influencers and celebrities posting about your brand in the first couple weeks,” says Fishwife’s Becca. “But what you can have is everyone in your life—your closest friends, your family, your cousins. You can have them start to get really excited about it and start to share in their networks.”
A successful campaign creates a snowball effect.
“I encourage people to think of building their brand outwards into concentric circles,” says Becca. “So you start in this little small circle and just get all of those people so excited about it and posting about it and sharing it with their friends. If the product is novel and the brand is great and the product is good, it will continue to grow and grow and grow out from there.”
2. Show up in person
In-person events are a great way to connect with customers and drum up grassroots support. They can generate hype around your brand and encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
One way to participate in events is by showing up where your target audience already is. For example, you could set up a booth at a farmers market if you’re targeting home cooks or sponsor a local concert series if you’re targeting music lovers. You could also run your own pop-up shop.
Pop-ups and events you host yourself will reach consumers below the top of the marketing funnel, since attendees will likely already be interested in your brand. If you require RSVPs, your event becomes a lead-generation strategy, too.
Here’s an example from seafood brand Island Creek Oysters. The company hosted a holiday party at its oyster bar featuring chef and media personality Brad Leone. This placed Island Creek Oysters in front of its primary audience of cooking enthusiasts, some of whom then spread the word to a secondary audience of friends, family, and social media followers.
The goal is to come up with an event idea that specifically caters to your primary audience. Your event should provide value for that group beyond free samples or merch. That could mean hosting a lecture, concert, or class that focuses on their interests. It could also mean providing a one-of-a-kind experience or an opportunity to meet like-minded people. For example, you could host a knitting marathon for knitters or a group run for runners.
3. Support a cause
Grassroots marketing allows you to find an audience invested in a particular issue and motivate them to persuade others. The more your audience cares about your message, the more likely they are to advocate for your brand.
A great way to do this is to declare your cause from the start, as founder Gloria Hwang did with the bicycle helmet company Thousand. “We started with a goal to help save a thousand lives,” Gloria says on an episode of Shopify Masters. (Hence the name.)
“One of our policies at Thousand is if you’re ever in a crash or an accident and wearing a Thousand helmet, we’ll replace your helmet for free,” Gloria explains. This policy allows Thousand to track progress toward its goal, since every damaged helmet represents a potential life saved. It also attracts a primary audience of safety enthusiasts who are drawn to the company’s mission and likely to become brand advocates.
4. Perfect your branding
A great brand identity gets people so excited about your company that they’ll market it for you.
Take the pickle brand Good Girl Snacks. The company launched a successful social media marketing campaign by gifting products to influencers (the primary audience), who then promoted them to their followers (the secondary audience). This strategy worked because of Good Girl Snack’s cheeky branding.
“We have a theory that because the name of the product is Hot Girl Pickles, it serves as a hook for these content creators in their videos, because if they’re showing that product, people are going to be like, ’What is that?’” says Good Girl Snacks co-founder Leah Marcus.
5. Build brand affinity
To achieve grassroots marketing success, you need to establish a connection with your target audience. Brand affinity describes the personal connection audiences have with your brand, and strong brand affinity encourages consumers to promote your business.
You can start building relationships like this by offering an exceptional customer experience and personalizing your marketing and outreach. Some brands even contact target audience members by phone or send handwritten notes as part of a grassroots campaign.
Thousand, for example, sends handwritten notes to customers who’ve been in a biking accident with their helmets on. This type of personalization helps foster brand affinity and customer loyalty.
You can also build brand affinity by using social listening software to hear what people are saying about your brand online, and then respond to timely complaints or requests. For example, you might find that audience members in a special interest Facebook group are complaining about a product defect. In that case, reach out to those consumers individually to offer free returns. Showing target customers that you care can encourage them to promote your brand to secondary audience members in their networks.
6. Seed your products
Once you’ve identified the consumers you want to reach, you can ensure they see your brand by seeding your products with creators they follow. This means sending your products to influencers as gifts with the hope they decide to post about them.
“It has immeasurable value if you are seeding to the right folks in the right communities,” says Becca. “There are hundreds of thousands of people that are invested in, let’s say, the foodie community. Whether they have 5,000 followers or a million followers, there’s just so much value in just getting your product into the hands of folks that have influence in their small community or their huge community.”
Here’s an example of creator seeding from Fishwife. In this Instagram Reel, nano-influencer@homecookguy unboxes a variety pack of Fishwife products.
7. Try brand collaborations
Sometimes, another brand already has the attention of the target audience you’re trying to reach with your grassroots marketing strategy. As long as that other brand isn’t a competitor, you can launch a brand collaboration to reach that audience.
Here’s an example from the makeup brand Saie. The company collaborated with luxury fashion brand Chloé on three looks for Paris Fashion Week. This helped Saie reach an audience of consumers excited enough about fashion to look at at runway shows. Placing their products in front of this audience could help Saie generate buzz among an engaged audience of fashion and beauty enthusiasts.
Grassroots marketing FAQ
What is a grassroots strategy?
Grassroots marketing efforts raise awareness by motivating a small subset of an organization’s audience to promote the organization to its larger target market.
Who benefits from grassroots marketing?
Grassroots marketing can benefit multiple types of businesses. It’s a cost-effective marketing strategy that can help attract new customers, improve marketplace differentiation, and influence consumer values.
Who is the target audience in grassroots marketing?
Grassroots marketing strategies have two target audiences: a small primary (or campaign) audience and a larger secondary (or general) audience. Grassroots campaigns inspire members of the primary audience to promote an organization to its larger secondary target audience.
