These days, smart businesses are leveraging cost-effective guerilla marketing strategies, including social networking and viral marketing, to market their products and services to customers and best prospects. All it takes is a little time, energy, and ingenuity. Consider these five tips to enhance your guerilla marketing plan:

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1. Get social. Shel Horowitz, a marketing consultant in Hadley, Mass., has seen a big payoff from using social networking sites. He gets media coverage by responding to a Facebook group that lists reporters looking for sources for articles. And by actively participating in social networks, he’s also landed clients and speaking gigs.

2. Book it. Several experts suggest prowling libraries or bookstores and slipping your business card into tomes related to your business.

3. Run a contest for free. When Scarsdale, N.Y.–based marketing consultant Judy Lederman worked for a department store chain, a woman who sells perfume for dogs (yes, there is such a niche) inquired about holding an event in the store’s cosmetics department. Lederman coaxed a local real estate agent into sponsoring a Best Dressed Doggie contest, with the entry fees going to a local animal shelter. “Dogs and little children always garner good media,” Lederman says. “And my budget was zero!”

4. Tip off the press. “The problem with most guerilla marketing is that the business does an inadequate job of promoting it,” says Bonnie Harris, a marketing consultant in St. Paul, Minn. When a client held a boxing match in a garage to promote a beverage cooler that slips into a golf bag, Harris alerted the media rather than hoping they discovered it by chance.

5. Seek a promotion. “Talk to all your vendors, suppliers, and customers, and find ways to work together to promote your product and brand,” Pritchett says. “For example, you might say, ‘Hey, Mr. Vendor, why don’t you feature me as one of your customers in your next internal newsletter to your 100,000 employees?’”

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