By Alex Sventeckis

I cringe whenever I look at how many unopened emails live in my work inbox. I’m lucky if I open maybe ten percent of them — including anything promotional.

But, of those ten percent, what convinced me to open and respond to them? Those companies did below the line (BTL) marketing right.

Email marketing, direct mail, events — below the line marketing includes these and similar targeted tactics to convince and convert buyers. What goes into running a successful BTL campaign? And where do you begin?

To help you start, I dug into BTL marketing: the history, its relationship with other marketing tactics, and best practices from experts. Here’s what I found.

Table of Contents

• What is below the line marketing?
• Above the Line vs. Below the Line Marketing
• How to Make Below the Line Marketing Work for You
• Below the Line Marketing Examples
• Below the Line Marketing Best Practices

What is below the line marketing?

Great question! Answering “What is BTL marketing?” is surprisingly tough.

First, let’s look at history. Below the line marketing got its start in the 1950s.

Manufacturing giant Procter & Gamble wanted to separate advertising activities based on who got paid for them. “Traditional” advertising costs (aka, TV, radio, OOH) payable to ad agencies made it above the line on the company’s draft budget. Everything else fell below the line.

In modern marketing parlance, I’d say below the line marketing is a spiritual cousin to demand generation. However, BTL marketing in practice feels more like a subset of demand gen — enabling demand gen’s strategy through tactical details and execution. BTL campaigns often run on shorter operational timelines.

The results BTL generates focus more heavily on responses and conversions instead of demand gen’s longer-term customer acquisition and nurture goals.

For our purposes, BTL marketing tactics will include:

• Direct mail
• Email marketing
• Trade shows and events
• Location-specific promotions
• Targeted online outreach

While traditional BTL marketing relies on a physical component, the internet’s reach is inescapable. So long as it’s highly targeted, personalized, and time-bound, you could make a case to include physical and digital marketing tactics.

Above the Line vs. Below the Line Marketing

Speaking of the internet, digital marketing has blurred the lines between above the line (ATL) and BTL marketing. Yet, whether it happens in cyberspace or physical space, we need distinction between both operations. For our discussion, let’s say:

• ATL marketing involves broad campaigns aimed at wide audiences.
• BTL marketing involves targeted campaigns aimed at specific segments of your target audience.

The elements of targeting and personalization make the difference. Instead of billboards nationwide, it’s mailers sent to a dozen neighborhoods. BTL brings a clear focus to connecting with an audience subgroup and convincing them to buy.

This targeting shrinks a campaign’s size and scale, …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron