Why BTL is Dying and How you could Save it: A Marketeer’s Perspective

Below The Line - BTL

In the era of precisely targeted, often effective and cheap marketing through various online mediums, one might wonder how relevant offline marketing really is.

Why would you recruit, train and manage an on-ground force for a Marketing Activation when you could reach a much greater number of prospective customers in a few clicks? It’s safe to say that the proverbial Below-the-line marketing activations, popularly referred to as BTLs are dead. This isn’t great news considering that direct marketing has always had astonishingly high conversion rates as compared to digital marketing campaigns, while also creating a lot of opportunities for people to learn and earn. Let’s dissect the reasons why offline Marketing Activations have lost relevance in these times, and how reinvention is the way to go:

1. Difficulty in aligning resources for offline campaigns
BTLs don’t run in perpetuity in most industries, which means that the Marketing Facilitators aligned for the activations are freelancers who’re recruited intermittently. One activation happens for ten days and the next happens after twenty; this intermittence in the process leads to a serious gap of resource retention and a general lack of orientation leading to sub-optimal work on-ground.

The concept of personally meeting your prospective customers with a terrific pitch and compliments is beautiful, but not if you’re not sure of who’s representing your company.

This operational hole is a big factor which has led to the downfall of BTLs. If there was a way to cure this, it could have been a different story.

2. Inadequate training
Logically consequential, inadequate training of resources is the next major drawback of BTL activations. If there’s a solid flux in the resources, who trains and orients the new resources perfectly? How do you train so many resources and how do you make sure that the imparted training is being retained? These questions aren’t currently addressed in the ecosystem. There can be nothing better than a well-groomed, well-trained facilitator conversing with a prospective customer and making him a life-long friend of the brand. Alas, this doesn’t always happen in BTLs.

3. On-ground Management
Finally, managing/monitoring of on-ground marketing activations happens in the most arbitrary fashion. Do you know what your team is saying to the customers? Are you sure about how the customers are responding to your company’s proposition? Can you record their priceless reactions, opinions, thoughts for progressive action or research? Is there any way in which you can be sure that your arbitrarily hired, trained resources are saying the right things to the prospective customers, and how customers are reacting to it? The answer in most cases is – we’ve never thought about it.

Reaching customers through on-ground activations/BTLs is a great idea. But only if the above loopholes are covered and polished to shine. If you’re conducting a BTL, be sure that the resources working on the drive are well recruited, training and managed in the way where you could be proud of the drive as much as you’re proud of your product.

Every good conversation is a game-changer for a brand, and so is every bad one.

on-ground-facilitator

For the absolute best work on on-ground activations, you could check out what The Testament is doing:

1. Crowd-sourced platform for recruitmentMarket Recruit – which incentivizes the crowd to leverage personal network and earn. We don’t have 100 recruiters sitting at our office, recruiting people; we have 2000 people on Market Recruit, who love earning by getting jobs for their friends. It’s just amazing!

2. Training retention and workforce engagement by EnGame - which gamifies training modules (textual, or video based) using quizzes to be sure that the training being provided to candidates is being remembered and put to use. Now you can be sure about who takes your training seriously and how fruitful it is in reality. Never put inadequately trained resources at work with EnGame!

3. Finally, On-ground resource management using Market Acquire. This tool of ours records every conversation which your representatives make with the prospective customers. Every conversation! You can now listen to how your customers are reacting to you, in real time. Market Acquire also ensures that the data which is being recorded during the activations flows in a paperless, lossless fashion. Conversations, data, even GPS coordinates…Market Acquire leaves no corner uncovered to make your drive fool proof. Isn’t it just amazing?

BTLs are dead. But the good news is that they’ve taken a rebirth in the form of Market Acquisition drives with The Testament. Try us out!


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Posted by Nishant Mittal

Nishant Mittal is a passionate entrepreneur, musician and writer. He likes to create and sell.

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