For marketers looking to reach a niche target audience, you may be wondering if above the line (ATL) or below the line (BTL) marketing is better for your budget. While it ultimately depends on your business goals, it’s essential to have a holistic approach that follows your customer’s journey from the awareness, consideration, and purchase sales funnel stages. In this article, you’ll discover the top BTL marketing ideas you can use in your strategy to help reach more prospects and drive conversions.
Since BTL is typically more personalized than ATL tactics, 78% of marketers believe it substantially impacts customer relationships, making it more critical than ever for you to implement. Read on to learn how you can use BTL marketing for publications.
Key Takeaways
- BTL marketing uses targeting and personalization to reach your ideal prospects
- Personalized BTL marketing leverages segmentation, trackable metrics, and engaging campaigns
- Key BTL marketing channels include direct mail, email, events, and more
What is BTL Marketing for Publications?
BTL marketing is a strategy that promotes your publication through targeted and personalized media channels. It delivers targeted advertising to identified prospects to increase conversions and customer loyalty.
BTL marketing may not be as flashy as ATL tactics that focus on mass promotions to reach larger audiences on channels such as TV, radio, print, and billboards to boost brand awareness – but it has its advantages. A few benefits of BTL marketing include:
- Segmentation: Target specific niche audiences or geographic regions to deliver more positive results
- Measurable: Track your campaigns to determine the return on investment (ROI) with metrics like conversion rates, cost per acquisition, click-through rates, and more
- Relationship building: Drive more engagement by developing campaigns that speak directly to your audience’s needs and pain points
5 BTL Marketing Ideas to Boost Conversions
With 99% of marketers agreeing that personalization positively impacts customer relationships, implementing BTL marketing ideas in your stack is essential to closing deals. However, you need also to determine your buyer personas, business objectives, and budget to determine which channels will give your business the most impact.
Let’s take a look at a few BTL marketing examples to help you get started:
1. Direct Mail
With 42.2% of direct mail recipients reading the mail they receive, organizations utilize letters, brochures, postcards, and more to target their audiences at their homes or businesses. To leverage direct mail, you need to personalize mailers to your prospect’s needs and send frequent campaigns as they’re closer to converting.
Here are a few best practices to maximize your direct mail campaigns:
- Align with your sales team to choose recipients and coordinate simultaneous call campaigns
- Develop clear call-to-actions (CTAs) to visit your website or book a consultation
- Create visually appealing designs that quickly grab your reader’s attention
- Make is sustainable with recyclable paper and include digital components like a QR code that links to a custom video
2. Personalized Email Marketing
Millions of people, including your ideal customers, utilize email daily to make business decisions. Once prospects enter your pipeline, you can develop email campaigns based on user behavior and preferences to meet their needs better.
The typical email marketing goal is to get to the top of the inbox to earn more opens and clicks. To make this happen, you need to write engaging subject lines and ensure every email includes valuable content that leaves readers wanting more. Once a prospect opts into your email network, consider sending the following campaigns:
- Welcome series
- Content marketing series like webinars, case studies, or whitepapers
- Consultation or free demo series
3. Events and Sponsorships
If you prefer more face-to-face marketing or operate in a more niche industry, hosting events or sponsorships is a great way to get in front of your audience. Most industry events have several sponsorship opportunities like digital ads, mobile apps, welcome bag items, happy hours, and more to help get the most attendance.
For each event you create, you need to develop a pre- and post-marketing strategy aligned with the sales organization to ensure you schedule meetings during the event and follow-up afterward. You can also leverage email and social media marketing with co-branded campaigns to maximize your brand awareness and target attendees.
4. Search Engine Marketing
With more consumers researching companies online before making a purchase decision, publications can leverage search engine marketing (SEM) to drive website visits. It’s also a great way to monitor your budget since you will only pay for visitors who click on your advertisements.
Search engines use complicated algorithms to serve relevant ads and content based on the user’s location, user behavior, and original keyword term. With paid SEM, sponsored ads appear at the top and side of the page for more visibility than organic search results, which is especially essential if you don’t have a strong SEO presence.
To maximize conversions, follow these best practices:
- Conduct keyword research to select keywords that your audience is already searching for that’s related to your brand or products
- Choose your target geographic region by selecting key cities, states, or countries
- Create ad headlines and copy that best meets your audience’s needs or search intent
5. Social Media
The average consumer spends 2 hours and 25 minutes per day on social media. While it offers you the opportunity to reach a large audience, you can still customize content to cater to your audience’s desires with organic and paid campaigns.
A personalized social media campaign starts by leveraging your audience insight tools in the platform to understand your follower demographics and develop content based on those personas. A few customized social content recommendations include:
- Videos
- Retargeting ads
- Quizzes or polls
- Localization
You should also leverage social media as a customer service tool to monitor direct messages, comments, and tags. These messages give you immediate insight into customer sentiment and offer you the chance to initiate a highly personalized conversation.
Grow Your Business with BTL Marketing
In the current business landscape, it’s more important than ever to foster customer engagement throughout the buyer’s journey. BTL marketing gives your publication the ability to connect with prospects, track conversions, and build more customer loyalty. However, it would be best to have a healthy marketing mix to attract customers and scale depending on your business objectives.
Ready to leverage BTL marketing in your stack? Contact Boom Communications Group for more information.