Below The Line - Marketing Activities - An Overview

How did BTL Marketing Activities evolve?
Over the years, a number of products, brands have come up and expanded into Cities, States, Countries, Continents and across the globe. As a Marketing Manager, one would come up with a possible marketing strategy to gain more shares in the market and to increase their consumer/customer base.

If you want to market your product in a larger geographic area, then most probably you may consider a concept "Think Global; Act Local". The marketing activities which one does in a larger scale like advertising in a national TV or advertising in a national newspaper can be grouped into ATL (Above The Line) Marketing activities. The overall branding of a company or a product is covered most probably in ATL marketing activities. Eg. You can consider any telecom company like Airtel, Reliance, Idea, Tata Docomo, etc. In ATL marketing activity, you don't find "Call for Action", "Point of Purchase", "Place of Availability".

The above  aspects can be complemented through BTL (Below The Line) marketing channels. BTL generally conveys customers/consumes about availability of products along with contact details or where the products are available. One can use BTL channel for a number of things to a draw potential audience to buy your product. Here are some of BTL activities which are being used by a number of marketers as an effective tools.

Portable Standees - Portable, easy to carry, customized standees prove to be an effective tool. You can place the standee in the place where you feel your target audience are more.

Portable Stalls - Portable, easy to carry, customized stalls are widely used to engage with audience and discover prospective leads for your products.

SMS Marketing - If you have database of your customers, using online sms portals you can communicate to your customer on your latest offers, updates, etc.

Email Marketing - Similar to SMS marketing, if your customers engage more on online, then this tool would be very effective as internet users are increasing rapidly.

Mall Activities - People love to hang out for shopping, spend their times in malls along with families. Mall activities would be a good option if you want to reach out to more audience.

Media Display Ads - Display ads have increased in recent times. All these bill boards, hoardings, banners, posters are put up to capture eye sights of target audience. More products, more media spaces, one has to analyse before choosing where to advertise.

Promotional Events - You can invite people to events where you can show case your products, increase your customer base.

There are more number of creative, innovative BTL concepts which are coming up. If your want to know more about BTL Campaigns, write to me at brandingminds@gmail.com 

TOP REASONS WHY SEO IS AFFECTING PRODUCT MARKETING IN 2014?

These days it’s a very heated topic to boot and this is a question that gets asked often, and though there are still plenty of folks in the SEO industry who say it’s very much alive and doing extremely well and is very beneficial for product marketing, while on the other hand, there are others who think it’s on the way out and has withered away completely. This leads us to think whether SEO is affecting the product marketing as well?

Recently in October, long time SEO Jill Whalen announced she’s ending her SEO career and she wrote:

“Finally, however, Google put their money where their mouth was with their Panda and Penguin updates. At last the only real way to do SEO was what I had been espousing all along. And it’s a beautiful thing! Today’s SEO blogs and conferences are bursting with SEO consultants talking about how, when you create amazing websites and content for your users, the search engines will follow.”

That leads Jill to say, this “means, my friends, that my work here is done.”
To support that SEO has been dying there are more evidences of the changing times look at the SEO industry’s poster company, Moz, which recently changed its name from SEOMoz, by which it had been known since it was founded in 2004.
Are we witnessing the beginning of an exodus from professional association with SEO? Is… SEO redundant?

Well, below are some valid points that can be considered for the failure of SEO and how is going to affect Product Marketing in 2014:

Lack of Quality Content

If you wish to market your product through your website, always ensure that you should have quality content on your page to attract or convince the audience or say create more audience, then why don’t you just publish good content to market your product? The trick is not to build artificial links to mundane content but rather share interesting, well-written, well-produced content that people really want to read, connect or interact with. People recommend specific content as the most relevant information on that topic, as a result, when someone searches, Google sees relevancy and naturally rewards a particular site

Social Media

More and more people are using social media to find websites to visit. The search engines are well aware of this, and are incorporating many social indicators into the way they rank sites. SEO experts will need to properly implement social media marketing, which will not only drive traffic from the social sites, but also help improve the rankings in the SERPs.
The point here is not that all SEO agencies are ineffective but the point is that “SEO” is something that occurs naturally and therefore, SEO optimisation as we know it is a dead art and is drastically affecting the product marketing as well.

Target Audience

We should go back to the basics. We should be thinking about our audience and what we can do to benefit them. At the end of the day, they’re the people purchasing our product, right? And we need to convince them. So the thumb rule is that in 2014, it will be the audience who will decide the popularity of the particular product, definitely not the SEO.

Mobile Phones

According to Google’s book, the top three positions on a search page matter even more in mobile world since the digital shelf gets really small on mobile devices.
In fact, according to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, a drop to the first (below paid ads) position can result in a conversion plunge of 90% or more! This means that your SEO campaigns need to take into account click-through rates and search volume in the mobile realm.
The other big difference is that mobile users do not want to scroll. So this will surely affect the SEO and subsequently, the product marketing as well.

Discovery

Lastly, SEO is about matching intent with discovery. The very nature of search is about discovery and SEOs need to master it. This means looking beyond the keyword and to the other ways in which users discover content from Google and other search platforms.
For example, Google+ and Google Now, AppStore recommendations and how Open Graph meta tags influence presentation, shares and clicks.
So if you still want to boost your results or wish to market your product successfully, then undoubtedly you are better off paying for a Google or Facebook ad than an ongoing SEO “strategy”