Do I Need to Do This For My Brand?
We came across this new term last year, from a business associate. She asked “What’s Through-The-Line marketing”?
Upon discussion, we understood that her peers were using the term “Through-The-Line” to complement the 2 long-term existing terms in marketing called “Above-The-Line” and “Below-The-Line”.
Generally, Above-the-Line (or ATL) activities are marketing efforts that are very “visible” or considered mass awareness efforts. These would include advertising on marketing channels such as Television, Radio, Billboards, Newsprint, Magazines.
Below-the-Line (or BTL) activities tend to be less “visible” to the general public and only visible to the audience they are targeting (more niche or more targeted) audience), and these include marketing in other channels like Social Media ads, Online banner ads, Flyers distribution, Events, Partnerships, Email Marketing and also Referral Programmes. Press Releases and Media Outreach are also considered BTL activities.
Through-the-Line then would mean cutting through from Above-The-Line to Below-The-Line. In other words, what we traditionally know as Integrated Marketing, or Omnichannel Marketing, where we use various marketing channels at the same time, to play upon each other and maximise marketing efforts.
At the Presence Marketing Group, we encourage clients to do as much integrated marketing as possible, because one effort can be amplified across many channels, and create many touch points for customers at the same time, which increases brand recall and ultimately sales. This requires much planning.
I Don’t Have Time For Integrated Marketing! What Can I Do?
Any company can do integrated marketing. If you have limited time, budgets and resources, the trick is to choose A FEW marketing channels and integrate them!
We do not encourage our SME clients to try to integrate 10 channels at one go. It’s too complicated and tiring. So you could consider choosing 3 to 5 channels to work with and then do them well!
Which Marketing Channels Should l Choose Them?
This would depend on your business model, product and target audience, but generally, the easiest to integrate are activities that you can outsource to a marketing agency, and perhaps your own team to manage 1 or 2 channels of your own. For example, to launch a new product, you could choose to get media to write up for you, do a social media campaign, run and event, and send an email to your regular customers. That’s 4 channels, and your internal team should be able to handle 1 or 2 of them, while you outsource the other 2!
Take The Guesswork Out of Marketing Spend vs Sales Returns
At the Presence Marketing Group, we use the Measurable Marketing Matrices (M3)TM framework that we devised after 15 years of data, that enables us to calculate how much sales you will get based on your marketing efforts for a campaign.
We’ve taken the guesswork out of your advertising spend so that our clients can confidently run marketing campaigns, knowing that they will get the calculated results.
Contact us for a no-obligation chat on what you should do for your 2023, or apply for a marketing grant from the Presence Marketing Education Foundation here
