You maybe an entrepreneur, a managing director, vice president, marketing product manager,  manufacturer or a service provider or even an organized retailer while you read my message, draw up a pen and paper right now.

Step one:

You have a product … How efficiently would you reach out to millions in the shortest span of time?

Step two:

Imagine you are a consumer. How would the product manufacturers locate you and why would you buy a certain product and not another? The consumer is everywhere….they are diverse and incredibly vast. And as a consumer did you ever wonder how some products reach out to you with ease while several other products cannot be located by you even if wish to buy them? It’s a mammoth machinery of retailers and dealers & distributors which needs to be managed efficiently.

The supply chain management, pricing, consumer scheming and ground level promotion —- all have to match up to a dot. That dot is distribution management. That’s what makes the wheel move, day in day out. Manufactures need a reason to sell to retailers who in turn need a reason to sell to you and just as you need a reason to buy Some companies understand this process well and hence flourish, other’s don’t.

So whats the process?

Now that’s what is Below the Line marketing. It’s a process which continuously generates consumer pull and creates dealer push. Sample the BTL product and promotion cycle.

First the consumer

Below The Line Marketing or BTL marketing helps search for the consumers. Inside corporations, at street, out there shopping for other products, traveling, talking on phone, traveling, dining or even watching a movie. Consumers are waiting to be enamored. They could be drawn in to buy products and services through attractive retail schemes, special offers to employees via corporate tie-ups, neighborhood marketing, cross-brand tie-ups, product promotion, Customer relation management programs.

Next the seller

Simply put, why will someone sell your product ? Below The Line marketing finds ways to motivate retailers to sell. Sell more and sell your products preferentially. BTL marketing puts in place a complete and elaborate process that offers rewards and recognizes retailers’ effort to sell products by various motivational programs. But then retailers are like the consumers. A conglomerate of diverse and unknown faces with different habit, taste, social-economic background.

BTL marketing identifies retailers through their sales performance, credit rating, customer interaction skill etc. All this is aimed at making sellers sell more and many more to sell much more. Also the market is expanding rapidly. New retailers needs to be appointed regularly to keep pace with the lateral growth of the market. And as we add more retailers, the retail management process becomes far more complicated Order booking, collection, sales MIS —- need far greater skill levels than earlier. We call this process Dealer Management.

Third the promotion

Desire. Money, sex, war, invention and life itself — all are outcome of desire. So is product purchasing and selling. The consumer needs to believe in the product and aspire for it. Hence the product has to be visible at retail points through various Point of Sales (POS) materials. But then imagine how large and expanding the market is. So, for optimum promotion, various non-competing brands are roped in to promote and sell a product. A soap and packaged rice decide to swap customers. They both have a common customer segment: housewives. A television and mens’s apparel exchange each other’s retail space for mutual promotion. They have a common audience: the men. Camlin a children apparel brand come together: they are searching for each other child consumers.

We call the process Cross Promotional Sales

Move on.

Step into large offices, larger building blocks, sprawling hospitals, hotels — make a bid for the consumers who work there as employees, live as residents or an enterprise management which wants to buy from you at a special rate to reward performing employees.

We call the process Institutional sales

Next the customer relationship

Traditionally the retailers smiled and said “Namaste” to a visiting customers. BTL marketing takes the simple process of wishing good to a next level of elaborate customer relation management program through: identification, profiling, loyalty, referral reward and communication. Ask yourself a few unassuming questions: How to retain customers, how to make them to refer someone from their family or outside (termed as the process of procuring referrals from existing customers) and finally how to make the existing customers spend more and return frequently to spend more. It ain’t a riddle. It’s a process called Customer Relation management.

Finally the brand building.

Media PR, retail promotion, visual merchandising and so much more. BTL marketing does all this and more. It builds a brand. But HOW? Read on…….

Consider renowned BTL Marketing Agency in Kolkata | BTL Marketing Agency in Delhi | BTL Marketing Agency Mumbai| Theme Ventures.