May be in ’92 or ’93, the son-in-law from the family that owns a big conglomerate gave 2 cans of condensed milk to my mom. “Bhabi, our new product!”. My mom was very happy getting 2 cans free (we all love to get free gifts I guess). She cooked some desserts to check the new brand. Till now, I only pick that brand, since it is related to my childhood, related to my mom. The “quality” of impact was too high.
Why this long intro? Reason is we are often picking Digital as the only media to promote our brand for several practical reasons, leaving behind the essence of Physical connection. Our TG are roaming in Digital Media, that’s one reason. Another important reason is we can easily measure ROI of media buying and justify our investment. These, along with some other factors are leading us to depend too much on Digital.
I propose, at the same time, we keep some BTL leg, to ensure that the quality of the impression we are giving is better, and longer lasting. Some companies are trying to develop methods to measure the outcome of BTL, it will take some time. For the time being we need to be a bit subjective, and use our judgement to go for BTL, but we need to go for it, at least to some extent. BTL makes one-to-one contact happen between a customer & the Brand, which is vital for longer run. If we see a message of a brand in facebook, it has one kind of impact. If we get the same message from a Brand Promoter in Wet Market, it has a different level of impact. Thousand impressions/engagements in facebook cannot be comparable with thousand interactions in a wet market.
Considering the quality of the impression, I’d like to divide the BTL in two categories. One offers comparatively less impactful interaction, for example Outdoor advertising (OOH); another offers extremely deep-impact interaction, for example, Events or Activations. The impact of an interaction in an event can be lifelong to a particular customer. So what can be the outcome this? Well, may be the lifetime value of the Customer!
Sometimes we Brand Managers or Marketing Professionals may miss out this point and fail to justify the big investment required for an Event or Activation. There are Brands leveraging the deep, long lasting relationship with their Customers over decades. Those were in contact with the Brand for some brief time in their life, and became their most loyal customers forever. The potential return of this investment cannot simply be ignored.
No company conducts communication & promotional activities only for a particular month. Definitely there are long and short term objectives. So we cannot just omit BTL from our plan and ignore the value of physical interaction of a brand with its customers. The fact that we cannot justify or measure the return from BTL activities, should not stop doing those. Rather we need to figure out ways to measure the effectiveness and outcome of BTL activities, at least up to an acceptable level of accuracy.
Let me propose some ways to measure the ROI of BTL activities.
First thing we need to do is determine what we want to achieve. Some BTL activities are planned to generate things other than sales numbers as well. During my service with an edible oil giant, I had the opportunity to run a BTL campaign to break several Taboos. We identified 17 districts of Bangladesh, which are having borders with India but performing extremely poor in packed Palm Olein (mostly known as Palm Oil). The people in adjacent Indian areas are consuming packed palm olein but in those 17 districts it is not working, even though the price gap between packed oil & loose oil was thin at that time. Upon some research we identified some taboos. Consumers have a perception that palm olein is unhealthy. Retailers have a tendency to push loose Soyabean oil, and they were not interested to even lift some trial quantity. Distributors were unwilling to invest. We ran activation in those 17 districts for 8 months. The Consumer-centric activities include a lot of “premise-meeting” with consumers (Uthan Boithok), arranging stage drama nearby wet market, showing awareness film (using mobile film unit), offering a bit of discount during door-to-door. Then we offered special gifts to retailer while lifting. We set some people to decorate their shops with POSM, and displayed a lot of branded palm olien on the shelves. After some time, Distributors and Field Force could see the result. And, the company is reaping the benefit till now (5 yrs have passed since we ran those activations). Now please calculate the outcome! We initiated the campaign with specific objectives, eventually Sales number came in!
We must set specific goals, so that we can measure against it. Goal can be generating TOMA, generate leads (for B2B business), make customers retention or even plain one- generate Sales.
Secondly, we need some specific metrics to measure the success, to check whether we are reaching the goals. I have even used back-calculation method to measure effectiveness of BTL sometime. For example, if there are X pieces of oil bottles sold, I can guess that there were 3X number of queries made, and 10X number of people have got some impression from our campaign. We could not set mechanism to trace the number of people we are interacting every day, but we had some historical indication about how much sales is generated from how many interactions.
Another easy way to measure success is to compare with benchmark. The benchmark can be set from previous campaigns of the company, or from a ready reference in the industry (even from outside the industry).
Thirdly, there should be interim optimization option while running a BTL campaign. Since we cannot measure ROI of BTL as accurately as that of Digital, we better keep some periodic checking to fine-tune the program modality. A/B testing can be very effective in this regard.
Then comes the need for reporting to the Management. This is the area I have seen many Managers fail (including me in some cases). We meticulously work with Agencies and try to get the maximum out of their capacity, but we often don’t report periodically to the Top Management. BTL is a very long term, delicate investment, and it most of the cases the return is subjective. Very natural that Top Management will remain doubtful about it. We must set objectives, track activities, get the result and communicate it with Top Management. BTL is a great tool to create connection with Consumers in the long run. Considering the never ending “budget-shortage” from Top Management, the tool must be handled delicately while using.
Author: Faisal Mahmud, Marketing Professional
