Why Would You Consider Above The Line Advertising?
So, you're doing marketing at a scaleup or an otherwise high growth company, and something’s got you down. Everything is off. The channels that were usually very effective are now doing a lot less. Growth is beginning to stagnate. What's going on?
It could be that your advertising is becoming less effective. Or the demand for your product category is not growing as fast as before, or maybe it's even declining. In the worst case, there’s both a performance and a market effect.
If this sounds familiar, then you’re not alone, and it could well be that it’s time to start thinking about new advertising channels.
TWO YEARS OF PEAK MARKET VOLUMES
When I started at Goboony, we were just four weeks into the pandemic. For pretty much the entire global travel industry, that was an exceptionally bad time. But not if you were selling campervan trips, like we were. Campervans and motorhomes quickly became the go-to holiday option in lockdown times. The growth we saw in the covid years was unprecedented.
But when the last travel restrictions and lockdown measures were lifted in 2022, market volumes suddenly seemed to drop significantly.
Now, a year and a half later, when you look at the bigger picture, it’s clear what was going on. We hoped the covid years would represent a lasting change in popularity for our category. But if you look at search volumes from the past 15 years up to today, the covid years were an exception. And, in fact, if you take out those two years from the graph, it looks like nothing happened.
So, we arrived at a sobering but realistic conclusion for just about all our markets: demand didn’t increase much in the past years, and it’s not going to now either. At least not without a little help.
TIME FOR NEW ADVERTISING CHANNELS
If demand is not increasing and your marketing efforts are mainly focused towards capturing existing demand, you’re in for a pickle. And that’s the case for many scaleups. In such a situation, the growth of your company is by definition limited to how much more efficient you can make your marketing and conversion rates. That doesn’t sit well with the double-digit growth targets that are normal for scaleups.
When all of this was starting to sink in, I happened to come across a really great article online. It’s actually about something completely different, but in a side note it neatly outlines three universal stages that many companies go through in their marketing efforts. You might well recognise them for your scaleup.
FROM INBOUND MARKETING TO OUTBOUND MARKETING
At the beginning, you can grow rapidly simply by capturing existing market. So essentially by making sure you’re found by category buyers. Search advertising, SEO, and perhaps also content marketing in various forms do the trick.
Then you start to notice that it’s becoming slightly less effective for high growth, and you begin to add other advertising to support search. You try some low key social advertising for instance, or maybe some youtube or display advertising. These are channels that work well for retargeting but that can also increase visibility beyond the people who are currently looking to buy in your category.
And then, in the final stage, the balance actually shifts, and outbound advertising channels are where you spend most your efforts, generating additional demand to be captured by search. These new channels can be the same ones as in the second stage, but often there comes a point when above the line advertising channels make their appearance. Radio, out of home, maybe TV.
“First MARKETING USED TO BE ABOUT BEING found, NOW IT’S more ABOUT GETTING PEOPLE TO EVEN CONSIDER BUYING YOUR CATEGORY AND BRAND.”
You're actually going from pull to push marketing, or from inbound to outbound marketing, whatever you want to call it. The point is that marketing used to be about being found, and now it’s more about getting people to even consider buying your category and brand.
4 BENEFITS OF ABOVE THE LINE ADVERTISING
Looking back on our first above the line campaign, I can share four reasons to consider above the line advertising channels in that third stage, or even in the second.
To start off with the most obvious benefit of ATL, these channels offer a very cost effective way to generate a lot of reach.
You have no choice but to work with a clearly defined campaign period.
These new channels make your existing ones more effective, and vice versa.
Above the line channels increase your brand’s credibility.
COST-EFFECTIVE REACH WITH ATL
The reach of ATL channels is enormous. It’s really not that difficult to reach an audience of millions with a radio or TV ad or an out of home campaign. You really wanna keep that in mind when going over proposals for these channels that obviously require a different kind of budget than you might be used to. (Because when I say cost effective, I don’t mean cheap by any means.) The good thing is that in most cases you can get a decent prognosis of exactly what share of your target audience you’ll reach. Oh and keep the expected average frequency in mind. It might not be enough if a whole lot of people see your ad only once.
Your campaign comes with a clear start and end
The thing I might appreciate most about our advertising on radio and out of home, is what I sometimes call the on/off switch effect. Your ads run for a period with a fixed start and end date that you can’t get around. This makes it way easier to measure effectiveness afterwards, and it also kind of forces you to jump into analysis mode afterward. You just spent a whole lot of money. So what did it do? You really wanna know.
This is very different from most online advertising channels, which are often approached as always-on channels. That means you really have to force yourself to jump into analysis mode every now and then. That’s really quite a significant difference.
The on/off switch effect also proves its worth if you choose to let different campaign channels start and stop at different times. When it comes time to analyse the results of the campaign, that makes it way easier to spot the effects of individual channels.
That is again very different from online, where search, social, display, and youtube campaigns often just run continuously. That often means you can only look for effects by diving into in-channel reporting, while with ATL advertising, you also wanna look at other effects like demand growth or business results.
If you wanna dive deeper into how you can prove the effectiveness of your campaign, in this article I explain exactly how we were able to successfully sum up all the results of our campaign.
THE OMNICHANNEL EFFECT
Omnichannel is a stupid word. But what I’m getting at here is basically that adding new advertising channels has a positive effect on the performance of your existing marketing communication, and vice versa. Someone who has seen your social ads is more likely to click on your search ad. And someone who has just read an email from you might also be more inclined to click on your display ad.
And in much the same way, adding ATL channels has the same effect. For example, we saw a 29% higher CTR on our social ads in areas where we had outdoor advertising running (in a later campaign, we even saw an uplift of over 80%). So, if someone has seen your ad on the street, preferably a few times, they are already vaguely familiar with your brand when your online ad comes by. That makes them more likely to click.
And conversely, someone who just saw your youtube preroll on the bus is more likely to have a bit of an aha moment when they arrive at their stop and see your poster in the bus shelter. All of this happens at a subconscious level, but any increased level of recognition will boost your advertising effectiveness.
THE as seen on TV EFFECT
It probably sounds a bit naive, and you don’t wanna make this argument the leading one when you sit down with your CFO, but mass media simply adds quite some credibility to your brand. If you’ve seen it on TV or have been passing it everyday for a week on your way to work, then it must be legit.
In adland, they call this the signalling effect. I feel like it’s often underestimated how important this effect is. It’s the trust factor that doesn’t come with a clear metric. I guess CTR increase for category search is a good indicator of it. But you’ll find it might also impact things like how much easier it will become to establish new partnerships or like a high level influencer ambassadorship.
A good example of this effect was when Goboony was mentioned on air by Dutch podcast host and tech expert Alexander Klöpping. He and his co-host had talked about Goboony once before because Alexander was considering a campervan trip, and his co-host is a campervan owner and enthusiast.
But in this particular episode just after their summer vacation, Alexander found himself looking back on his campervan trip. In the show, he mentioned that he had rented a campervan on our platform and then he quickly added that Goboony had just run a big outdoor campaign over the summer. It was as if he wanted to reassure his listeners: it’s OK, people, they advertise in bus shelters, so it’s really a legit company.
should you consider ATL ADVERTISING FOR YOUR SCALEUP?
So, is it time for you to consider above the line advertising? That has a lot to do with which of the three stages your company finds itself in. If you still see enough growth by simply capturing demand, then these kinds of investments may not be necessary yet. Even though investing in increased visibility for your brand is never a bad thing, when you start doing it you really wanna keep doing it consistently and continuously, not just once.
Now if you see that your existing channels are becoming less profitable, or if demand is stagnating, or both, then you might certainly wanna consider adding new advertising channels to your marketing mix. It could be social advertising or youtube advertising, but it could also definitely be ATL channels.
The most important thing is to make sure you will be able to do really good analysis of the results afterwards. You can read here how we successfully measured the various positive effects of our ATL campaign and how we found the confidence to continue and even increase these investments.
THE SHORT VERSION FOR SLEEPYHEADS
Is demand plummeting, or is the return on your advertising decreasing? We've been there.
First you wanna try and understand whether it’s a market effect or a performance effect, or both.
Then try to understand what stage your company is in and whether it’s time to invest more in outbound marketing.
Is that the case? Then definitely keep reading about my experiences with our ATL campaign.
A SERIES ON ATL CAMPAIGNS
This article is the first part of a three-part series on above the line advertising. Keep reading:
