While the digital age has come and businesses are seeing great success through those mediums, linear TV advertising is still one of the best ways to reach a large audience and build your brand.
When considering the advertising mediums you’ll use as a business, you must consider the customer journey and where your potential customers are in the buying process when they see your ad. TV advertising works well for direct response, while also educating your potential customers about your product and creating demand.
Key benefits you should expect from consistent advertising on linear television:
Reach a Large Audience
Activating a well-produced TV ad campaign to a large audience of potential customers allows for stronger brand awareness. With the right budget, you can reach a high number of individual people with a frequency that improves their ability to recall the ad. This is important because you want them to recognize, or think of, your business when they later search for someone to fulfill their needs.
Targetable Audiences
With the technology and data that is available from media companies today, businesses can build a well-targeted campaign that reaches the people most likely to want or need what they offer. This helps to produce revenue-driving results that make a real difference to the bottom line!
You Have a Captive Audience
Unlike other mediums, when your TV commercial runs, it is the only ad placement or content in view at that time. Surveyed adults in the US demonstrably pay the most attention to TV advertising, followed by online advertising in a very close second.
Strong Ad Format
TV advertising allows the use of visual and audio content, leading to media that is engaging and more impactful to your potential customers. TV and streaming ads are incredibly effective for creating stronger ad recall, with 46% of consumers saying they’re most memorable.
Dominate Local Television
If you are a local business looking to better reach your audience in a smaller geographic location, then calling upon your local media outlets is a great way to build customized advertising plans that reach your community.
With a local television ad campaign, you can:
- Target local news to reach people specifically interested in local events and happenings.
- Connect with your local market consistently, building a relationship with the area you serve.
- Advertise on the right programs based on the wealth of data available about the audience demographics.
- Drive bottom-of-the-funnel actions, like purchases or scheduling consultations. Your potential customers see your commercial, become familiar with your brand, and then when they later search for a business to fulfill that need, they will recognize your company and the familiarity you’ve built with them.
So, how do you make your TV advertising campaign a success?
Start with Quality Production
Producing a high-quality TV commercial is a critical component of success. It needs to be visually appealing, and communicate how your product or service does one of the following:
- Solves a problem.
- Fulfills a need.
- Improves their life.
- Satisfies a want.
Highlight the benefit and end result they can expect. Think of the old line in marketing about how “people don’t buy a new mattress, they buy a good night’s rest.” Cap off your commercial with a strong and clear call to action. What’s the next step for the consumer if they want to make a purchase? Give your potential consumers an easy path to becoming a customer.
Understand Your Audience
Work with your agency or media partner to determine the best audience to which you target your advertising. Do you have solid first-party customer data that shows your ideal customer? If not, lean on the expertise of an agency or the media provider(s) with whom you work to build a target audience based on their experience with businesses like yours.
Advertise Consistently
If you want your advertising to be effective, it must be consistent! When working to improve people's awareness of your business, ongoing reach with a strong frequency is key.
Evaluate Results
As with any advertising medium, you must evaluate the results to determine when or how changes are made to your campaign. TV advertising in many cases is an influencing medium, and isn’t always directly attributable to revenue or leads generated. Because of this, it’s important to monitor your overall business metrics. Some key business metrics that you can use to get an understanding of how your overall marketing efforts are performing are:
- Lifetime Customer Value - This is the expected revenue generation, on average, from any single customer.
- Calculation: (Average Customer Value X Lifespan of Customer)
- Note: To determine average customer value, look at the typical purchases during a period of time (e.g. annually) and add them together. Then multiply by that same metric (e.g. years).
- Customer Acquisition Cost - This is the average cost for each customer you gain. Balance this acquisition cost against the Lifetime Customer Value to ensure that your marketing is profitable.
- Calculation: (Marketing Dollars Spent / Customers Gained)
- Lead Quantity - This is the raw number of new leads that you receive. When you make changes in your marketing, be sure to monitor fluctuations in this number. Don’t forget to account for typical seasonal fluctuations or other events that impact your inbound leads, outside of marketing efforts.
These are just a few metrics to keep an eye on. Be sure to work closely with your agency or media partner to build a plan for measuring success.
So, Why TV Advertising?
Overall, television advertising is still an effective medium for creating demand, generating awareness of your products and services, and moving potential customers through your marketing funnel to make a purchase. Like any advertising, TV can and should be used as part of a multi-channel marketing effort.
Ensuring that you have a strong presence in other areas, like search ads (PPC), organic search results (SEO), and have a great website that makes the buying process easy, will only improve the long-term success of your TV campaigns.