TV Advertising Space; A Waste Of Space?
There are two types of TV advertising space, according to how you use it. Direct response TV advertising space and brand advertising. Understanding the differences between the two can immediately save companies a lot of money. Brand advertising is used by companies with well known household products or services in order to build and increase awareness of their brand. For small or medium size enterprises (SMEs), unless you have huge amounts of money which you are happy to lose, you should not do brand advertising at all.
For SMEs brand advertising is a complete waste of money. The only type of TV advertising space filler SMEs should consider is direct response advertising. The only purpose of direct response advertising is to produce contact and action between the advertiser and their customers. The type of response will vary depending on the type of business you are in and your overall marketing strategy.
You may want the response to be an immediate purchase. You may want the response to be for someone to contact you to ask for a pamphlet or more information.
The great thing about direct response advertising is that you can instantly tell whether it is working. It either yields the desired response or it doesn’t. One of the reasons that most SME business advertising does not work is that it’s a combination of halfhearted direct response and highly ineffective brand advertising.
So now you now know the difference, it is time to review your advertising strategy. In the land of the small or medium business, direct response is King!
It is absolutely essential that you test and measure all of your advertising. At the very least you need to know how many people responded, how many of them were converted to a sale and what that is worth to your business. Then you need to compare that figure to the cost of the advert and you can immediately work out how profitable it was, or whether you should stop running it.
Many businesses automatically budget a certain mount of money to their annual advertising spend and they’ve only got a vague sense of whether the adverts are paying are not. This is crazy. SMEs obviously need some sort of system for asking people who contact you for the first time where they heard about you. If you have a larger business, you may even want to set up a separate phone line with a number that only appears in your advert. If you’re directing people to a website, you may want to set up a special web page that also only appears in your ad. This will ensure that you can clearly identify when people are responding to your advertising. One of the reasons that TV advertising space can be so high risk is that it's very difficult to test it on a small scale. You should never invest in TV advertising space unless you can make it both direct response and measurable.
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