Does TV advertising work for small business?

How effective is TV advertising?

That depends on what you're selling.  National or regional brands that depend on brand identity buy lots of TV ads.  Think car dealers.  So do established brands that can afford to spend millions of dollars to create and maintain brand loyalty and identification. 

Think McDonalds. 

Is that you?  Chances are that it's not. 

 One big difference between car dealers or fast food restaurants and most other businesses is the type of product they are selling.  Everybody eats.  Most people drive.  But businesses that sell services or specialty products target a much smaller percentage of the population.  And the more specialized your ideal customer is, the less effective TV ads become.  Think of TV ads as a shotgun that hits everyone.  What you need is a sniper rifle that finds a few key targets.  Your ideal customers.

Two key words to remember when talking about advertising are "reach" and "frequency."  Reach means how many people see an ad in a given area and frequency means how many times they see it.  Let's say you are a plumber in a large metro area.  If you choose to advertise on television, you can potentially reach a lot of people.  But can you afford to spend enough for the frequency so they will remember you?  By the time you pay for the production of the commercial and ten or twenty airings on the local news, you are going to spend at least $10,000.  Can you afford to spend that much per month for the required effective frequency?

 Does TV advertising work for small business?

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Remember, people aren't going to call you unless they need you.  Unless their toilet springs a leak right after the local news, they will have forgotten your commercial by the next day.  Assuming they saw it at all and weren't in the kitchen fixing a snack when it was airing or zipping past it on their DVR.  So you are spending a lot of money trying to reach a very small percentage of the audience that needs your services,does not already have an established relationship with your competitors and lives in the area that you serve.   See the problem?

Here's the solution.  If someone has a need, they are going to go to the internet to find out how to fill it.   They are going to engage in an information gathering and problem solving process and then make a decision.  You want to be the answer to their question before they ask it.  When they do a Google search, you want to land on their first page of results.  When they look for answers, you want to be the one that provides them.  

 You may want to read our blog: Why your boss is never happy with your marketing results.