Advertising your website on TV is not only incredibly effective, it can also be surprisingly affordable as well!

I’m positively STUNNED at the number of website owners and otherwise brilliant small business owners who think the only way to drive people to your website is via search. Cable television advertising (which is advertising on your local cable stations instead of individual programs) can cost less than an average PPC campaign.

In my work with clients, I’m amazed at the fact that most are more than willing to dive into a PPC campaign which can easily run into several thousand dollars per month, yet are terrified to use “offline” methods to promote their business such as investing in television advertising.

Internet search advertising is a LOT like yellow pages advertising in the fact that by the time someone heads to the Internet (or the yellow pages) they already KNOW what they’re seeking. That’s why the conversion rates for “search advertising” are so much better than the conversion rates for “banner” advertising.

Banner ads work like traditional media in the fact that they are positioned so a prospective customer will “trip” over them BEFORE they’ve made the final decision to head to the yellow pages -internet – or store!

Meanwhile, television advertising can “grab” a prospective customer’s attention BEFORE they begin to search for your product or service.

You need to know how buyers move THROUGH the buying process. If the product is a MINOR SALE – such as purchasing a package of gum, the decision making process might be measured in nanoseconds. Meanwhile, the buying decision for a larger purchase – say a boat – takes longer. While the bewildered spouse may think that her husband’s boat purchase was out of the blue, in fact her boat lusting husband had been reading magazines and visiting boat shows for months prior to the big purchase.

In the months leading up to the boat purchase, our potential boat buyer’s ears perked up whenever there was an ad on the radio for a boat show. When a boat dealer’s ad ran during his favorite program, he sat glued to the screen. If he had the show recorded, he may have stopped to watch the ad. THAT is how the buying decision works – especially in the major sale.

As for our boat dealer who wants to sell a boat to our wanna-be skipper, he can use television advertising to “beat” the search game by promoting his website via his television commercials.

Advertising is a game of building familiarity with customers. Television advertising is a GREAT way to get introduced to those customers. Just make sure you’ve created a compelling and selling message to deliver via your television advertising campaign. THAT is the secret to success in ANY media!

Kathy Hendershot-Hurd is an internet advertising business consultant who works with small business owners on creating effective marketing tools for their business. In 1997 she launched Virtual Impax (http://virtualimpax.com) and she’s written a book, Beyond the Niche (http://beyondnichemarketing.com) to help small business owners create an effective marketing strategy for their business.

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