Television & Digital: Better Together

Why Your Advertising Strategy Needs Both – and How to Combine Them Effectively

Do you want to get better results from your small business’s advertising while maximizing your return on investment? Then consider running a targeted ad campaign that capitalizes on the power of television by combining it with digital advertising.

Cable television has always offered advertisers the ability to target prospective customers with incredible specificity, while still reaching a broad audience. Based on a cable company’s data about its audience’s viewing behavior, you can use cable television ads to target viewers by factors such as age, gender and location, as well as by income, ethnicity and lifestyle interests.

Now, however, businesses have the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of television advertising exponentially by combining it with digital advertising. You can use customers’ past online behavior — such as the websites they visit, the search terms they use and the products they buy — to target them on an individual level and serve up advertising based on their interests and behavior. For instance, if you own a shoe store, you could deliver your ad to people searching or browsing “shoes” online.

Whether your goal is to build awareness of your business, get prospects to consider you, or move them to actually make a purchase, combining television and online advertising is a highly effective advertising strategy. While television is still the most popular advertising medium in the U.S., digital advertising is rapidly catching up. In fact, spending on digital advertising is projected to account for 35.8% of all media spending this year.

By tying your cable television advertising to digital advertising, you can take advantage of the growing popularity of video. Adult consumers are spending an average of 5 hours, 14 minutes per day watching video in 2016 — which reflects continued growth from previous years. Whether they’re watching it on a television screen, a laptop or a mobile device, seeing your advertising in multiple places helps increase awareness and keep your business top-of-mind.

Take these steps to tie your television and digital advertising together for greater effectiveness:

• Work with your media partner to identify the cable television programming that attracts your target customers.
• Include a URL in your television ads to drive customers to your website. Create an ad-specific landing page with more details or a special offer.
• Make sure your website has online-ordering or appointment-setting capabilities so that prospects can take action on your television ads at any time of day or night.
• Repurpose your cable television commercials as online videos to increase the impact of your advertising. Increase engagement with these online videos by including hyperlinks and calls to action.
• Don’t replace television advertising with digital advertising; instead, use the two to complement each other. Some 82% of brands report that increased spending on television advertising leads directly to an increase in website traffic, while cutting back on television advertising has been shown to disproportionately hurt businesses’ sales.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket — or all your ads in one medium. Combining cable television and online advertising gives you more opportunities to connect with your target market than using either one alone.