The Ultimate Guide To Product Marketing - Part 3: Launching a TV Campaign
September 14th, 2017
After the results of your web test are out, you will need to unpack and analyze those numbers. While this may sound overwhelming at first, we're going to make it a lot more simple in this article and briefly discuss the data you should be looking at, as well as begin walking you through the process of rolling out a TV campaign.
What are the things you need to look at to determine if your web test went well? Well, obviously the number of orders/sign-ups you receive is a big teller, but to analyze what the overall picture looks like, you're going to need a few numbers. First, find out your click-through rate.
Click-through Rate
Your click-through rate is a measure of how clickable your email was, basically. It evaluates how many people expressed interest in your product or service that was shown to them out of the greater majority who also saw your ad. You can easily calculate it by dividing the number of page clicks by the number of email messages sent, multiplied by 100. You can view your clicks by looking at your data on Google Analytics and seeing how many hits your landing page got via email. For example, if your campaign got 200 page views and you sent out 10 000 emails, your CTR is 2%.
The benchmark for CTR varies across different mediums. For instance, a 2% click-through rate is considered only average for search engine ads, but exceptionally well for email campaigns. This has to do with factors like target audience size, or the size of the chosen platform's user base. Check out this useful calculator to see how your CTR stacks up against competitors of similar industry. Although this calculator doesn't mention email marketing, you can still get a sense of click-through rate benchmarks per industry and gain a better understanding of the metric.
While there's no exact "good" or "bad" click-through rate, know that a few things affect how high or low you score on that scale. A big determinant of your CTR is, of course, your ad copy and your ad itself too. If the body in your email message is inviting, promising and interesting, you are much more likely to receive a higher click-through rate than if you were to send out a poorly written email and have a low quality advertisement. This has to do with the level of trust you're establishing with your audience and the kind of impression you're putting forth–if people don't trust your product or service they are definitely filing your email under 'spam'.
Click-through rate goes hand in hand with the Conversion Rate; your conversion rate is a measure of how many people are completing the desired activity on your page, out of the majority who clicked your link and went to your website. Similar to CTR, it's calculated by dividing the number of orders or sign-ups by the number of total page visits, multiplied by 100. Conversion rates help you look at how much of an interest your product is generating, and it really gives you a good insight into whether or not you should expand your campaign horizon past email.
Next thing you should look at is your Return On Investment, or ROI, which is a ratio of how much money you're getting in return of your spend on advertising, production costs or any other costs. ROI gives you a sense of how much profit you're making per every item sold and order placed. To calculate this, you divide your profit by your investment costs, multiplied by 100. So, if those 200 orders were at $20 per order, your total revenue would be $4000. Say that your total cost is at $3000, your ROI is 33%. Depending on your profit margin you can evaluate whether your ROI meets your standard, so ROI is a pretty relative measure of success (as long as it's a positive number, we must add.)
You are advised to leave your campaign to 'cook' for a while in order to collect as much data as possible, so we do not recommend you begin optimizing or analyzing results for a few weeks so that you receive a good volume of data that you are able to rely on. Don't stress about it and just leave it to do its thing, a watched pot never boils!
Taking Your Campaign To The TV Screen
For this part of the article we spoke to our friends in the media buying department at Kingstar Media. They told us all about the process of TV media buying and what that means to you as a product owner.
Agencies are usually approached by clients who may be on both sides of the TV campaign process; either they already have a spot prepared and just need to sort out the media buys, or they come to the agency with no spot, just their vision for their campaign, so they would need a spot prepared AND a media buy. Luckily for them, Kingstar is just two (exhausting) flights of stairs down from Distilled Creative, a full-service production company that has been producing awesome TV commercials for many products over the last 10 years.
First thing's first, when creating your spot you must conduct audience analysis in order to accurately define who your target market really is, and the sort of creative you will therefore have to make, as well as the language you'll need to use to speak to your potential customers. Define your group's age, gender, demographic, and even details like annual income. All of those characteristics will help sharpen the image of your typical customer and therefore guide you while you figure out where to look for them.
Once you have your target market set and accurately defined yet still large enough to include a sufficient amount of people, you'll move on to exploring creative ideas and ways to tell your story to this group, with the help of a production company.
Agencies will likely have years worth of historic data at bay to make the process of finding your target market and figuring out your media buys a whole lot easier. Based on their experience with hundreds of brands in the past, they use qualitative and quantitative data to find out how people consume products and thus have an idea on what the best media strategy is for certain target market sectors. They are also experts on which channels are suitable for which target market sector and have the tools to help you make decisions on which channels and networks are worth the investment. However, in many cases, some networks would get overlooked due to the price of their media buy depending on the client's media budget.
It should be noted that the first few weeks of a DRTV campaign are reserved as a test period only, so the media buy starts off on a smaller scale, usually for 2-4 weeks.
Media Buying
Once the list of networks is curated, media buyers do their thing and get you to where you could and should be. They leverage buying power and good relations in order to get discounts on typical rates, and some even have their own pre-negotiated rates with certain networks. There's also the benefit of remnant advertising which we went over in our first article of the series that provides you with a cheaper way of buying TV media. Despite not there being a specific pricing model for TV buying, you could buy TV media space with different networks across Canada and the US for about $15,000 and spread the word about your product nationwide.
This is just to give you a general understanding of the media buying scene, since rates change from one agency to another. Advantages of an agency media buy include the better rates they may offer you compared to their counterparts, as well as the detailed and accurate data forecasting they are able to show you based on their rich experience within this field, promising you good results.
Optimizing
As data is flowing in from phone and web leads, we learn more about your campaign's performance on the TV networks you've chosen to be shown on. As more data is collected, it's time to use this data to optimize your campaign. Media buyers recommend you wait at least a week before optimizing. But what does that mean? "Optimizing" is a fancy way of saying "modifying", or "improving" on your campaign. For TV, this means that you may stop advertising on certain channels and start looking into buying more media for other networks if you find that they're doing a better job boosting your product.
Aggregating a lot of data from your campaigns can give you the power to renegotiate media buy prices with certain networks if you originally found them a bit too steep, since you now have proof on which networks perform better than others. It also helps you evaluate your testing period in order to decide whether or not you should continue to buy more media and expand into a fully running TV campaign.
Recap
A direct response TV campaign begins with a thorough audience analysis, followed by brainstorming ideas for creatives and coming up with a media buying strategy that includes research on placements and networks that are most appropriate for your brand. Media buying usually starts off with 2-4 weeks of testing, then campaign performance is evaluated and optimized to carry on for a longer period of time.
Users, almost absent-mindedly, reach for their phone when they see TV commercials in order to conduct more research about the product they just saw, so it's a common step for clients to launch a digital campaign in order to support their TV campaign and establish an online presence. Check back in next week to learn about launching a digital media campaign and some of the best practices we recommend. Thanks for reading!