Increase your ROI when advertising on TV by integrating it successfully with your website

You can increase your return on investment (ROI) when running a television commercial by successfully integrating it with your website.

To do this apply these basic techniques for both your TV commercial and website:

TV commercial

• Ensure the URL is on the screen during the advertisement and if/when possible also verbalise the URL.

  

 

Website design

1. Have an easy to remember URL that can direct the user straight to an information page about the sale/offer/deal such as www.domain.com.au/product-sale where the product is the name of the product you are selling.  This has 3 advantages firstly it makes it easier to remember, secondly for those time poor consumers they can access the information quickly and thirdly it aids in increasing your search engine ranking for those search terms.
    
2. From the home page have a prominent link/area/button such as “Latest Sale” which takes the user directly to the advertised information page.  This means for those customers that didn’t see the television advertisement you can let them know and for those who have forgotten the URL they can find it.
    
3. Have the information about what you are advertising easily accessible from anywhere in the site preferable in a viewable, printable and downloadable format.  Don’t assume your customers access the site only through your websites homepage because if your SEO is working well for you they may enter your site via an internal page.
    
4. Have a useable contact form which only asks for the information you really need in order to attend to the users query (name, email, phone, comment) and give a text area large enough for them to enter a reasonable amount of viewable text.

 

By applying the above techniques you will be able to avoid the recent frustration I experienced by the following company when they ran a TV commercial which included their website address.

Example of poor integration

My husband and I have wanted to buy a new bed for some time now so when a TV advertisement came on last night for a bed sale at Forty Winks I was interested to find out more.  The information I got from the advertisement was:

• Sale was ending soon
   
• Several beds were on sale priced at $999 and $1999
   
• There is an interest free period conditions apply
   
• Their website address is www.fortywinks.com.au

 

I went to the website hoping to find the answers to the following questions:

1. When was the sale ending?
    
2. What beds exactly are on sale and for how much?
    
3. What conditions apply to the interest free period?

 

I didn’t get an answer to any of my above 3 questions but instead I got 3 frustrating roadblocks.

1. On arriving on the home page Fig 1. the first thing I did was quickly scanned the page for the keywords “Sale” or “Campaign” or “Offer” but I couldn’t find one.

Fig 1. Home page

 

2. So I started clicking around the site, first trying “Beds and Mattresses”  Fig 2. nope no sale there.  OK maybe it’s under “Catalogue” Fig 3. nope no sale there, maybe I can watch the TV ad again by clicking on a small link found in the footer called “Forty Winks TV Ad” Fig 4. nope still no joy as the ad featured wasn’t the one I had seen last night. 

Fig 2. Bed & Mattress landing page

Fig 3. Catalogue

Fig 4. Site footer

 

3. Maybe I could send them a request for the answers but on going to the contact form I am presented with a form Fig 5 that asked for not only my name and contact details but also my address details and a text area allowing only 2 visible lines which I could barely get "Hi could you tell me the answers to the.." before it disappeared above the scroll.  At this point I was very frustrated so I decided to give up and resigned to the fact I wasn't going to find out the answers to my questions any time soon.

Fig 5. Contact

 

Outcome

My experience resulted in this blog an unhappy user experience and a lost sales opportunity for Forty Winks.