So – You’re making a new TV ad for your business.
You go out and hire the best creatives you can afford.
And after a long pitch process, going through idea after idea, you find “the one”.
Then there’s filming, location, editing and a host of other costs to be negotiated. But once you get the edits through, it all starts to look much more exciting. Then there’s the back-and-forth with the editors until you’ve finally got a finished product that you’re absolutely delighted with. And your agency is thrilled at the prospect of perhaps winning an industry award.
But then it dawns on you that with all the additional changes, locations, actors, revisions, re-shoots and so forth, there’s not actually any budget left to put it on TV anywhere meaningful..!
So it goes out at 3am on an obscure local channel that no-one watches. And you’ve got away with it…until that is, the CEO asks why he hasn’t seen the ad on TV.
Sounds ridiculous right? I mean, who’d do something like that?!
Turns out plenty of people would: There are a lot of websites in NZ that have had five and six-figure sums spent on them along with the associated amounts of time looking at visuals, concepts, wire frames, beta versions, user testing and so forth. Yet when you search online for the products these sites sell (and at least half of NZ consumers do just this), you just never see their (amazing) new site in the search listings.
Anywhere.
And there’s no budget left to run a search engine advertising campaign (eg. AdWords) or to do SEO properly – the budget has all been spent!
Hard to believe..?
Try searching on Google for, say LCD TVs – some retailers have put obvious effort into both paid and natural search. Others simply have not.
Or maybe you’re trying to buy books online, say as a Christmas gift. Again, there is a lack of proactive SEO, or PPC campaigns for that matter, from some New Zealand retailers. The results speak for themselves.
Making TV ads and then not showing them to anyone sounds ridiculous and you’d never do it.
So why is it ok to do exactly that with your website..?