How can marketers use TV ads to drive searches?
In this post I'll look at some examples, stats and suggested best practices.
In this post I'll look at some examples, stats and suggested best practices.
How can marketers use offline ads to drive brand and product searches? In this post I’ll look at some examples, stats and suggested best practices.
Driving search isn’t necessarily the prime purpose of offline ads, but marketers should be aware that many are likely to respond to ads using the web.
They may be watching TV with their smartphones, tablets or laptops to hand. Or they may see an ad on the train and respond by opening a mobile browser.
In these scenarios, marketers need to do as much as they can to make sure customers get to the correct website or landing page.
Displaying a URL is one way to do this, another is to display a call to action to search for a particular term.
Here’s an example from Sonos which I used in a previous post on customer reviews.
It’s beautifully simple and the call to action couldn’t be clearer:
People who search for the term are greeted by a search results page full of five star ratings, which gets the point across very nicely.
Of course, you need a product that’s good enough to generate such great reviews first, but if you do have that, why not make the most of it?
I’m going to call them search calls to action for now because that’s how I’ve referred to them before, and I don’t know of an alternative term.
Anyway, here are some convincing reasons to use them:
Of course, it’s possible to do both…
What constitutes best practice here is yet to be determined clearly as there seem to have been relatively few studies into this topic.
However, that won’t stop me suggesting a few…
It may seem obvious, but many TV ads feature a URL or search term for just a fraction of the ad’s length. Give them time to see it.
In the BT ad below, the URL is shown for just two seconds of a 50 second ad.
Yes. it’s a simple URL to remember, but just a few more seconds increases the chance that people will see and recall the URL.
This Barclay’s ad calls for people to search for ‘Barclay’s Blue Rewards’.
Sure enough, the brand occupies the top slots in the SERPs, while no competitor brands rank on page one.
PPC ads ensure that, as people search for the term they’ve been asked to, or other terms related to the product, you’re guaranteed to be top of the page. As in the Barclay’s example above.
If people search for a specific URL or term after viewing an ad, the landing page should reinforce the ad.
Here, the Barclay’s page uses the same imagery as the ad, and begins to describe the features of the product.
This reassures searchers that they’ve reached the right page and ensures that the transition between TV ad and website is as smooth as possible.
As the previous stats show, people are more likely to have a smartphone to hand than any other device, so landing pages have to be mobile-friendly.
Again, Barclay’s gets it right:
I think this is an area where marketers have plenty of room for improvement.
For TV ads to be successful in driving online searches (and ultimately sales) then the whole campaign needs to be joined up.
Barclay’s here provides a good example, but others are guilty of failing to ensure search positions before ads are broadcast, not displaying URLs or CTAs clearly enough, or not reinforcing the ad message on the landing page.