Is Television Advertising Right for You?

 Will your TV offer make viewers run for their telephones?

Let's face it -- if everybody could make money hand over fist using local television, as some people certainly do, everybody would already be doing it. Yes, TV can be a fabulous moneymaker for you if you have the right offer! But not everyone has an offer that is likely to work on TV. So, before you spend a nickel, it's a good idea to make an intelligent guess, at least, of your likely results. (Here's a little story about selling widgets on television that will illustrate how you should be thinking about this.)

Before you start advertising with TV or any other form of advertising, it's very important to make sure you have a good offer. What I call an offer is what you want to trade your prospects for their time or money. It is the main thing that will determine the success or failure of your TV advertising.

Good offer or bad offer? The answer to that question determines, more than anything else, how well your TV advertising will work.

To illustrate with a little exaggeration, let's say you have a very good offer -- a boxcar full of new refrigerators that normally sell for $500 each. You want to unload them for $199 each. How much advertising do you think it would take to sell those refrigerators?

But what if you had a very bad offer? You have a boxcar of refrigerators, but they're all old, beat-up and ugly. In a used appliance shop, they might sell for $50 each. But you want $199 each for them! Would any amount of truthful advertising move those refrigerators at that price?

If possible you should also have a valuable "Sub-Offer". This is a preliminary offer of real value from which you can "sell up or sell more". An attorney's "free consultation" or a dentist's "free examination" are their "sub-offers".

What if Your Commercial Works? (We know what you will do if your TV advertising does not work -- you'll stop doing it.) But what if it works better than you ever expected? Can you answer the phones if all your lines light up at once? Can you separate the "wheat" from the "chaff" -- the good prospects from the bad? Can you track results well enough that you'll have an idea which TV programs work for you and which do not? Those are things you should think about.

OK, let's say that you've done your research and you've decided that TV advertising just might work for you. You have a good offer, a good sub-offer, and you're confident you can handle the calls and turn callers into prospects, prospects into customers or clients. Now what? Now, you have to decide whether you will do your TV yourself or find an advertising agent to help you. (And, "By the way," you might ask, "what about radio?")