By Bill McAlister, President of Media Enterprises
Web, web, web. That is how our DRTV customers are placing their orders. Phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are the possible web portals. It used to be the backend was this sleepy backwater of live phone operators and the products were the only thing constantly changing. Today over half our orders come from the Internet and the format is in constant flux. It is not enough to just have the TV spot video running and an order screen on our inviting web pages. Our standard web pages come in a rainbow of looks, each customized to fit correctly the Apple iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxies and more. If not formatted properly it turns a beautiful money-making landing page into a jumbled non-productive mess.
Our inventors depend on us to provide the best presentation possible for their babies, and all the best intentions of creating the best product and best television commercial are for nothing if we drop the ball on the one yard line and fumble the sale. I am sorry to say our Philadelphia Eagles have been Red Zone challenged in this department for several seasons in a row but there is hope. In addition, the day of just placing the web address in the commercial and customers come running directly to your website has also become a thing of the past. Most people Google our products such as Night View NV and are greeted with our Adwords listing at the top of the page and our web listing in the first natural search result and other places that are talking about our products. The process of creating the web pages is also critical to that goal with search engine optimization. With the right web page setups, the pages will have the right content and the page tags to get the attention of Google’s black box algorithm that decides which pages are displayed first. Who would have figured that running a simple direct response television commercial could be so difficult?
And for our prospective customers, how many ways can we possibly touch them with our message? Customers can also see our display ads, get our emails and see our posts on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and other places. Viral buzz can be creating on Twitter, blogs and vlogs. Is having our new television commercial showing Mighty Putty Purple epoxy pulling a 340,000 pound 747 jumbo jet enough to grab web attention? Have I used enough web vocabulary yet? It’s all an effort to the get the very biggest bang for every TV advertising dollar we spend. With media rates multiples of what they were in the past and a fractured audience on hundreds of channels that may be DVRing past our spots, the web is a make or break it proposition for the Direct Response TV industry.
–Bill McAlister is President of Media Enterprises Inc., an on-air marketing, manufacturing and consumer product sales and distribution company. Bill’s mission is to push the envelope of conventional sales and marketing practices to achieve a superior level of quality and excellence using a direct response television model. www.MediaEnterprisesInc.com
