Digital Strategies To Amplify And Complement Your TV Campaign

(Article originally published on Forbes.com. And is part 3 of our series with BeFoundOnline on “Bringing TV and Digital Together.”)

In a previous article, Dan Golden and I offered our shared learnings about SEO strategy and how to be prepared for the different online traffic that a TV ad will bring. In this article, we will discuss additional digital opportunities that can help both maximize and complement the efforts you’re making on television.

Here are three bonus digital strategies to help make the most of your TV campaign while giving your online marketing a boost. You can do them all, or just one. It really depends on your product or service, market, budget and audience.

Expand Your Video Formats.

“Just take that 30-second TV spot and run it on the interwebs. It should work great,” is something no digital marketer has ever said.

For a digital buy, video formats really need to fit the platform. Your TV commercial isn’t optimized for Instagram Stories, the Facebook Newsfeed or any one of the dozens of options available on YouTube. So, before you get started, make sure you have the right creative in place. Creative that works for digital video needs to have strong attention grabbers and should be optimized to convey a message without audio. There are also opportunities for including direct and clickable CTAs.

Implement Strategic 'Dayparting' Around TV Campaigns.

Schedule your paid search, social and programmatic ads to run at the same time that your TV spots do. If you have a big TV ad campaign, also have digital ads ready to go once it airs. This is a great way to capture the response to your TV ad and boost your return on investment.

And because TV can create big spikes in digital demand, you need to increase digital ad budgets around the times your ads are set to run. Another option would be to put bid modifiers in place on non-branded campaigns in TV markets. You don’t want to lose opportunities due to artificial daily budget caps.

Extend Your TV Campaign With Digital Video.

Whether you’re looking to target your TV audience again, reach a totally different audience or both, digital video can help. With YouTube, you can use a variety of ad types like pre-roll, skippable and non-skippable ads, bumper ads, sponsored cards, TrueView ads and more. TrueView ads, for example, run like commercials with the benefit that you only pay when a viewer watches the ad for 30 seconds or clicks it.

You can also leverage video on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. These platforms have the added benefit that you can target a very specific audience demographic, leverage the video you have in a small ad and drive traffic directly to a video or landing page. Paid social also makes it possible to connect online with customers via social ads, PPC and display ads while they’re watching TV.

Publisher direct and programmatic video buys provide even more ways to extend your TV ad's campaign by replaying the ads or segments of ads. Through digital video, you can reinforce the messaging of the original TV ad and increase the likelihood that your ad will reach viewers at a more opportune time in their buying cycle.

As you can see, strategizing for a TV ad campaign can very quickly cross over into the digital world. This is just more reason for us all to strive for greater continuity between the two. When you look at your TV creative, think about its digital possibilities. When you analyze your digital plans, do so with an understanding of what’s going on offline. And with it all, don’t be afraid to keep on testing and learning.

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