TV adverts have to be one of the most enduring forms of marketing, so it makes sense that a lot of brand marketers focus their campaigns on them.
But if you aren’t using a brand monitoring to measure impact, you could end up losing out on a lot of crucial brand awareness data.
Once an advert is out there — lighting up the screens of household TVs — some marketers tend to forget about it. Those that do look into the success of a TV campaign usually measure the sales and website traffic that the ad brings. But is that really enough?
What about brand awareness?
There are even fewer marketers who track how their TV campaigns affect their brand’s awareness. And that right there is the missing piece of a puzzle!
You need this piece, otherwise, you'll be missing out on vital information that will not only improve your TV campaigns, but also your brand marketing strategy as a whole.
Read on to find out why you must track brand awareness for your TV campaigns.
The Problem with TV Advertising
You are no doubt already well aware of the difficulty that comes with trying to track the brand impact of TV advertising. No matter your brand, it's not easy using traditional methods to try and gauge how well ads are performing.
Not only do most brand managers struggle to find the right attribution model, they are also up against those individuals who constantly preach that TV is dead.
Is it really dead, though? We’d argue that it isn’t — but people often disregard this opinion as it can be extremely tricky to track TV's effect on brand correctly. It’s just easier for them to believe that TV is over!
However, TV is still very much an important medium for many brands. In fact, in Germany it is still one of the most used mediums. And when you take a look at worldwide stats, you can see that primetime reach is still huge.
One example of TV's sustained relevance is a big televised sporting event, like the Superbowl. Thanks to people now being able to live-stream the event, advertisers can get even more views for their ads. As the best ads often do well on social media, especially on YouTube afterwards, they can gain between 100-150 million views after being aired on TV.
And that number doesn’t include the millions of people who would have seen the ads live!
Brand Awareness Must Join Your List of TV Campaign KPIs
You already know that there are a few different metrics that can be used to measure your TV advertising performance.
Site traffic
Sales
ROI
Brand awareness
Nothing new, right?
Brand awareness might be, though. For many marketing managers, it’s not a metric they intuitively think to track — especially if they are solely focused on increasing sales and profits.
By setting up brand tracking, you can gain so many useful insights in relation to how TV campaigns affect your brand awareness. And not just brand awareness, mind you. Brand consideration and associations are also trackable, but those are topics for another time.
With brand tracking software, you’ll see what percentage of your target audience is actually aware of your adverts and how many new customers these ads help you capture.
Once you have these figures, you can instantly see whether or not your ad was a hit. If it wasn’t, you’ll at least have plenty of data that should make it easier to see how you need to tweak or alter your next campaign.
To drive this point home, let’s take a closer look at all of the reasons why brand awareness needs to be on your list of brand campaign KPIs.
Brand Awareness Can Change the Performance of a Company
Ok, this point isn't solely focused on TV campaigns, but it is an important one. Living in the age of social media means it can be very easy for brands to target the right kind of customers.
It’s not always as simple as it sounds, though. With increasingly stiff competition on various social media platforms, customers who were once loyal can very quickly turn fickle. Customers are also a lot more likely to be swayed by what their peers tell them about brands, as well.
These would be very difficult challenges to face if you ignored your brand awareness metric.
Once you track brand awareness, you'll find out exactly how aware your target audience are of your brand. This should give you some insights into whether a TV campaign actually had any traction in the real world. Did it beat those of your competitors?
Tracking Brand Awareness Shows Whether TV Ads Are Worth the Investment
A lot of companies still spend heavily on new TV campaigns throughout the year. One such example is Pharma advertisers, who spend a whopping $6.5 billion. This figure, however, is nothing compared to the eye-watering $7.15 billion spent by advertisers in the tech industry.
Many marketers justify this expenditure as a way to drive long-term brand building. It ensures top-of-mind brand awareness and can help to raise this awareness right at the top of the funnel.
As this is such an important investment, it’s not something on which a marketing department should be spending blindly. They need to know that the ads they are buying are worth it.
Therefore, brand tracking software is essential for any marketer and their team.
You’ll Discover Emerging Audiences
Any advert that you create for TV won’t just be seen by your target audience. That shouldn’t worry you — if anything, you should see it as an opportunity for building your brand.
With a great ad and bit of luck, some of the people who see your ad but don’t belong to your target audience might convert into customers at some point down the line.
Imagine you are the brand manager for BMW’s Mini. Your target audience is drivers aged 25-45 year olds. However, your TV adverts will also be seen by people aged 18-24. This gives your brand a chance to prep this demographic as future buyers.
As long as you are tracking the advert’s effect on brand awareness, you can see all of the new target audiences that are developing so you’ll have plenty of time to start doing all that you can to appeal to them.
You Must Track Your TV Ads to Make Sure They’re Having the Right Kind of Impact
When you create adverts that are designed to increase brand awareness with a certain audience, you will want to make sure that they really are having this desired impact.
Is there a way to do that other than by tracking them? We very much doubt that!
To make sure your adverts are increasing brand awareness in the ways you envisioned, you will have to track them. This will provide you with data that should show the performance of each and if there are any ways you can improve them.
Data insights might suggest that an advert needs a few tweaks or that it could be necessary to completely scrap it and start again from scratch.
The data might also show whether it’s worth creating a slightly different advert that could better target a completely new target audience.
What Happens When Brands Don’t Track TV Campaigns?
But what about the flip side of brand awareness and TV advertising campaigns? You might think that your brand’s efforts could be much better placed elsewhere by focusing on different aspects of your marketing.
The benefits that would come with prioritizing something else will outweigh anything negative that would come from neglecting brand tracking of TV ads, right?
That might not be the case. There are a few problems that regularly crop up when a brand fails to carry out any brand tracking related to its TV campaigns. If you don’t track this metric, then you can expect the following:
You won’t know anything about the impact your adverts are having on the brand’s target audience.
You’ll be oblivious as to whether expensive advertising campaigns are giving you the edge over competitors.
It’s impossible to prove impact and show whether the cost is worth it.
You’ll be blind to new audiences and won’t see any other areas in which your adverts are having a positive effect.
You’ll miss out on all the data that shows the long-term brand impact of TV ads.
You won’t see how to improve ads or whether there are any that aren’t working.
Case Study: How Latana Assisted AirHelp
AirHelp is the world’s largest passenger rights advocate, assisting and educating airline passengers about their rights and claims for compensation.
One way in which Latana assisted AirHelp was when it came to brand awareness. Using the data from Latana’s brand tracking tool, they were able to see areas of awareness in which their competitors were outperforming them (general audience). Additionally, they were also pleased to see that they had some strong areas, especially with core target audiences.
Using all of these insights and data, AirHelp was able to create and launch a TV campaign in the first half of August 2019 that would better target each of their audiences.
It’s not just TV ads that Latana has assisted AirHelp with. The company is also using the branding tool for quality checks of other branding efforts in various marketing campaigns.
Are you ready to start tracking how your TV ads are affecting your brand? It’s never too late to begin!
