Even after being the "head of marketing" for the past couple of years, I still am a newbie with anything to do with marketing. So I learn and I read and I try and try some more.

Since our website is our main marketing tool, one of the most important things we track is the number of visitors. Its not the only thing and probably not even the most important metrics but if you have a website and no visitors - you have nothing :-)

So we're talking about lead generation, there are many ways to try and get leads to your online marketing "funnel" but none is more glamours that the TV commercial - I love a good TVC and always have, so when it came up as an option I grabbed it with both hands.

I am going to have my very own TV commercial - yeepee.

First lets get one thing out of the way, we produce accounting software package for Australian micro businesses, that's a big market, a few hundred thousand businesses in all (not sure where they all are though), but it is not the entire Australian population.

So first off the bat, TVC is probably not a great idea as it is very generic. Someone once told me a funny analogy about our marketing efforts:
We're trying to hit the Harbour bridge from the Opera house with a cricket ball,
it's not going to work... you either need a big gun (like a TVC with lots of budjet) or you need to get really close (like you with direct mail)

Nevertheless a TVC we're going to try.

So the first step is to come up with ideas. For this purpose we read a couple of books to get into the mood, one is called fascination and can be summed up in the following ways to get people interested:

Lust: Seduced by the anticipation of pleasure
Mystique: Intrigued by unanswered questions
Alarm: Take urgent action to avoid negative consequences
Prestige: Inspire an envious eagerness to possess something
Power: Get people to defer to you and your message
Vice: Get people to act outside of their normal behavior
Trust: People will find you safe and comfortable. They will confide in you.

Followed by another great book called Made to stick which provides a framework to writing copy that sticks:
* Simple
* Unexpected
* Concrete
* Credible
* Emotional
* Stories

After coming up with a few ideas, I've tried to create a few videos by myself, focusing on a few ideas, quickly giving up on the whole thing.

At this stage I emailed a few production houses/Ad agencies that specialise in this area. Funnily most of them did not even return my emails but the responses I did get as well as the information I maneged to gather made me realise we're talking about a cost of 10K to 20K easily - not the kind of money I am happy to spend as an experiment. Not to mention the cost of the ads themselves.

As an alternative I turned to Elance and asked for quotes to get a 30 seconds TVC produced, I received many quotes and findind the right one was hard. I managed to select one produced from the USA, which unfortunatly proved hard to work out with the time zone difference. A few weeks passed and I settled on another provider - this time from Romania!

A few days later the script was ready, a simple and straight forward script that focuses on "pain free accounting for your small business" - which is one of our best peforming tag lines.

The contractor used stock video for the ad together with some nice editing and screen shots of the video and an Australian voice over artist.

At this stage I started to discuss purchasing spots with a couple of TV stations, I have decided to start with the Gold Coast as the regional area for our first test. This is a large enoough area (~1M) and we currently have quite a lot of customers from that area.

So a few emails and phone calls, I received a few quotes and went with Prime7 for about $2000 you can run 15 spots over a course of 1 month with a diverse schedule (some peak some less).

The next hurdle is to receive CAD approval from the freetv, this organisation approves every TVC that airs in Australia, their guidelines are substantial and cover many aspects of the TVC. I had to prove that Nominal is the "newest accounting software on the market" amongst other clarifications. But this only took a couple of days and their online system is quite nice and works fine.

The next step is to get the TVC to the station, apparently there are two companies that can do that (for a fee), I worked with dubsat. These guys will receive the TVC from you along with other details (like a clapper or ID board) and will send it to the station. They have a few services with different prices but the simplest one is $29 for 2 days devliry. Fine by me.

There were a few technical glitches with the video my contractor created, the format was not exactly right and their technical requirments were not exactly clear. Than there was a problem with the sound - it must be 12 frames of silence at start and end and Dubsat will not test for that.

So the TVC has finally arrived at the station, now we are crossing our fingers and monitoring our website to see if anyone is actually viewing this commercial and visiting our website from the the Gold coast area. Will tell you about it later.