TV or not TV? Is that one of the questions that plays on your mind as you contemplate how you can most effectively scale and grow your business?

If so, the answer is clear – TV advertising is fantastic at delivering transformative effects for smaller advertisers and their brands.

Many new and / or small businesses find that following a relatively “easy” period in which they can efficiently harvest existing customer demand through channels like paid search and Facebook advertising, they start to hit a volume ceiling at which point they find it difficult to generate incremental sales from those channels. This may be because they are just speaking to a small pool of consumers over and over, they are preaching to the converted and / or they have reached saturation point within the channel.

For a business to grow, the most important thing is to reach as many of its potential customers as possible. In doing so, the business can start generating demand and filling the top of sales funnel. TV advertising is great at cost-effectively reaching audiences at scale and therefore growing the potential customer base.

Through the inherent power of audio-visual advertising, TV advertising can evoke emotions that increase trust, create and reinforce positive associations and as a result, make brands famous. This longer-term brand building is fundamental to business growth.

However, in addition to this, TV is extremely effective at delivering short-term sales by rapidly driving awareness amongst target audiences at scale. Indeed, in our As Seen on TV study looking at over 300 campaigns from smaller advertisers, TV was found to deliver 80% of advertising-generated sales whilst only representing 66% of spend. Furthermore, the research found that the typical profit payback point was after about four months.

In addition to all of this, TV amplifies other media channels and makes them work harder. It serves as a great platform from which to create awareness and demand, as we can see in the chart below which shows how Monzo’s search volumes went through the roof as soon as they started advertising on TV.