Peo­ple go to tremen­dous steps to utilise main­stream media effec­tively. This week, one of my clients has fast-tracked a com­plete rebuild of their (gen­er­ally under­per­form­ing) web­site in direct response to per­haps twenty-seconds of prime­time TV fea­ture on a highly rat­ing show.

Cost is pretty much no object: the poten­tial gains in brand and busi­ness devel­op­ment are entirely unre­peat­able. Their mar­ket­ing & pro­mo­tion strat­egy is fairly web-centric, and arguably the sin­gle best TV spot out­come one could hope for is direc­tion to a rich infor­ma­tion por­tal. The web, like no other medium, offers this for a com­pa­ra­bly diminu­tive cost.

Not only do you get higher con­ver­sion rates than you would if a phone num­ber were dis­played, but you can also stem the inflow of enquiries to a more man­age­able rate than tele­vi­sion would oth­er­wise gen­er­ate. This week I’m rapidly devel­op­ing a new web­site for them, but also aim­ing to imple­ment a new VoIP mech­a­nism to effec­tively man­age the antic­i­pated tele­phone traf­fic surge. This is for a small busi­ness with no employ­ees sit­ting at a desk 9 – 5 ready to take calls: they require a par­tic­u­larly agile strat­egy to appro­pri­ately lever­age this media opportunity.

At the end of the day, the con­tent of the actual tele­vi­sion spot is rel­a­tively insignif­i­cant. If it con­verts to web traf­fic, it’s done its job. The web (and, in par­tic­u­lar, tele­phone con­tact and sub­se­quent rela­tion­ships) is the cru­cial com­po­nent in this mar­ket­ing mix. It pro­vides a way to appear as big as TV with finite resource con­straints. Oper­at­ing on such a lim­ited time scale, we can’t throw money at this project fast enough to make it suc­ceed: the lim­i­ta­tion is in human resourc­ing and man-hours, rather than pro­vi­sion­ing addi­tional tech­nol­ogy to achieve opti­mum capacity.

This client can respond to close-timeframe busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties in days, not months, chiefly through judi­cious appli­ca­tion of Internet-based tech­nolo­gies (and a tremen­dously con­cen­trated amount of hard work!)