Most businesses we speak to have been wondering about TV for a while before they pick up the phone, and by then they’ve usually stopped asking whether TV works. What they want to know is whether it’s too early for them.
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It’s a fair thing to ask, and the answer has less to do with the size of your business than with where your growth is coming from. Making TV adverts is what we do, so we’ve an interest in telling you the time is now, which is why this article gives as much room to the reasons for waiting as it does to the signs that you’re ready.
The sign to look for
Nearly every business starts with the same kinds of marketing: a website, Google ads, social media and word of mouth. They’re the right place to begin, because they’re cheap to start and you can see quickly whether they’re working.
The trouble is that they all run out of road. There are only so many people searching for what you sell each month, and once you’re reaching most of them, spending more doesn’t bring in more. Suppose you install garden rooms, and for a few years search advertising has been your best source of work. At first, every increase in the budget brought more enquiries at much the same cost each. Lately you’ve been paying a bit more for every click and bidding against the same handful of firms for the same people, the easy growth has dried up, and the numbers have flattened out however much you put in. That isn’t a sign that the advertising has gone wrong, only that you’re already reaching most of the people who are looking this month, and no amount of money will make more of them look.
That’s the moment TV starts to make sense. Search and social are very good at catching people who are already looking, whereas TV reaches the far larger number who aren’t looking yet, and makes sure it’s your name they think of when they do. The two work together as well, because one of the first places a TV campaign shows up is in the number of people searching for you by name, and somebody who’s looking for you in particular is a far easier enquiry to win than somebody working through a list of firms they’ve never heard of.
Other signs you might be ready
Growth that has flattened out is the clearest sign, but some businesses arrive at the same point by a different route. One is finding that your competitors are better known than you are, even though you’re as good or better. That’s a shortage of familiarity, which has nothing to do with quality, and familiarity is what television is best at building. Another is noticing that people who find you tend to buy, but not enough people are finding you, because a business that’s good at turning enquiries into customers gets more out of every extra person who hears of it.
Timing can force the question too, because if you’re opening somewhere new, or launching something, you need a lot of people to know quickly, and television is one of the quickest ways of telling a whole region something at once. Sometimes it simply comes down to capacity, when you’ve got the staff, the stock or the fitting teams to take on more work and nothing left to squeeze from the marketing you already do.
You don’t need a huge budget
The idea that TV is only for national brands with millions to spend puts a lot of people off, and it isn’t true. According to Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV, more than a quarter of the businesses that advertised on TV in 2025 spent less than £50,000 on it over the year, and half spent less than £250,000. Thinkbox exists to promote television, so it has every reason to make the point, but those figures are a count of what advertisers spent and not somebody’s opinion.
What matters is how you use it, because a single advert in the middle of one of the biggest shows on television could swallow a small budget whole, and that’s not the way to do it. The smaller advertisers who do well tend to concentrate their money so that it feels big in a small space, and there are several ways of doing that:
- Keep to one region, so that you’re advertising where your customers are and nowhere else. For most businesses ITV is bought region by region.
- Keep to one time of day, because daytime airtime costs less than the evening peak.
- Choose a tight audience, which services like AdSmart from Sky make possible by letting you pick the households that see your advert.
- Use a shorter advert, because twenty seconds costs less to air than thirty.
- Go on air in a cheaper month, because January and the summer generally cost less than the run-up to Christmas.
It’s also worth asking about incentives, because broadcasters are keen to bring new advertisers onto TV and there are often deals for first-timers. Our media buying partners will know what’s on offer at the time.
You can also make a modest start and build on it. Boldon Bathrooms’ first TV advert was made on a tight production budget, which is completely understandable when you’re trying something for the first time, and it did well enough that they came back ready to put more into their second, which we made with the agency SD Advertising. Starting in one area has a further advantage, because you can compare what happened to your enquiries where the advert was shown with what happened where it wasn’t.
When it’s too early
We’d be doing you no favours if we said TV was right for everybody. If you haven’t yet got the basics in place, such as a website that turns visitors into enquiries and the ability to handle more customers, sort those out first, because TV will send people your way and you need to be ready for them. An advert that fills a showroom you can’t staff, or sends people to a website that loses them, is an expensive way of letting people down.
It’s also too early if the cheaper routes still have room in them. If every extra pound you put into search is still bringing in enquiries at a cost you’re happy with, keep going until it stops, because that’s the least expensive business you’ll ever win, and it will teach you a lot about which messages your customers respond to.
The other reason to wait is if the money for TV could only be found by taking a risk the business can’t afford. Television does much of its work over months, as people come to know your name, so a campaign needs enough behind it to run for a sensible period and be judged fairly at the end. If the budget would only stretch to a week or two with nothing to follow, we’d suggest holding on until it stretches further. And if you sell to a small number of customers you could list by name, television is probably the wrong tool at any stage, which is a point we concede in is TV advertising wasteful?
Not sure where you stand?
If you think you’re getting close, have the conversation before you’re ready to commit, because an advert has to be planned, made and approved before it can go on air, and we’ve set out how long that usually takes.
Tell us where your customers come from now and what’s stopped growing, and we’ll give you an honest view on whether TV is the next step, which includes telling you if we think it’s too soon. You might also find it useful to read about the cheapest way to advertise on TV and what TV advertising costs, or you can simply get in touch.
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