Engaging Your Target Audience with Commercials

Despite the ongoing and progressively increasing dominance of online channels for advertising, commercials remain an effective method of showcasing your product or service and highlighting your brand. It can be easy to dismiss commercials as simply haphazardly thrown on television stations, but there is far more research and work involved than most would know.

At Igloo Creative House, we pride ourselves on our ability to understand our target audience and how best to serve them. In today’s marketing landscape, it’s more important than ever to optimize your commercial strategy to successfully engage your audience. While Igloo Creative House offers second-to-none digital advertising services that make up part of the overall Magic Media group’s extensive offerings, commercial advertising is nothing to be ignored.

Determining Your Target Audience

Before work begins on your commercial in earnest, it’s critical to undertake extensive research to understand who your target audience is. Taking the time to understand this will determine the content of your commercials, whether it should be live-action, animation, characters, setting, style of language used, and virtually every audio and visual aspect of it.

The aim of commercials, like any other form of advertising, is to resonate with your audience, their wants, and needs, as effectively as possible. Without a thorough understanding of who your audience is, crafting commercials can prove to be rudderless. Using your learnings from market research about your product or service and brand, and perhaps key takeaways from previous marketing campaigns, can help position your commercial for success before planning for it has even begun.

Right Times, Right Channel

After your commercial has been crafted and informed by your market research and target audience goals, a critical step to its success is determining what channels it should air on and at what times. Certain channels, depending on their programming, will have different audiences and the goal should be to align your target audience with the channel’s audience as well as possible. Similarly, airing your commercial at the right time will have a significant impact on its success and alignment with your chosen channel’s audience.

For example, evening news reports tend to have a higher number of middle-aged and older audiences. If your product, service, or brand is geared towards these demographics specifically, it would be ideal to slot your commercial in during the evening news reporting period if at all possible. Television commercials can be extremely effective due to viewers already being actively engaged with the channel’s programming. It’s a lean-back experience  for commercials, where if a commercial of relevance airs during this period of engagement, the viewer is more likely to become interested in your product, service, or brand.

Data and Analytics

As your commercial airs, it’s important to monitor its performance. Like most forms of advertising, it often winds up being an iterative process. Though you might find success when it first airs, it’s more than likely some tweaking will need to be made to your strategy, whether that’s the content of the commercial itself or where and when it airs.

This could mean adjusting the channel it airs on and the times. It could be something as simple as airing it earlier or on a completely different channel to captivate your audience better. While on paper airing your commercial during the evening newscast might seem like the most effective way to engage your audience, in practice this could turn out to be a different case. Vigilant monitoring of your commercial’s performance, where its performance dips, and how they can be addressed should be a top and ongoing priority.

Looking for a partner to take your commercials to the next level of success? Check out our reels and get in contact with Igloo Creative House today! We’d love the opportunity to help your commercials fulfill their highest potential.

As part of the wider Magic Media group, we offer a comprehensive range of services in addition to commercials. For all your full-cycle game development, real-time VFX, and cybersecurity needs, reach out today and let’s create magic.