With the many technological changes and advances happening in media today, there is still one true ruler in content delivery – TV! TV is a bargain in advertising and for half a century now, TV is still king in American households.

TV advertisements familiarize the viewing audience with your brand and your message. In the past decade, the way in which people respond to TV advertisements has changed. Consumers used to prefer to call directly to inquire about a product or service. Now, many consumers choose to inquire via web search instead. But one thing has remained constant – the TV advertisement initiates the desire to learn more.

What that means is one medium isn’t enough anymore—it takes a strategy that combines digital with print , mail, and TV. But when buying media from all of these different sources, you can end up wasting a lot of money if you don’t follow best practices for creating the campaigns and placing the media.

To move the needle on TV, you have to tell a story in a matter of seconds. MKJ Marketing was the first to create pre-produced funeral home TV commercials, making high-quality advertising on cable possible for clients across the U.S.

Our personalized ads feature professional actors and scripted narratives on topics like:

Or, you can be featured in your own custom commercial on any topic of your choosing by attending one of our TV shoots held several times per year.

Having a local cable company film in your funeral home can actually hurt your reputation if the video quality, script, lighting, sound, and more are sub-par. Without question, the cost of licensing a personalized ad, or even custom television commercials, is a fraction of the cost you will spend on media for a year, so make your investment count with a television commercial that will get you calls.

Media buying is not as easy as calling the local cable station and telling them your budget. We have seen so many funeral homes waste tens of thousands of dollars thinking this is all they needed to do. Instead, buying television media requires identifying your target audience, knowledge about cable systems, studying demographics of channels and the flow of viewers through seasons, and negotiating with the cable station to get what you need.

At MKJ Marketing, we have years of experience buying TV for clients in the funeral home industry. With a dedicated in-house media buyer, we are able to craft a strategy that not only fits your budget, but actually maximizes it.  In fact, we often tell clients to cut their current media spend by thousands while increasing the leads they get from running the television spot.

We target a specific audience known to inquire about funeral services and choose the best networks to advertise on so that you reach this demographic. We use TV ratings points to determine the best and most valuable cost-per-spot to advertise and hit our target demographic. We also have recommendations about the time of year that’s best to advertise, since it’s not necessary to run every month of the year. We then propose and plan a schedule with a budget and execute our plan by booking the media for you.

Did you know that even after you buy TV media, your spot will not always run when it should? This is because the cable company can bump your spot for things like breaking news or even just a higher paying media customer. You will lose money unless you review monthly invoices and records to check the time, channels, and frequency that your spots ran, and then negotiate “make-goods,” where the cable company runs more of your spots in better blocks the following month. While tedious, this review and negotiation is critical to placing television media without wasting a lot of money.

When you buy a personalized or custom television advertisement with us, we’ll create a media plan and place the media for you at no additional cost.  Our producers deliver the approved spots to the cable company or broadcast station on your behalf, and our media buyer will confirm the traffic instructions to notify the stations what ads you want to air and when. And we review the monthly invoices for you to ensure all spots ran completely and in the designated time blocks, so that you never have to wonder if potential customers are seeing your television commercials. When a schedule does not run fully, or does not run correctly, our media buyer will negotiate spots to make up for the shortage in an area of equal or added value, so your schedule runs complete and not under or over budget. Our buyer also continuously negotiates for wins in added value like no-charge and bonus spots to support the paid schedule, all at no charge to you.

Kerry Ann Hogan is an experienced media buyer, with more than seven years of experience in the marketing and TV industry. She is committed to helping companies build their brand and drive growth through traditional advertising, and she absolutely loves negotiating wins for her clients.