We advertised our family law practice on television for a number of years. During that period, we spent about $500,000 per year running the ads. We had a great deal of help from a media buying agency that did a super job of buying the right spots for us to hit our target clients.

As we ran the ads, we carefully tracked the results. We charted the changes in website traffic along with the changes in initial consultations, new clients, revenues, and profits. We were fortunate to have offices in two separate media markets so we could experiment with one approach in one market and use the other market as a control. That way we could test TV vs. other marketing approaches and test one approach to TV vs. another approach to TV.

Here’s an example of one of our family law commercials (click through if you can’t see the video).

Did the commercials work? Like a charm.

TV is amazing. We’d turn on the commercials, and the phone would ring like crazy. Fantastic results.

But—and you knew there would be a “but”—times change. TV isn’t what it used to be.

Our target audience changed its TV-watching behavior, and our results started to suffer. Our audience stopped watching commercials: they started fast-forwarding through them with digital video recorders (DVRs). Our target demographic happened to overlap overwhelmingly with owners of DVRs. We manipulated our placement a bit to overcome the DVRs by targeting live programming—mostly news and sports—but the results suffered nonetheless.

Will TV work for you? Maybe. It depends on whom you’re targeting, and it depends on your ability to mount a significant campaign. You can’t just fund a few TV commercials: you’ve got to run a bunch of them to get the right impact. You’ve got to create a situation where people who need your services keep seeing your name until they take action and visit your website or call your office. TV requires repetition of your message. It takes big bunches of money to play your message enough so that it penetrates through a noisy environment and reaches the intended target.

TV can be expensive, and you need the capital to fund it. You also need the people and systems in place to maximize the return when the calls start coming.

Before you jump into TV, do these four things:

1. Carefully define your target client. Be very specific.

2. Carefully define the message you’d like that target client to receive from you.

3. Get help from professionals in developing your ads and purchasing the TV time. Generally, you’ll use one firm for creating the ads and another for buying the time. They are very different services and call for very different skill sets. Be cautious when a small agency offers to do it all. It might be able to do the work, but it won’t likely do it all well. Don’t create a commercial that makes you happy. Create a commercial that causes your target clients to take the action you’d like them to take.

4. Measure, measure, measure. Do your campaigns for very specific periods with very specific budgets. Measure the results against your target. Keep going if it’s working, and walk away if it’s not.

Don’t assume TV won’t work for you. It might, and you won’t know if you don’t try. Your media market is different, your target client is different, and your practice is different. Our commercials generated millions in revenues. I have no regrets about our efforts. It was good while it lasted.

TV isn’t right for us now, but it might be right for you.