Integrating outdoor advertising into your marketing plan can bring many benefits, such as increased impressions and brand awareness, along with streamlining your marketing funnels. To best integrate OOH into your marketing strategy, develop a cohesive plan to roll out campaigns and track them for efficiency.
Billboard advertising isn’t just static images.
When you have an integrated marketing campaign that includes outdoor advertising, your products and brand reach thousands, even millions of people, and can bring you amazing results.
The question for many is: How does OOH fit into my current marketing strategy? How will OOH help me achieve my acquisition goals?
The answer is through campaign performance tracking and retargeting.
Benefits of Integrating OOH into your Strategy
The Numbers Don’t Lie
90% of Americans notice outdoor advertising while driving, according to a recent study. This means they reach people from all types of backgrounds and demographics. With billboards, you’re reaching young and old people, families and single parents, online shoppers and brick and mortar shoppers. By leveraging outdoor advertising, you’re putting your brand and product out in front of a large swath of people, which you can use to simply make an impression on each viewer or to further specific campaigns or product launches. Billboards do an excellent job at showing your message to a wide audience while not interrupting their day—they can easily experience your brand and product as they go to work, go shopping, or walk their dog.
Reach Highly Desirable Audiences
Outdoor advertising is really effective when it comes to reaching young, urban, and affluent groups of society who are very social and likely to share with others their impressions, or what they see during the day. So, essentially you’re developing a kinship with promoters who will share your brand via word of mouth, during daily life, conversations, or digitally via social media. Either way, these are highly desirable audiences—they’re the exact groups of people marketers want to be reaching, because they’re much more likely to view and engage with your ads and spread the word.
Types of OOH Advertising
Traditional — Billboards, Trivision, Digital Billboards
Hyperlocal — HotSpots, Wild Postings, Street Furniture
Urban Billboards — Wallscapes, Bus Wraps
Targeted Approach
Planning is the name of the game when it comes to launching any marketing campaign. When starting an outdoor campaign, the best way to ensure they’re effective is to know who you’re targeting. Knowing who is most likely to engage with your ad and where they live, work, or commute is highly important. With this information, you can decide which types of outdoor advertising you want to employ, how many locations, for how long, etc. Luckily, outdoor advertising is great at targeting specific demographics.
Questions to ask when trying to define your market:
How old is your target audience?
Are your target audience working professionals, and what is their average salary?
Are you attempting to target people living in a specific area?
What is the gender of your target market?
With these questions, you’ll begin to narrow down your ideal audience and can better develop creative that will be relevant to these demographics.
Engage Your Audience
Billboards have the limit of your audience’s attention. If they’re driving 70 mph down the highway, chances are they won’t have time to read a paragraph on your billboard. Due to this, billboards often have simple messaging that is aimed to capture your audiences’ attention and deliver your messaging quickly, leaving them with a good impression of your brand or product. When you focus on the action you want your audience to take, you can begin to build funnels that include online ads or other marketing media in your overall marketing strategy.
One way in which billboards can build even more engagement is by taking into consideration the environment where the ad will be placed to get contextual design inspiration. An ad that meshes with the landscape or calls back to a popular phrase in that area or region will likely capture more attention since the audience will see how relevant the ad is to them.
Combine OOH with Online Ads
When you combine outdoor advertising with online ads, you’re adding another element to your marketing campaign, another way to track engagement and analyze the results you’re getting. New technology has helped track engagement throughout the course of a campaign, both in billboards (using smartphone technology and anonymous tracking) and in online ads. Once you’re able to analyze results all the way through the funnel, you’ll be able to make decisions toward your next campaign with better metrics and a better idea of how outdoor advertising can take you to the next level.
Why Your Next Marketing Campaign Should Include OOH
Billboards are the only traditional advertising medium that continues to see growth, even after the expansion of digital services and advertising. A recent report predicted outdoor advertising will grow 6.3% globally, with sales reaching $38 billion by 2023. This is not a backwards medium—it’s a vibrant, engaging way to develop brand awareness and turn leads into conversions.
One of the reasons why OOH is growing so much is that recent advances in tech have brought marketers the ability to track audience movement and other metrics to measure the effectiveness of OOH. By looking at these metrics and dimensions, marketers can review the data and learn better ways to reach and influence their moving audience.
Taking it Offline
Users are distracted. When people watch TV, they’re not paying attention to the ads. Many younger audiences even watch TV on their computers and have the ability to block ads, while others use TV recording software to record shows and skip through the ads when watching at a later time. Content is overflowing, and capturing audiences’ attention is not becoming easier. Furthermore, it’s not always easy to show that the impressions digital ads get are real.
With outdoor advertising, it’s a different story. Billboards give marketers an edge because the ads are shown to drivers or passengers passing through highways and high traffic roads. Drivers are by necessity looking out the windshield, so they will subconsciously look at billboard ads. Furthermore, billboards provide a respite from the grayness of traffic and asphalt roads, which is why a majority of people say they enjoy billboards.
Location, Location, Location
Another significant change with outdoor advertising is the ability to leverage location intelligence for targeting and data collection. Smartphones provide anonymous mobile location data that can help determine the behavior of engaged audiences. This then helps marketers decide the best locations for their next campaigns.
Digital billboards can even leverage this information to provide value to audiences. For instance, digital billboards could show the current temperature, or chance of precipitation, or even traffic ahead on the same highway. By providing value to drivers and passengers, billboards become a source of trustworthy information and a relevant medium.
Data Measurement
Along with using location data to strategize on new campaigns, there are other aspects of data that can be collected to reach similar conclusions. Billboards can now track footfall, traffic. Some can even track time spent near a billboard, which denotes high engagement (works best for eye-level outdoor ads).
As more companies see the value in outdoor campaigns, the medium’s cross-channel and retargeting capabilities will extend and open even more opportunities for brands to connect with consumers in creative, engaging and non-intrusive ways.
How to Integrate OOH
Develop Robust Customer Profiles
Before getting started, learn who comprises your audience. Thankfully, we have comprehensive profiles on many demographics in all of our markets to help you better target your audiences. These demographic profiles include different age groups, career groups, and other status demographics related to income, marital status, and more.
Our local experts and account executives can give you a better idea of who passes by each location, which helps us decide how to best approach your audience, which can then also be used for other online campaigns for full funnel targeting.
Create Targeted Media Plans
Draft a plan that will be carried across your multiple advertising media.
Ask yourself:
What image would you like to associate with your brand?
What message do you need to get across?
These are questions we ask in order to get to know your brand and your goals. Each ad will be different because platforms have different requirements and parameters, but they need to work together to achieve the same goals. The best way to guarantee they do so is to create them concurrently. There can be more than one plan, too, especially if you plan on using different outdoor formats or multiple creatives.
Deliver Value & Offers that Make Sense for Your Customer
Make sure to offer your audiences something valuable with your messaging. What does your product or brand offer that would make your audiences look for you after their drive is over? Then, if they visit your website after seeing an outdoor ad, you’ll want to reward them by providing them with a special value on a product or an offer that is too good to let go. Based on the customer profiles, you’ll know exactly what your customers are looking for, and if you’re able to provide that for them, you’ll stand out from the competition, especially if you make the purchasing process easy for them.
Integrating OOH into your marketing strategy is a viable way to get more eyes on your brand and bring people into your funnel. Reach out today if you need help and our account executives will show you the power of OOH.