Ultimate Guide to effective outdoor advertising campaigns

Outdoor advertising campaigns are a fun and effective way to promote your business and it’s products and services. Many businesses use this method, not only because it’s cheaper than TV or pay-per-click online ads, but because it can be very effective in brand building and catching attention.

This advertising method is not just about creating a poster or banner of your product and services and placing it where people can see it. The best outdoor advertising campaigns require thorough research, careful planning, and out-of-the-box creativity. While starting an outdoor advertising campaign can seem like a daunting task, it has never been easier to get started. In this article, we will explain the basic steps to begin your outdoor advertising campaign and offer some tips to ensure you don’t run into any issues.

Set your campaign objective

If you have considered investing in billboards, there’s a good chance you already have an idea of what you would like to put on them. Before anything, it is important to set your marketing objectives. It is the first step in creating a successful and effective outdoor marketing campaign. Measuring performance against a clearly defined objective is a vital component of a successful advertising plan. Take the time to plan out your expectations to ensure you have a measurable standard to judge your outdoor advertising campaign on.

If the objectives of a campaign are to create a regional presence and increase brand awareness, then there must be a set of incremental goals to achieve them. This requires defined goal percentage increases in page traffic and benchmarks against prior marketing campaigns. With new technological developments in the field, the measurement of OOH is becoming much more exact and readily available. Measuring progress towards a defined objective will illustrate the results of your marketing efforts, and take the guessing out of campaign management.

Define your target audience

Now that you have your goals clearly in mind, whom are you trying to reach? What type of people would most likely be attracted to your product, service, or message? Understanding your target audience and your marketing reach is a crucial step to selecting what type of ad space you will invest your advertising dollars in, the location of your advertisements, as well as what your message should be and how it is displayed. To make this determination, you must be specific.

The consumer profile should have multiple tiers and layers to it. Understanding characteristics and behaviors about the consumer will hone in on where and how to reach that consumer throughout the course of a day. A profile defined as “males, age 25-34” is too vague and will not help maximize impressions and campaign spend. “Males, age 25-34, single, renting an apartment, likes basketball, reads comics, and works out in the early morning” is a much more specific target consumer profile. 

Content is king

Being successful in the outdoor advertising space requires businesses to not only find the perfect billboard location, but it also requires them to create head-turning and memorable designs to display on them. You have to have the right tone, the right voice, and the right image to convince your target market to buy your product or service. 

Successful billboards will often accentuate the landscape they are a part of instead of detracting from it. Make sure your design isn’t too harsh by utilizing pleasing colors and limit the text on your billboard to be easily read and remembered with a quick pass. With Market research, you can determine what kind of approach to take, what types of outdoor advertising appeal to your target market, and very important where to target them.

Measure your ROI

They say that in business, what gets measured, gets done. Tracking your sales before, during, and after an advertising campaign can really help measure its effectiveness. It’s also important to keep a record of new accounts, as well as calls and in-store & web traffic at the inception of a new advertising campaign or strategy. 

Campaigns key insights help you see what strategies your competitors are doing and what works for them. It also helps you see what advantages and disadvantages you have compared to your competitors, your own USPs, the methods and strategies your target audience responds to, what areas your outdoor advertising can thrive in, and other relevant information.

Don’t limit yourself

Don’t limit yourself to using just banners, bus queue shelters, and panels, or hoardings for your outdoor advertising campaign, get your campaigns on digital screens. Nowadays audiences spend most of their time on mobile phones so by utilizing mobile data with DOOH aggregated and anonymized, brands can plan more efficiently and show attribution for their campaigns that are both contextually relevant and timely. Today brands are looking to expand on their relationships with consumers and see location-based mobile marketing as a channel that can create deeper engagement. It’s one of the most targeted and personal mediums around. 

You can use technologies to increase customer engagement and activation. They can communicate with consumers through NFP proximity functionality and device movements or via QR codes. Codes can be sent on consumer mobile devices, further redirecting them to specific landing pages, where they can download filters or images that can then be used to photograph themselves and share personalized images from a brand.

Out of Home campaigns are effective only if thoroughly planned and executed. As an advertiser who is new to OOH or launching a new campaign, it’s important to know and understand these insights.