Improving brand visibility and enhancing a company’s reputation is a powerful way for small to midsize business leaders and their marketing teams to increase their customer base and maximize profitability. But content creators and advertisers know that they can’t just rely upon digital marketing channels in order to accomplish this—it’s important to diversify marketing campaigns and leverage a variety of marketing strategies to outmaneuver competitors.
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising provides SMB leaders and marketing experts with a highly adaptable and impactful marketing channel capable of building brand visibility and awareness while increasing locally-sourced leads and sales. In order to best put OOH advertising to work for your brand, you must first understand the benefits of OOH ads, how best to deploy advertising in this channel, and how data-driven OOH campaigns can improve return on investment (ROI) over time.
What is out-of-home advertising?
Out-of-home advertising is a form of advertising that engages with consumers outside of their homes. Also referred to as “outdoor advertising,” OOH advertising utilizes mediums such as billboards, benches, bus shelter posters, wall murals, posters and flyers, and other exterior surfaces and venues in order to provide high visibility to marketing campaigns.
SMB owners and entrepreneurs benefit from the fact that OOH advertising campaigns are harder to avoid than digital advertising channels because of the size and placement in a real-world environment. In fact, OOH advertising acts as an affordable, yet powerful, top-of-funnel tool for building brand awareness and visibility, ensuring customers are more likely to engage with your digital marketing in other channels.
Benefits of out-of-home advertising
A unique mix of digital and analog mediums, OOH advertising introduces several benefits that digital marketing channels cannot deliver alone.
Cost-effective enhancement to your overall marketing strategy
Rising privacy concerns are driving consumers to increasingly leverage ad blockers and privacy settings in digital spaces to insulate themselves from advertising and activity tracking. Digital advertising is also a highly competitive space which can require significant infusions of advertising capital in order to ensure the visibility of your ads. At a time when 24% of CMOs say that they have sufficient budgets to execute an effective strategy but are still being asked to do more with less, marketing strategies built around tactics such as OOH advertising become indispensable. [1]
Incorporating OOH advertising is a low-cost method for placing static advertising materials in the direct path of potential customers who will see the ad multiple times in their daily lives, reinforcing brand awareness and increasing the chances they will then search out your brand as a local solution to their product or service needs.
Marketing campaign performance improvement in other channels
Well-planned marketing campaigns involve leveraging marketing tactics along multiple channels. Because OOH is effective at boosting brand visibility and awareness, it’s also been found to boost the effectiveness of the marketing executed along other channels.
Marketing professionals can increase the impact OOH has on digital marketing and other types of advertising by mirroring the visuals and messaging of the overall marketing campaign and incorporating tools such as QR codes into the outside marketing assets.
OOH marketing ads can’t be skipped easily
The competitive and saturated nature of the digital marketing landscape coupled with constant algorithm changes can not only make it expensive to run digital ad campaigns, it can also create challenges for brands looking to increase visibility and awareness.
Out-of-home marketing campaigns not only enhance other channels of marketing, but also reach your target audience in the real world, where customers are less distracted and more likely to engage with and be influenced by your ad assets. In fact, the static and public nature of OOH ads means that customers can’t scroll past or skip them easily, ensuring increased engagement.
Immunity from SEO algorithm changes and privacy concerns
Search engines are constantly evolving their search algorithms, and updates can leave brands scrambling. Making the necessary broad, sweeping changes to their advertising campaigns can be an expensive and time-consuming process. To complicate matters, 87% of SMB marketing teams that rely upon third-party data are also scrambling to adapt their marketing strategies to account for the anticipated abolishment of third-party cookies. Because ads are deployed in public spaces and reliant upon physical traffic, OOH marketing campaigns are largely immune to either of these concerns.
Tailored OOH localization improves your relationship with the community
The overall goal of OOH campaigns is to both improve brand awareness and enhance your reputation and image with your local community. By featuring your advertising campaigns in high-traffic areas on billboards, murals, and other signage, and crafting each instance so that it best speaks to the type of customers likely to see and engage with the ad, your brand becomes a part of the community landscape. This increased visibility ensures locals are more likely to turn to your company for your products or services.
Out-of-home advertising examples
Out-of-home advertising campaigns, under the proper direction, can be extremely innovative. Some of the most effective and impactful OOH campaigns have been those where the marketing teams have taken into consideration both the brand aesthetic and the OOH medium used to convey the campaign messaging.
Amazon leans into the visibility of its delivery fleet
Amazon, a giant in the eCommerce space, has a massive delivery fleet it leverages to give itself a competitive advantage over other retailers. In a recent OOH campaign, Amazon wrapped that very fleet of delivery vehicles with clever slogans and advertising messaging. Taking this approach, Amazon converted its delivery force into a nationwide mobile advertising platform that is highly visible to consumers. [2]
McDonald’s uses digital billboards to tailor OOH ad to the local weather
As an international brand, McDonald’s is able to tailor and deploy highly localized OOH campaigns. One of the restaurant chain’s OOH campaigns in Great Britain took advantage of digital signage in high-traffic urban areas. The signs displayed differing versions of the advertisement for a line of frozen McCafe drinks based on the local temperature. [3]
Spotify turns data insights into gamified advertising campaign
Spotify’s 2022 approach to OOH advertising was to use billboards to reveal insights into user behaviors based on data gathered from listening activity on the platform. Other billboards introduced interactivity, like incomplete song titles or lyrics with fill-in-the-blank challenges to help passers-by learn more about global listening habits. [4]
How is out-of-home advertising measured?
The key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate the ROI of OOH marketing can be tracked fairly easily once SMB owners and entrepreneurs understand how these ads impact customer behaviors.
- Interaction rates with OOH ads can be tracked through engagement with the digital assets customers are led to as a result of scanning QR codes or visiting posted links.
- A direct correlation can be drawn between specific OOH assets and their impact on a retail space’s foot traffic and revenue. OOH ads can be considered effective if a nearby retail space experiences a boost in traffic and an increase in sales.
- Using digital geofencing to trigger online surveys near OOH ads or placing a surveyor in the vicinity of your OOH assets to poll customers about the ads, your brand, and their intent to purchase can help determine whether an OOH campaign is effective.
- Brand mentions, check-ins using targeted hashtags, or online chatter including campaign-specific keywords in social media channels can indicate an effective OOH campaign.
Digital OOH management tools can provide access to rich analytics
Out-of-home ads are deployed across a mixture of analog and digital mediums. However, there’s nothing low-tech about the data analytics that can be gathered through pairing technologies such as geotargeted ads and geofencing to the areas where your OOH campaigns are deployed.
Combining these technologies with accessible, anonymized location data, you can gain insight into how consumer behaviors and digital engagement are impacted by your OOH ads, and when the advertising platform allows, you can even make real-time adjustments and optimizations to ads to improve your targeting and engagement.
Tips for your out-of-home advertising strategy
Like many digital marketing strategies, OOH advertising requires SMBs and entrepreneurs to do their due diligence on the back end to ensure the strategy aligns with the overall goals of the business.
While market research and audience identification are just as much a standard component of OOH marketing as they are other tactics, there are several approaches specific to OOH marketing that specialists should fold into the planning process.
- Consider the time of day your target audience might be engaging with OOH ads in a specific location. Your messaging and ad design should resonate with the time and opportunity consumers have to engage with the ad in that space.
- OOH campaigns should be crafted to enhance or expand existing digital marketing efforts, and therefore your branding and messaging should be consistent between mediums. You should include specific keywords and unique elements in OOH in order to help with the attribution of success to the campaign.
- Because these ads can often be deployed in ways that are extremely accessible to consumers, you can improve their effectiveness by allowing customers to engage directly with the ad in some way that enhances the experience. When possible, make OOH ads interactive, dynamic, and engaging, as this will improve ad recall and increase brand perception.
- In the same way that digital advertising relies heavily upon keywords to serve up ads to the proper customers, you need to do the research to ensure that you’re deploying OOH ads in the proper venues and mediums to ensure maximized engagement with customers.
It takes skilled marketing professionals to create a balanced and impactful OOH campaign that takes into consideration all of the relevant factors that might impact its success. One of the most cost-effective methods for addressing opportunities to improve your team’s marketing efficacy is to turn to UpCity’s advertising providers directory, where you can find a local or national solution for expanding your marketing capabilities.
Diversify your marketing tactics with out-of-home advertising
Small-business owners and entrepreneurs must take full advantage of every marketing channel available to their brand in order to outperform the competition. This is especially true at a local level where small, local brands might be struggling against the massive digital spending leveraged by their larger national and international counterparts. Out-of-home marketing campaigns provide a unique opportunity for local brands to gain visibility and enhance brand perception in highly visible and well-trafficked locations.
Take a look at these UpCity resources, and find out how to best expand and improve your marketing strategy to improve brand visibility and recognition using OOH and other tactical approaches:
Source