For raising brand awareness in your local area and boosting sales, you’re unlikely to find a more effective method of promoting your business than outdoor advertising.
Between strategically placed roadside billboards and digital out of home (DOOH), outdoor advertising is ideal for putting your business in front of potential new customers and amplifying your key messages.
Many small businesses believe the misconception that out of home (OOH) advertising is expensive and ineffective, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Capturing the attention of your target audience on their way to work, or in the places they frequent the most, is the first step in attracting them to your business and, in turn, driving engagement and sales.
In this guide, we’ll explore how you can capture the attention of potential customers and dominate your local market using outdoor advertising.
Planning Your Outdoor Advertising Campaign
When it comes to launching a viable outdoor campaign within the local marketplace, your efforts should be built on one or more clearly defined objectives.
In short, you should only launch your campaign once you have an end goal in mind, with OOH ads serving as the tools with which you’ll achieve your objective.
Determining precisely who you’re trying to reach gives you the ideal starting point, as having a clear understanding of your target audience will impact on everything from the placement of ads to the content and messaging that you utilise to engage them.
But how exactly do you identify and understand your customers?
Create Customer Profiles
One option is to create a ‘buyer persona’, which is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal consumer.
This can be built from existing consumer datasets and targeted market research within the local area, and will include information such as age, demographics, behavioural patterns and motivations.
Ultimately, it should embody your target customers and provide an in-depth understanding of those who you want to appeal to.
Carry Out Detailed User Surveys
Whether you’re a start-up venture that’s targeting local customers from scratch, or if you’re looking to expand your reach to new demographics, we’d recommend using tools such as Survey.io to gain initial consumer insights into your products and services.
You may need to be prepared to incentivise participants (such as by providing free samples where possible) in order to gain large volumes of first-hand feedback.
The key is to create detailed and concise questions, while focusing on potential customers’ motivations and how they interact with your brand.
Make Use of Google Analytics
We’ve touched on the importance of creating an integrated marketing campaign, but you’ll also need to use a wide range of channels to identify a target audience.
Google Analytics can be particularly insightful, as this provides unique datasets such as audience interests and the precise location of customers.
This also delves into behaviour and the technology used by customers when interacting with the brand, which is crucial when building out the finer details of your campaign.
Setting An Objective
Arguably the most crucial element of planning your outdoor advertising campaign is to set an overall objective.
To ensure its success, it’s important to determine precisely what action you want your customers to take as a result of seeing your ads.
Having an objective clearly defined at the start of your campaign planning will help to determine the content of your ads, the tone of your messaging, and even the locations you choose to advertise in.
So it’s vital that any outdoor advertising campaign is built with a clear goal in mind.
For example, to increase footfall and sales in your shop, you may advertise a limited time, in-store only sales promotion.
Or, you may choose to use brand focused messaging (rather than sales focused) if your goal is to increase brand awareness and engagement on social media.
Where Should You Rent Outdoor Space?
Choosing the right locations for your outdoor advertising campaign is crucial. What determines the right location will vary depending on your business, campaign goals and the people you’re trying to reach.
In simple terms, you’ll need to ensure that you’re placing ads in locations where your target audience is most likely to be found, based on a range of factors such as:
Traffic flows
Where your target demographic lives
Where your business is based
Your customers’ interests and daily routines
The core purpose of your campaign.
For example, let’s say that you are advertising a local takeaway restaurant to a young professional audience who are likely to commute to and from work everyday.
With this insight in mind, you may invest in outdoor advertising spaces on busy main roads to capture large numbers of your target market while they are on their commute to and from work.
Hungry commuters will often be thinking about their evening meal on the way home, so advertising on main commuter routes close to your restaurant can capitalise on impulse decision making and direct them to their nearest location or encourage them to order online.
This type of campaign has been previously undertaken by brands such as McDonalds who reported gaining 6.4 million mobile impressions by combining outdoor advertising and in-app advertising on Waze.
But it’s not just large scale campaigns like this one that get results from outdoor advertising.
Small, local businesses across the UK are reaching new customers each day through strategically placed billboard ads.
When choosing where to advertise your business, here are some other things you should keep in mind:
Invest Time in Demographic and More Detailed Customer Research
If you want to target a specific target market, or understand your target market better, you should also consider carrying out user demographics and detailed consumer research on sites such as Acorn.
This powerful resource works by segmenting the population into 62 different types, enabling you to drill deeper into your target market and provides a more detailed insight into audiences and their behaviours.
This can be applied when tracking any behavioural changes in existing audiences and identifying profitable prospects, while it can also be used throughout campaigns to make any necessary adjustments to ad locations and content.
Focus on Levels of Traffic and Footfall
It’s also important to appraise potential target locations in terms of the level of traffic that they benefit from on a regular basis. This will ensure that you’re targeting key areas based on a number of seminal factors, and there are several tools and metrics that you can utilise to monitor locations.
One of the most widely used is a travel survey. Participants are given a device with an in-built GPS tracker and Wi-Fi connectivity as well as a compass and accelerometer, which they carry with them for up to two weeks.
Participants also answer extensive questions pertaining to their lifestyle and shopping habits, providing practical insight into where people are going on a daily basis and the high-traffic locations that they’re likely to frequent. Acquiring data from a travel survey can therefore provide you with invaluable insights into your target demographics.
Determining the effectiveness of individual ad locations
Reach & Impressions – Reach refers to the number of unique individuals who see an advert, and impressions is the number of times that a particular ad is seen.
Frequency – Frequency can be determined by dividing impressions by reach within a specified time frame (e.g. two or four weeks). Knowing the frequency that an ad is seen at will help you understand which locations benefit from the most traffic over time.
Reach & Impressions – Reach refers to the number of unique individuals who see an advert, and impressions is the number of times that a particular ad is seen.
Frequency – Frequency can be determined by dividing impressions by reach within a specified time frame (e.g. two or four weeks). Knowing the frequency that an ad is seen at will help you understand which locations benefit from the most traffic over time.
When To Run Your Ad Campaigns
Once you’ve created a plan in terms of where and how to target your audience, the next step is to time your campaign to achieve the best possible levels of engagement.
This is particularly important if running a time sensitive campaign, as you’ll need to identify precisely when your prospective customers are most likely to engage with your brand.
If you’re planning a campaign around peak trading (in the lead up to Christmas, for example), to maximise the impact of your campaigns, you may with to also run strategically placed billboard ads in advance of these peak times.
This way, you can build brand awareness early on and ensure that local shoppers are already aware of your brand.
When To Book Your Ad Space
When planning an outdoor advertising campaign, especially around peak times, you will need to be proactive, as there is likely to be intense competition.
This is especially true for those targeting the most popular, high traffic locations, such as on main roads leading into city centres or around shopping centres.
If you are planning an out of home campaign, you should start contacting outdoor advertising firms as early on as you can.
But as a rule, if you want to secure your preferred locations, be sure to book 3-6 months in advance.
Tip: You can sometimes minimise your advertising costs by securing paper or digital billboards on long term bookings that extend beyond the typical two week hire time.
Planning your campaigns in advance, looking beyond the immediate term and booking early can be highly beneficial.