Guest Contributor, Andy Rocker
Out-of-home, especially digital out-of-home (DOOH), offers more potential to your or your clients’ advertising campaigns than ever before. The versatility, attention-grabbing impact, and data capabilities it presents are lining up with a range of consumer trends to offer serious leverage.
Step 1: Know your audience
Traditionally, out-of-home has been a mass media method, hitting whole swathes of the population with your message. But, in another way digital has transformed the industry, now you can get much more targeted, matching location data (anonymized, aggregated, privacy-first data drawn from smartphones) with neighborhood demographic data to figure out exactly where your ideal customer is going and how to get in front of them.
When you know who you’re after, you can choose ad inventory that goes straight to where they are, from digital bulletins on highways to hit commuters and travelers to street furniture in urban neighborhoods to reach those working and staying close to home.
Step 2: Match your messaging
Your billboards (or any other out-of-home media you’re using) need to work together (along with the rest of your advertising) to drive the results you’re looking for. This means they need to have consistent messaging. Make sure your keywords, colors, and overall design are the same, no matter where they’re placed.
Step 3: Grab attention with a well-thought-out design
In a continuation of the last step, make sure your design lines up with how people engage with out-of-home. Out-of-home’s strength is as an attention-getter; play this up with a simple yet impactful message, bold colors, and short copy.
You don’t need to say everything on your billboard. Just say enough to get their attention then push them to take action – even if the action is just to remember you, that’s ok!
Step 4: Give them something to do
Even though out-of-home is a brand awareness medium, it can also drive actions directly. Research from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America shows just how many people do something in response to out-of-home messages: from website and brick-and-mortar visits to product purchases to app downloads and social shares, audiences on the move are responding.
So on top of a simple, direct, powerful message, tell your prospects what you want them to do. Use short hashtags, URLs, directions to your store, or other directives to guide their behavior.
Step 5: Test, test again, and keep on testing
With digital out-of-home, A/B testing (or split testing) is easier than ever. You can try different combinations of copy and design, in as many iterations as you want, across different placements to determine what drives the best results for you.
You can maintain an overall consistent feel and message across your billboards while tweaking the details to find out what resonates with your audience the most. And maybe you discover that audiences in different geographies respond better to different creative.
Whatever the case may be, testing how you communicate your messaging will only make it stronger, improving the results you achieve.
Conclusion: It’s time to give digital out-of-home a try
With the advancements in digital and programmatic out-of-home, planning an effective out-of-home campaign has never been easier. And its ability to both drive brand awareness and sales means it’s more versatile than ever, offering more bang for your buck.
Use these steps to set your (or your clients’) campaign up for success. Meanwhile, get in touch with Blip/Adkom to find out how our platform can provide you with efficiencies and reach in out-of-home you simply can’t get elsewhere.
Andy Rocker, is Director of Customer Success, Blip Billboards
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