OUTDOOR ADVERTISING STRATEGIES Adding outdoor media to your advertising plan this year? Great! Then you already know that billboards are an excellent way to increase your profits, build your brand, and stretch your advertising budget further. But do you know how to develop an effective strategy? If not, keep reading because the team at Penneco Outdoor has six outdoor advertising strategies that work every time!
6 Outdoor Advertising Strategies that Work
1. Target Your Ideal Customer
Do you know who’s in your target audience? How old are they? Are they male or female? Do they have families? Work full time? If you can’t answer these questions, you risk running an inadequately targeted campaign.
But reaching your ideal customers goes beyond simply identifying their basic demographics. You also need to understand their psychographics — in other words, their personality traits like values, behaviors, and opinions.
One of the main advantages of advertising on billboards is the fact that you can personalize your ad campaign based not only on their demographics but also on their psychographics.
2. Show Up Where Your Customers Are
Outdoor advertising is like real estate. It’s Location. Location. Location. You can buy space on the largest billboard in your region, but if it’s not located where your customers live, work, and play, you’re just wasting your money. Additionally, you want to choose a billboard site that’s highly visible and unobstructed, as close to the road as possible, and positioned at viewable angles.
Strategically choose a location your target drives by frequently and can easily see your ad on the billboard. Remember there’s a great deal of power in your customers repeatedly seeing your billboard.
3. Brand, Brand, & Brand Some More
Build recognition and loyalty by consistently communicating your brand across all your advertising mediums. Though it might be tempting to switch up the layout, use different fonts, or change color schemes, it’s not an effective advertising strategy. Consumers become loyal to recognizable brands they know and trust.
For billboard advertising, this is even more crucial. With only a few seconds to view your outdoor ad, commuters must be able to instantly recognize you, so they have enough time to absorb your message. Therefore, consistent branding is perhaps the most important outdoor advertising strategy that works.
4. Time Your Advertising for Maximum Impact
One of the most effective advertising strategies is to time your ad well. Spreading your advertising budget evenly throughout the year may seem wise, but you can often get a bigger bang for your buck if you advertise during peak seasons.
For example, if you’re an accountant, run outdoor ads during tax season to take best advantage of when people know they need you.. In retail? Devote most of your ad spend to the holiday season.
5. Use Your Resources Wisely
Maybe you’re a solopreneur or small business owner and only have a handful of employees. (Hey, we get it!). Take an honest inventory of your team members’ time and skills. Decide whether it’s more cost-effective to design your billboard in-house or contract the work out. If you have a great designer, doing it in-house may make sense. If not, invest in a contractor. Paying for poorly designed ads will cost your business far more in the long run than the project fee to a designer.
6. Measure the Effectiveness of Your Advertising
Are you already using the 5 strategies above? Great! Now it’s time to track the effectiveness of your strategy. Figuring out how well your outdoor advertising is working may sound overwhelming, but it’s easier than you’d think. Here are four ideas to get you started.
- Create a unique landing page to go with the ad and use your website analytics to track traffic
- Set up a dedicated email account and keep track of the number of emails received to that address.
- Use a specific discount code in the ad and count the number of clients who use it when they purchase.
- Ask your customers how they heard about you. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, simply ask people at the time of purchase. Make sure you have a way to capture all the responses consistently. For a virtual business, this question might be part of your checkout process. Alternatively, you could ask in a follow-up email.
Conclusion
Billboards are a valuable way to attract more customers to your business, boost sales, and build a brand with a loyal following — all for pennies on the dollar! Leverage these six strategies for effective outdoor advertising to maximize your return on your investment. They work!