Depending on whom you ask, billboards conjure different images. Let’s agree for the purpose of this article that, when we talk about billboards, we are referring to those large outdoor structures we normally see along the interstate.

Of course, this definition is a little simplistic. Billboards come in all shapes and sizes. They are not just along well-traveled roadsides. We see them in city downtown areas. You will find billboards anywhere billboard manufacturers expect them to earn money for the advertiser and hence the creator.

The term billboard comes from the “billing board”. This term refers to the outdoor advertising space of gigantic proportions. Billboards are huge because their aim is to catch the eye of passing walkers, cyclists, and vehicle drivers. They are intended to be read in their entirety in the time it takes a pedestrian, biker, or driver to pass by the sign.

Measuring Billboard Effectiveness

According to writer, Apryl Duncan, Americans are deluged with visual stimulation. She estimates that, on average, Americans are bombarded with between four thousand and ten thousand ads every day.

To be effective, billboards need to stand out from their competitors. While billboards have a captive audience as people walk, run, bike, or drive by, they must be large, striking, and easy to read. Otherwise, their potential audience will simply ignore them. Measuring billboard effectiveness is important to every outdoor media campaign. Billboard companies should provide statistics and specific data as it applies to:

Location

Outdoor media is unique in that it is one of few advertising mediums that is not as dynamic. Where internet ads can change frequently and within a short time span, billboard generally change less often, but are sometimes more effective. How is this? Measuring billboard effectiveness always begins with evaluating location of potential billboard placement. This is usually done by considering factors such as:

• Number of people or vehicles that pass a billboard per day
• Number of people or vehicles that could see your billboard per day
• People or vehicles who actually saw/interacted with your billboard

Measuring Traffic for Billboard Effectiveness

It’s crucial to know the traffic surrounding the location of a billboard in order to better measure traffic for billboard effectiveness. For one, you should try to find an ideal location that gets a lot of traffic, although these areas can usually be priced much higher than other lower trafficked areas. Measuring traffic is usually done through a variety of methods including government data, census, road traffic counts, and even manually logging travel data day-to-day. These numbers will help you determine if a location is an ideal placement for your business, brand, or service.

Analytics

If there’s a brand name, slogan, or catchphrase — that is used unique to your business — you could use analytics data scraping methods to analyze how often those terms, phrases, or words are typed into search engines. Similar to how businesses would execute keyword research, the same method could be applied in measuring billboard effectiveness. The more search hits a phrase gets could provide insight into how often people are viewing and taking action with an outdoor ad.

Hashtags

Hashtags are more widely used these days and provide ample opportunity to getting potential customers on board with a message displayed on outdoor media. Utilizing hashtags can help companies better evaluate the effectiveness of the billboard advertisement.

Sales Analytics

There’s usually a direct correlation between sales and outdoor ads. It’s important you notate benchmarks in reports for sales, or general profits and determine if a new billboard ad is bringing in more customers or not.

Billboard Audience Impact

Billboards aren’t technically outstanding. Some have moving parts. Most appeal only to your vision. However, billboards have a captive audience. Think of those hours you spend in your car, bus, GO train. or other commuter vehicles.

The daily commute is literally the longest idle time in the busy schedule of North Americans. No matter how you get to and from work, while you make that trek, you are a captive audience. Companies aiming at getting their brand known and advertising agencies intend upon helping clients achieve their goals recognize the power of billboards as a vehicle. They take good advantage of the opportunity to bombard foot and vehicle traffic with powerful visual images strategically located.

Billboard advertising is effective in our busy world. It’s a way to get the highest number of views and lasting brand impressions of any advertising medium.

Billboard Advertising Goals

Billboards aren’t like other types of ads. Researchers have discovered that the average viewing time is four seconds.

So, billboards are aimed at building brand recognition or reinforcing a brand recall. Billboards aren’t there to inform, educate, or persuade. Basically, they are saying, “See me!” or “Remember me!”

How is Billboard Effectiveness Measured?

When it comes to measuring billboard effectiveness, there are several considerations.

First, let’s consider the return on your investment. How much does the billboard cost? How much revenue does it bring in? When we consider ROI, billboards have a proven record of being worth the time and investment.

Billboards are part of the landscape. They are practically everywhere you go whether you’re traveling on foot, on a bike, in a car, on a bus, or in a train. It’s little wonder that advertisers continue to pump money into this form of advertising.

Static advertising forms like magazines, flyers, direct mailing, email ads, and newspapers can be discarded with hardly a glance. But, billboards are in your face.

Thanks to modern technology, any professional outdoor advertising agency can provide its clients with hard data to show that their billboards are paying off. They can measure the foot and vehicular traffic at any time of the day, day of the week or month of the year.

Professional outdoor advertising companies can predict the demographic most likely to view and respond to your billboard. The effectiveness of billboards is measured in Daily Effective Circulations or DEC. This refers to the number of vehicles and pedestrians passing your billboard each day.

What Makes a Billboard Ad Stand Out?

Despite their size, billboards need to stand out from the visuals that surround them. That’s a tall order. Outdoor advertising companies use creative designs, eye-catching materials, catchy slogans, and special effects to make their billboards memorable.

How do they do this? To answer that question, let’s look at billboards that have stood out in advertising history. Remember, the ultimate goal of billboards is brand recognition and brand recall.

Consider these billboards that made their product a household name.

• Coca Cola should get top marks for some of the world’s most effective billboards. “It’s the Real Thing”. Recently they have used the Coke white swoop on the traditional red background to encouraging recycling containers. Not a word is needed!
• IBM has taken its city billboards to a whole new level. They have added a curve to their billboard to create a rain shelter and a ramped bench seating area. Their creation blends modern design and function.
• “Kleenex” did such a good job of brand recognition that its name is synonymous with every other tissue brand. But, like Coke and IBM, Kleenex is not content to bask in its name recognition. The company’s latest billboards appeal to emotion. Their ads afford their customers opportunities to show caring.
• Famous for its Golden Arches and yellow off-ramp billboards, Macdonald’s has always excelled at sending a message without using a word. Now, this fast-food giant is turning its billboards into homes for bees.
•  It would be impossible to ignore the “all you can eat and more” billboards erected by the motorist stop Oldtimer restaurant chain. The billboard surrounds a tunnel on the motorway with the tunnel acting as the customer’s mouth.

Are You in the Market for Effective Billboard Advertising?

Professional Outdoor Advertising Experts have the knowledge to create attention-getting billboards. They know where to place them to build brand recognition with your niche market.

These professionals also have the tools to measure viewer reactions and to help clients make adjustments for maximum return on investment.

Learn more about how we can help you get the most from your advertising dollar. Contact us to discuss billboard advertising in Puerto Rico.

In 1867, the first billboard was leased. This billboard was used to hold a large advertisement. Since then, billboards have become one of the most popular forms of advertising. They are unique with visual designs, large size, guaranteed audience, and the ease in which they can be set up on roads and highways.

Billboard advertising industry began in the late 19th century. It started off slowly. But by 1870, there were around three-hundred bill-posting and sign painting companies. Then, in 1891 the Associated Bill Posters’ Association was founded. This expanded the concept of poster advertising, allowing advertisers to see the potential that the medium offered. Today, billboards have risen to one of the most popular forms of advertising. Below we’re discussing what to expect from billboard advertising.

What Is Billboard Advertising?

When the 20th century began, billboards were a popular form of advertising, but nowhere near as popular as they soon became. With the rise of the automobile, billboards rose to one of the dominant forms of advertising.

Roads and highways were built to accommodate the automobiles that everyone was buying. Billboards were advertising a variety of different products and services on these roads and highways. Everyone saw these billboards as they drove.

Today, billboard advertising is one of the most popular advertising mediums. A billboard is a giant poster that is visible to hundreds of people. Unlike other forms of advertising, billboards always have a sizeable audience. By making the right choices, you might be able to reach the right people at any given time.

• The billboard advertising industry began in the second half of the 19th century
• In the 20th century, billboard advertising became a dominant form of advertising, due to the automobile
• Billboard advertising is one of the most popular forms of advertising in today’s world
• Every billboard is guaranteed to have an audience

What Do You Do Before Purchasing Your Billboard?

Billboards can be costly upfront. You should know what to expect from billboard advertising. For one, you should consider a consultation with a billboard advertising agency. During your consultation, you should finetune the needs of the billboard. You should also investigate your target audience, the proper location, and what your billboard advertisement conveys and expresses.

Purchasing a billboard is a process, and it begins by being aware of your audience, and the exact message that you would like to convey. If those two elements of the process are uncertain, then your billboard will be hard-pressed to succeed.

When you understand those two elements, you can set up a consultation with a billboard advertising agency. Throughout your consultation, you will be able to finetune the individual components of your billboard. These are components include:

• specific audiences that you would like to reach
• the message you are expressing
• placement of your billboard
• what the billboard says and what it looks like.

Once all of that information has been organized, you’ll be able to look at billboards that the consultant feels are right for your business. Make sure to visit each billboard in person, so that you can see what it really looks like, and whether or not people can actually see it as they drive by.

• Make sure you understand the message you need to convey and your target audience
• Setup a consultation and fine-tune the individual components of the billboard, including the design, placement, and specific audience you need to reach
• Visit the billboards your consultant has suggested for you and find one that looks and feels right to you

What Happens Once You Purchase Your Billboard?

When you purchase your billboard, the next step is for you to work with your consultant on designing the billboard advertisement. All of the preparatory work you did earlier is incredibly valuable in this stage of the process.

Earlier, before and during your meeting with the consultant, you finetuned the different aspects of your billboard. Aspects that include your target audience, the message you want the billboard to convey, and the overall design of the billboard.

When you work with your consultant on designing your billboard, all of that information will be put to good use. For the words, you’ll need to keep it short and sweet – six-words or less is ideal – while making sure that you’re saying something that speaks to your target audience, and conveys your intended message.

Words are only a small portion of a billboard, though. Billboards are visual mediums, and you’ll be spending a lot of time working with your consultant on the visual design of your billboard. Every visual element must align with what your audience needs, what you are selling, and the message that you intend to convey.

For example, if you are advertising a motorbike that goes very fast, then you should integrate visual motifs that are related to speed and momentum. That way, the words are a supplement to the visuals, rather than the other way around.

• When you purchase your billboard, it’s time for you to design it
• Make sure your design is in alignment with your audience, what they want, and the message you want to convey
• Focus on making the words a supplement to the visuals; billboard advertising is a visual medium

What Makes A Billboard Effective?

When a billboard is in the right spot, has the right visual design and the right words, and successfully introduces people to your product, that billboard is effective. If a billboard is in the wrong spot, has a clunky visual design and a strange choice of words, that billboard is unable to properly introduce potential customers to what you are selling.

In order for your billboard to be effective, it must be in the right spot, have the right visual design, and the right words. Those elements lead to a billboard that conveys what it is that you are selling, in a manner that ensures that the right people see what you are offering.

If you are advertising designer clothing, you probably wouldn’t want your billboard to be located on a road somewhere deep in rural Puerto Rico. Instead, you would want to place that billboard in a place where people with lots of disposable income will see it.

Examples of Effective Advertising

When advertising that designer clothing, you need your billboard to convey the status and prestige that comes with wearing your clothing. Instead of using a visual design that appears clunky and lacking in polish, use a visual design that comes across as sophisticated and classy.

To make your billboard extra special, you need to use the right words. For designer clothing, you wouldn’t use words such as “affordable” or “inexpensive”, you would use words such as “elegant” and “luxury”.

No matter what you are advertising, make sure that all three of those elements come together. What you should expect from billboard advertising:

• Your billboard must be in the right spot, have the right visual design, and the right words
• Make sure that your billboard is somewhere people can see it, and where the people who will buy your product are likely to see it
• Ensure that the visual design is in alignment with what you are advertising
• Make sure that you use as few words as possible, and that every word has an impact

bMedia Can Assist

For Puerto Rico billboard advertising, bMedia Group has you covered. We have years of backed experience and can help you craft the right message and the winning graphic to help boost your business. Our form of advertising isn’t just effective, it is proven. Contact us today for a consultation and clarification on what to expect from billboard advertising.