6 Statistics on Billboard Advertising

Billboards are a form of outdoor advertising that have been around for more than 100 years. Thus, we have plenty of statistics on billboard advertising we would like to share.

The primary purpose of a billboard is to promote a product or service by displaying an image or message large enough to be seen from the road, on a vehicle, among various other ad inventories.

Although billboards are no longer limited to paper posters, they are often still referred to as “billboards”, and can be found in many places where drivers might stop or slow down, including gas stations and rest areas along highways and roadsides throughout cities or rural areas.

billboard statistics

Statistics on Billboard Advertising

The first point to consider is that billboards are the most common form of outdoor advertising. They can be seen from a distance, and they can be located in areas where people who aren’t driving will encounter them. Even if you don’t drive by them, you may walk or bike past one on your way to work or school. Here are some other statistics on billboard advertising worth considering.

#1: 71% of people surveyed about billboard advertising stated they had viewed at least one while driving.

Billboard advertising is so successful because they are seen by millions of people every day. This makes them one of the most cost-effective methods of reaching large audiences quickly and easily across a wide or local geographic area.

According to a 2009 study of US adults 18 or older, ninety-eight percent have either driven or ridden in a vehicle in the past month. The same study found that 71% of travelers look at messages on roadside billboards. Even more impressive, more than 37% of traveler’s look at an outdoor ad each or most of the time they pass one, according to the study.

#2: Billboards make up less than 3% of all North American advertising spend

Statista records that of the $297 billion USD spent in North America in 2021, a mere $7 billion are due to billboards.

Billboards have been considered an effective way to advertise for more than 100 years, and unlike other forms of advertising, their effectiveness has not diminished over time, even if the advertising industry is moving towards digital experiences.

#3: Advertisers in the North America saw a 12% dip in ad spend in 2020, but hit back with 16% growth in 2021

Like many industries, the COVID-19 pandemic affected businesses, persons, lives, and loved ones – including in Billboard advertising. In 2020, the industry contracted 12% when compared to the previous year. However, 2021 saw a jump in demand of 16%, exceeding pre-pandemic levels.

For reference, during the same period (2020-2021), digital advertising spend across North America increased by 19%.

billboard advertising statistics

#4: Billboard advertising works for multiple interests, intents, and buyers

89% of those surveyed consider billboards to be an effective form of advertising. Billboards are used by companies, politicians and even small businesses in order to promote their products and services.

According to Forbes, billboards ability to serve a variety of messaging in highly localized ways encourages the following:

  • 58% of billboard viewers learned about an event they were interested in attending.
  • 58% of billboard viewers learned about a food establishment they would later visit.
  • 56 % of billboard viewers actively engaged in conversation about something funny they saw on a billboard
  • 33% of billboard viewers were reminded to watch a favored TV program.
  • Roughly 30% of billboard viewers took note of a phone number or web site address on a billboard.

#5: 13% of survey respondents state that they are most likely to remember billboard ads when they are driving along an interstate highway

One of the greatest challenges facing billboard advertising is finding a way to maximize exposure while keeping costs down. In order to do this, it’s important to understand the best places to put your billboards and how they’ll be most effective in each location.

In the US, Interstate highways are some of the busiest roadways in existence; according to data from the US Department of Transportation, about 200 million Americans drive along interstates every day.

Given the pure volume of traffic along North American interstate highways, billboards can reach millions of individuals – some multiple times a day

#6: Buying decisions are made everywhere – especially when travel or commuting is involved

A US National In-Car Study in 2009 found that billboards command attention and increase a desire to make a purchase.

  • 72% of billboard viewers frequently or sometimes shop when going home
  • 68% of billboard viewers frequently or sometimes make shopping decisions in the car
  • 38% of billboard viewers make the decision to stop at the store while on their way home
  • 24% of billboard viewers say they were encouraged to go to a particular store that day
  • 32% of billboard viewers, instead of going that day, visited the retailer within the week

One of the best things about billboards is that they are highly visible and in a public place where people are likely to be traveling. This means that you can reach consumers who are out and about, moving from one place to another.

Billboards also have a long track record of being an effective form of advertising. They have been in use for more than 100 years, which means that there’s plenty of data on their effectiveness over time. This makes them far less risky than other forms of advertising because you know exactly what you’re getting into when you choose this type of marketing strategy as part of your overall campaign strategy.

If you’re looking for an effective way to advertise your products or services, then billboards might be just what you need!

billboard data

bMedia and Billboard Advertising

While some may argue that billboards are an outdated form of advertising, it’s important to remember how influential they can be. While there are many forms of media available today, billboards are still one of the most effective ways to reach a large audience and make an impact on their purchasing decisions.

As a local leading media company, our goal is to provide advertising vehicles that make your message get through to your target market in order to solidify your brand image and/or increase your sales through impact, quality, innovation, and distinct services. We have specific statistics on billboard advertising within the Puerto Rican market that will prove just how cost effective billboard advertising can be.

Contact us today to learn more.

Impressions vs Reach

In marketing and advertising, the Rule of 7 is a common concept that states that your potential customer needs to see or hear your brand name roughly 7 times to convert. This is one of the reasons that billboards are so important for companies who want to attract their clients and grow their customer base. However, what are the main differences between impressions vs reach?

As a local leading media company, bMedia’s goal is to provide advertising vehicles that make your message get through to your target market to solidify your brand image and/or increase your sales through impact, quality, innovation, and distinct services.

 

reach vs impressions

What is Reach and Why is It Important?

Reach is defined by Hootsuite as being the number of people who have seen your ad at least once and can be categorized as either organic, paid, or viral.

Organic reach refers to the number of individual people who saw your content through their timelines or news feed on their own.

Paid reach is the number of people who saw content that was paid for, such as an ad.

Viral reach is the number of people who saw your content because one of their friends interacted with it.

Reach is an important metric to use when considering your marketing campaign because it counts the unique size of your audience; having your reach outlined helps you when you’re trying to understand the impact of your content.

Is Reach the Same as Impressions?

Reach is not to be confused with an Impression. However, when it comes to impressions vs reach, both are equally important metrics for tracking the success of your billboards and campaigns.

Where reach is how many people have seen your content, Impressions are the number of times your content has been displayed to your audience, regardless of if they clicked on it or not. Impressions may show up on your audience’s timeline without them having seen or taken it in. Furthermore, it still counts as an impression simply because it appeared on their web page regardless of whether it garnered engagement.

For example, a piece of content posted on Instagram may pop up on someone’s timeline, and whether they clicked on it or simply scrolled past it, it is still considered an impression.

Which is Better – Reach or Impressions?

There are plenty of similarities between impressions vs reach, but is one better than the other?

When strategizing a new campaign, you want to be sure of which metrics you’re measuring advertising effectiveness and success.

Each Key Performance Indicator (KPI) has a different outcome in terms of success and completely depends on your goals. If you’re unsure whether the amount of ads you’re putting out is too little or too much, you’d want to track impressions. If your ad is sent out and has little engagement or a low conversion rate (someone taking the action you want). Each gives you different information and campaign insight about your ad and content performance to figure out the effectiveness and any changes you may need to make along the way.

reach and impressions

What Is An Impression on a Billboard and How Do You Measure It?

While social media has tons of analytic tools at your disposal, outdoor advertising options (OOH) are a little trickier to track. To do this, you will need a combination of strategies from multiple sources to calculate your success.

Billboards are the most common for those that are on the road or even just walking down the street – as we all can attest to, they are everywhere. The size of these ads is created as such to draw your audience in through their regular routines. Not only that, but they are massive, sturdy structures that can be seen from far away – quite literally hard to miss.

When it comes to OOH advertising, tracking Impressions is a little different. Rather than having data on how many people were exposed to your ad, it’s important to be mindful of activity in the area and the level of engagement. This is mostly calculated through traffic patterns to estimate the number of people that saw the ad through the Traffic Audit Bureau (TAB) using surveys, market research, and more to measure the number of impressions. This information helps you define demographics, interests, consumer characteristics, time spent near the ad, vehicle speed, and much more.

How to Measure Reach with Billboards?

In OOH Advertising, Impressions calculates how many times a person sees your ad on average, where Reach focuses on the bigger picture – the entire population – and the number of times a person has seen your billboard at least once. Reach is calculated technically – using road type, distance on the road, size, and billboard characteristics, to name a few.

Using Reach and Impressions to gauge the performance of your advertisement are great indicators of success, as well as what you can do better next time.

Why Should I Use A Billboard in My Marketing Strategy?

Billboards have been used for years, and are not going out of style anytime soon.

Their effectiveness is unmatched, sometimes without your audience even recognizing the effects of the persuasiveness taking place. You may have used them on a long road trip to play the alphabet game, intaking more information than you thought.

They are psychological attention-grabbers, feeding your audience different messages and calls-to-action (CTAs) with your brand.

On the internet, your audience has more control over whether they see an advertisement, or how often they are on their phones or laptops at all. With billboards, they are physically and mentally hard to ignore, as they surround much of our daily lives and routine. By implementing billboards into your marketing strategy, you take back some of that control and can influence your target audience more easily.

Choosing the right group to help you find that client base is even more crucial in your advertising strategy plan – which is why bMedia statistically has the highest consumer traffic for their island-wide billboards.

bMedia is the perfect agency to help you reach your audience when you want, where you want.

How to Promote Your Business in the Community

Promoting your business is essential if your goal is to stand out from your competitors and gain brand recognition in the community. Therefore, it’s important to take advantage of promotion opportunities in your area that will generate more customers and help solidify a trusted brand-consumer relationship in your community. In today’s digital age, promotion opportunities are endless. Businesses can spread the word about their product through search engines, social media channels, online directories, or even go with the ever-so-trusted billboard. To reach your target audience, you must make your brand visible on multiple platforms. Here are some different ways how to promote your business in the community.

how to promote your local business

Out-of-Home Advertising (OOH)

The first step to promoting your business is to make it visible. What better way to do it than out-of-home advertising (OOH). Outdoor advertising techniques include street signage, flyers, street teams, promotional events, and the beloved billboard.

The most trusted and original forms of OOH advertising are billboards. Billboards work because they are eye-catching and one of the most trusted forms of advertising for consumers. The majority of Puerto Ricans live in urban areas, and the great thing about billboards is that they can target local high-traffic areas where customers can interact with your campaign.

Today, we are seeing billboards evolve, boasting endless advertising potential for business. Digital billboards continue to rise in popularity because it allows users to directly engage with the advertisement, creating a memorable experience that highlights the product/ service you are offering.

To ensure a successful billboard campaign, we have determined some best practices to help maximize your promotion:

  • Keep it simple
  • Use borders and cropping appropriately
  • Be intentional with colors and contrast
  • Leverage key locations and seasons
  • Be careful of fonts

Establish a Social Media Presence

There are 2.32 million social media users in Puerto Rico as of January 2021, equivalent to 81.6% of the total population. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest are great marketing tools because of the ability to engage with existing customers while reaching out to new customers. As of December 2020, Facebook received 80.3% of all social media site visits in Puerto Rico. Facebook advertising is all about getting your message on the right news feeds using targeting options. Facebook allows you to advertise using images, videos, and even polls for interactivity.

Additionally, social media can be used as a marketing tool by creating brand-specific content. Social media has provided us with a range of posting formats such as images, short video stories, live sessions, tutorials, and more. Creating content for these platforms is an opportunity for business owners to engage with consumers while promoting a specific product, service, or event.

promote business with SEO

Take Advantage of Search Engines Like Google

Being visible on Google is great for your brand, it puts you directly in front of consumers seeking solutions. Creating and verifying your Google Business profiles allows your business to show up on Google Maps and caters results to the searcher’s current location. Creating a Google My Business account is free and once verified, you can optimize your listing to show up as a high-ranking result for relevant searches using a good SEO strategy.

Be Involved in the Community

If you’re wondering how to promote your business in the community, a good place to start is to be active and attentive in your community. Businesses can sometimes be involved in the community for the wrong reasons and they show. Be sincere, be genuine. Don’t push your business if it’s not relevant or actually helpful. In one way or another, your business will come up and your community will support it after they’ve seen and felt your support.

Being involved in the community involves giving back to it. Donating to a local charity will bring your business closer to locals by making it more approachable. Consumers are likely to support your business if you’re associated with a charity or cause close to them. You can give back to your community in several ways including:

  • Annual contribution to charity
  • Special promotions with a percentage of sales going to a cause
  • Donate products or services to local schools or community centers

5 star reviews

Get Online Customer Reviews

Set up profiles on platforms like Yelp and Tripadvisor to increase brand exposure. These platforms are used by locals and visitors when looking for local businesses. 92% of consumers purchase from a business after viewing it on Yelp. These platforms allow customers to leave reviews, making it easy for business owners to monitor and respond to any business inquiries. Make sure all business information, such as hours, phone number, address, and website are all accurate for potential customers.

Importance of a Good Marketing Strategy

A good marketing strategy is a blueprint that will determine how your message will reach out to your target audience. Your business might be making a profit, but to remain successful, you must consistently stay ahead of your competitors. The best way to ensure this is to have a good marketing strategy in place. Not only will good advertising give you an edge, but it can also give you insight into how your business is performing, allowing you to make the right business decisions.

Market research is crucial in creating your promotional strategy. Data and information collected from this research will allow you to develop your product or service to boost profit potential. It can also help you create a detailed organization plan, ensuring optimum utilization of resources to get the message in front of the target consumer.

How to Measure the ROI of Your Campaigns

Once you’ve learned how to promote your business in the community, it’s then important to know how to measure the effectiveness of your promotional efforts.

Marketing ROI involves attributing profit or revenue as a direct cause of marketing growth initiatives. To determine whether your advertising campaign is successful or not, there’s a straightforward formula you can use:

ROI = (Sales growth – organic sales growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost

Marketing costs include but are not limited to:

  • Overhead and internal expenses
  • Agency fees
  • Media buys
  • Creative costs

ROI helps determine budget allocation for ongoing and future ad campaigns. It’s important to consistently evaluate KPIs such as reach, frequency, and impressions so you can determine if your marketing efforts are benefiting business growth and help you allocate your budget accordingly.

Strategize with bMedia Group

If you’re looking for ways to promote your business within your community, reach out to bMedia Group. We are Puerto Rico’s leading experts in outdoor and billboard advertising. Our professionals can help you strategize, execute and maximize the effectiveness of your promotional campaign and market research.

Contact us today! We’ll guarantee your ads will be seen and remembered, helping you unlock unlimited business growth.

Go To Market Strategy for Startups

We don’t mean to intimidate you (and maybe you were already aware), but there’s something you need to know: Studies show that 90% of all startups fail within five years of formation — not a very reassuring statistic, right? But what’s the story behind this damning figure?

It all comes down to obscurity. Simply put, nobody knows about your business or what products/services you offer. In an ideal world, you could pour endless amounts of cash into a marketing push that announces your presence to the world with gusto, but, as we’re sure we’re both painfully aware, this is no ideal world.

Not only are advertising budgets rather meager for startups, you’re up against other businesses with established product-market-fit, which is daunting, to say the least… but there is a way to cut through the competition and get your voice heard – an effective go-to-market strategy for startups.

marketing strategy for startups

What Exactly Is A Go-To-Market Strategy, And Why Is It Important For Startups?

A go-to-market strategy for startups is precisely what it sounds like – an advertising game-plan that breaks an unknown product or service into a target market; it’s your key to the locked door of commerce!

Your go-to-market strategy is a blueprint that illustrates how you will reach the people you want to reach with the message you want them to hear. It’s considered a separate entity to standard marketing stratagems, as they imply an established market position, whereas GTM is a way of reaching an initial audience from nothing.

It’s the foundation on which all your future marketing campaigns will be based, and a strong foundation inspires confidence, not just within your target audience, but among your investors, too. Creating a GTM strategy is the ultimate way to position your business for success moving forward. Other GTM benefits include…

  • Weeding out potential risks
  • Generating profit quickly
  • Developing your business and product/service
  • Attaining you a competitive edge over other startups

Creating a Go-To-Market Strategy For Your Startup

The three pillars you’ll need to know for a go-to-market strategy for startups are the What, Who, and How

  • What are you trying to sell?
  • Who needs what you’re trying to sell?
  • How are you going to introduce your offering to those who need it?

If you can answer these questions, you’ll have laid the foundation for a successful entrance into your particular niche of the market, so let’s consider how this can be done.

Step 1. Know Your Audience

You may well have come up with the concept of your product or service through finding gaps or weaknesses in the market yourself, and that’s great; it means whatever you come up with has some form of real-world appeal, but now you have to find others like yourself and figure out what makes them tick.

Hone in on your target audience, and try to map out their behaviors and general way of thinking. Forget about trying to sell something to the world; focus on this very finite group of people and figure out exactly what they’re looking for.

Modern consumers expect businesses to know all about their wants and needs, but we’re not mind readers, so instead, we can build up a customer persona by… This applies to all types of businesses. It doesn’t matter if you are a digital service providing with a nationwide audience, like providing legal wills online, or a brick and mortar business creating tangible products to specific locations, like a vodka distillery, knowing your audience is crucial.

Scheduling Interviews with Potential Users

Interviewing people takes time, but you won’t find more rich, accurate, and enlightening results via any other means, so it pays to talk to prospective customers face-to-face.

Far more fluid and personal than standardized surveys, interviews give you a real insight into the lives of people who your product/service could help, which is a great way to gather data you can use at a later date to refine your offering.

Be wary of time constraints and ask effective questions, such as…

  1. What are their preferred channels of communication (e.g. email, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, billboards, etc)?
  2. What are they disappointed by or lacking?
  3. In their eyes, what makes a product or business effective and valuable?

survey your audience

Questionnaires

Interviews are fantastic sources of information, but they’re almost too focused. Although you’re narrowing your research to drum up a customer persona, you still need to venture further afield to ascertain splits in that persona in terms of age, profession, location, etc, and questionnaires are a great way to do so.

The wider net you cast will give you more of an insight into what pain points are simply individual woes and which are felt universally, ripe for capitalization.

However, do bear in mind that you’ll need to provide some form of incentive to encourage people to complete your questionnaire, and try to keep it short and sweet, too — we’re all busy people.

Purchase Pre-Existing Data

There are countless other companies that have had to study their target audience before you founded your startup, and you can use this to your advantage.

Paying for research carried out by similar companies gives you effort-free results. Now, they’re not going to be quite as accurate as the results you’ll get from your own studies, but they can certainly help to create a more substantive customer persona in a short amount of time.

Due to its immediacy, this method is often employed first as a sort of scattershot data drive. It gives you a rough estimate of things like target consumer age, location, profession, income, pain points, and purchase triggers.

Step 2. Know Your Competitor

If you’re going to offer something new, you need to know what your competitor is already bringing to the table. If an established entity has beaten you to the punch, your chances of gaining traction with a GTM strategy are slim-to-none. Find ways around it.

Step 3. Coming Up With a Value Proposition

In a nutshell, a value proposition is a snappy headline followed by 2–3 sentences that divulge why your product/service:

  • Is relevant to the user
  • Solves the user’s problem
  • Is unique and cannot be found elsewhere

For example, let’s say you’ve invented an automatic garlic clove peeler. Your value proposition should establish that garlic is one of the most common ingredients in cuisine around the globe (relevance), it makes the tough job of peeling cloves effortless (problem solved), and it’s a patented design (unique).

It’s important not to get caught up in mentioning features alone. To entice customers, you need to tell them in no uncertain words how it will make their life easier or more enjoyable.

Step 4. Establish The Best Lines Of Communication For Reaching Your Target Audience

With your target audience in sight, it’s time to find out how to reach them. People of different age groups and professions communicate and are exposed to things in unique ways.

For example, younger people will consume a lot of adverts on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, while older generations may only use Facebook or perhaps even just email.

Another example is that people working from home will engage with mostly digital adverts, but for those who commute to an office, billboard advertising will be highly effective.

Don’t feel you have to settle for just one mode of communication per faction of your target audience. Research has shown that omnichannel approaches to customer communication have a much higher retention rate than single-channel approaches.

go to market strategy

Step 5. Zeroing In On Marketing Tactics

People don’t just use different channels of communication, they also have preferences in regard to how they’re engaged with.

For instance, certain demographics may respond well to the personal/celebrity touch of paid partnerships, while others will be distrustful of this tactic as the pecuniary aspect of the agreement makes the brand representative seem disingenuous and the product seem weak.

Step 6. Don’t Stop Testing

Even if you think you’ve got everything figured out, you need to keep on testing your theories by measuring advertising effectiveness. Test different styles of ad copy, test the efficacy of different images, test different marketing tactics… test everything!

Marketing is a trial and error process, so the more mistakes you get out of your system early on by putting plans through their paces, the fewer you’ll be paying for later with a poor campaign.

Step 7. Budget Planning

Once your research has provided all the answers you need to shape your GTM strategy, it’s time to map out what your budget may look like and how it will be split across different marketing tactics.

Step 8. Implementation

At this stage, you’ve done most of the heavy lifting, and now it’s time to use what you’ve learned to implement your marketing strategy!

bMedia and Developing a Go-To-Market Strategy

As mentioned earlier, omnichannel marketing tactics in GTM strategies are far more effective than single-channel plans, which is why you should seriously consider incorporating a robust OOH line of communication with your target audience as part of your strategy, either as the primary or supporting mode of contact.

Granted, digital marketing has great reach potential, but as a fatally saturated facet of the advertising industry, it tends to inspire a lot of fatigue in the viewer. Billboards and OOH adverts, on the other hand, still grab attention, cinching valuable real estate in the consciousness of the viewer.

But providing the physical space for your ads is just the tip of the bMedia Group’s iceberg. Our dedicated team of marketing experts can help you build a custom, go-to-market strategy for startups from the ground up, ensuring you and your business can generate customers, and start changing people’s lives with your product/service.

Contact us today, and we’ll talk you through how we measure the efficacy of OOH advertising with state-of-the-art analytics to optimize the potential of your campaigns and stimulate rapid business growth.

Your startup may be small, but with bMedia in your corner, you’ll cast a much larger shadow, giving you the confidence and market position to hold your own against giants of any given industry, giants that, with our help, you will soon tower over.

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

To a certain extent, advertising can be a trial and error process. Not all marketing campaigns start out great, right off the bat. Most successful strategies are built on little errors businesses weed out over time by measuring advertising effectiveness.

What’s the Importance of Measuring Advertising Effectiveness?

Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

Sure, you can equate a sudden influx of clients to your recently implemented marketing campaign, or a downturn in lead conversion to seasonal variables, but unless you have the metrics and cold hard statistics to prove it, you can never be sure how your strategy is performing.

When it comes to advertising your business, you need to know the real-world effects of every decision you make, as each of these decisions is costing you money. So, let’s take a look at the different ways of measuring advertising effectiveness, and what advertising metrics you should be using.

Advertising Performance Metrics

Before you can apply any advertising metrics to your campaign, you need to ensure that it is measurable, and this is done by setting time-sensitive, advert-specific goals.

Establishing Objectives

Objectives are everything when it comes to marketing. After all, if there is no goal to work towards, it’s impossible to measure success, as success becomes irrelevant – which isn’t the outlook you want to have if you’re trying to grow your business.

Once you’ve established the objective of an advertisement, you’ll know what metrics to apply to measure performance.

These are known as key performance indicators.

Deciding on Key Performance Indicators

You can think of KPIs as steps that must be taken to achieve your marketing objective.

For example, your overarching objective might be to drive sales of a particular product up 20% by next quarter. Therefore, a KPI to observe would be the number of visitors the product page receives after the release of the ad compared to the traffic it was logging beforehand.

Once you’ve established a quantifiable backdrop for your advertisements, there are literally hundreds of ways to track the performance of your advertising campaign and determine whether you’re pulling in an ROI. Let’s take a look at some of the more commonly used metrics.

Reach

Reach is quantified in different ways depending on the medium, but it always tells you the same thing. It simply refers to the total number of people exposed to your advert — the more, the merrier!

Frequency

Frequency is the number of times each individual sees your advert. Repetition plays a huge role in memory retention, so if each person sees your ad a few times, it’s definitely a good thing; however, too much exposure to the same advert will cause fatigue, and it will start to fade into the background.

Impressions

Impressions metrics are basically a combination of reach and frequency metrics. They measure the total number of times your advert has been seen, even if by the same people.

Cost Per Customer

How much does your advertisement cost when split between the customers it brings? If the cost per customer is less than the revenue they brought in, then your advert is, at the very least, not drawing a loss.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Similar to cost per customer, this metric measures how much the ad is costing you when divided across the clicks it has garnered.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

How many people are clicking through on one of your online advertisements? If the number is exceedingly low when compared to the overall reach of the ad, it’s underperforming.

Advertising Metrics: How Is the Efficacy of Out-of-Home Marketing Measured

Advertising Metrics

 

With advancements in technology, thousands of metrics have been made available to the online digital marketer, which may leave you questioning the relevance of traditional outdoor advertising. How would you even go about measuring advertising effectiveness through the impact of a billboard or poster campaign?

Well, you’d be surprised how quantitative this area of the marketing industry is. In fact, as your outdoor ads are mostly going to direct viewers to engage with your brand online in some form or another, it means you can use a lot of the same technologies utilized by digital marketers, to assess your outdoor advertising effectiveness.

One Strategy at a Time

Firstly, to assess how well your outdoor advertising is doing, you need to stabilize all other marketing activities. If you see an increase in interest or revenue, you need to be able to say with confidence that the outdoor roll-out is responsible for the growth.

Traffic Data

Here at bMedia, we use a state-of-the-art car tracking system in all our billboard locations to give you an accurate estimate on the probable exposure of your advertisement.

Landing Page Tracking

Just because your adverts are out in the real world, doesn’t mean you can’t use computers to analyze their performance. By placing a unique URL on your advertisement, you can then use an online tracker to measure how many visitors the URL receives, just by viewing your out-of-home advertising.

Hashtags and Social Media Tracking

You can do a similar thing with hashtags. Assign a unique hashtag to your billboards, and monitor proliferation online across various social media platforms.

Promo Codes

The same principles apply to promo codes too. Let’s say that you’re a watch manufacturer, and you wanted to entice customers with a modest discount. You could print, “Use Promo Code WATCHTHISSPACE for 10% off” on just your billboards, then measure how many customers applied the code at checkout.

Keyword Tracking

It’s quite possible that people will see your advert, get the general gist, but miss the exact wording of a promo code or hashtag. They may then respond to your ad by searching your brand online alongside phrases such as “new deal”, “watch offer”, or “promotion”.

By keeping an eye out for those keywords in your online analytics, you’ll have a clearer picture of how many people your outdoor advertisement is influencing.

Customer Surveys

Don’t get us wrong – state-of-the-art analytics technology is great and all, but you could also just try asking your customers where they heard about your brand and what brought them to your site. Try this in your online contact forms, email marketing campaigns, or even social media.

Mobility Tracking

Another way you can drum up more of an idea about reach, frequency, and impressions is to measure the movement of journeys people make in vehicles or otherwise in a certain area. This can be done by monitoring the GPS location of willing survey participants or, perhaps, asking them to write and submit a travel diary.

Outdoor Advertising Effectiveness: Why Outdoor Advertising Is Essential to the Success of Your Business

Outdoor advertising effectiveness

As more and more of our lives are playing out in front of screens, we’ve seen a massive spike in the popularity of digital marketing, and while this is an effective means of reaching people, it’s not necessarily the best way to advertise to prospective clients/customers.

The constant barrage of online ads and lead acquisition emails we experience in our day-to-day lives is enough to drive anybody up the wall. Rather than enticing the viewer, they tend to cause irritation and feelings of distrust.

In response to this over-exposure to digital marketing mediums, the value of traditional outdoor marketing has skyrocketed, and bMedia is at the forefront of this surge in popularity.

When people see a bMedia billboard, they’re not scrolling past it at lightning speed or distracted by a million other bits of data, they’re focused on your advert and your advert alone, reading it slowly, weighing up each word, enjoying the visual accompaniment, making a mental note to investigate further once they get to where they’re going.

bMedia Can Help You Grow Your Business

Contact us today and gain access to over 500 high-exposure areas across the entire island of Puerto Rico, meaning that we can single-handedly optimize the reach of your outdoor advertising campaign.

Our intuitive billboard location map makes it incredibly easy to explore your options, but we do so much more than simply provide the space for your advertisements. Our crack team of marketing strategists with years of experience in the industry will help you build your campaign from the ground up to serve your specific business goals.

Effective Billboard Advertising

Billboards are a great medium to use when you really want to get your message to your customers.  Some people think they’re outdated in an increasingly digital world, but there’s a reason they’re still going strong. Everywhere from Times Square to Puerto Rico, they work! However, there are a few key factors worth noting that really contribute to effective billboard advertising.

Some say TV and radio advertising are losing out to streaming services. Others champion using online ads, but each channel there has a critic claiming no one uses that social network anymore. What’s undeniable is that people will still venture out into the world on a regular basis, and there’s no need to update their device in order to read a billboard.

The effort and detail put into everything behind the billboard will help maximize its message and effectiveness. In other words, the more you focus on the goals behind the ad, the audience, the design, and the location, the more optimized your billboard is for maximum effectiveness.

Here’s where to start your quest for effective billboard design:

effective billboard advertising

Tips for Most Effective Billboard Advertising

To make sure your billboard advertising is reaching its full potential, there are a few things you’ll want to pay close attention to.

Follow these 7 guidelines:

  1. Make sure you know your target audience
  2. In most cases, simple is better than complex
  3. Use clear messaging
  4. Follow best practices for ease of reading
  5. Always aim for a goal
  6. Focus on one call to action
  7. Never forget to use this to build your brand

This may seem like a lot of steps, but it really isn’t since many of them build on each other. Learn on to read how to best accomplish each one of these.

Define a Target

The first important aspect of creating effective billboard advertising is making sure that it’s targeting a specific group of viewers. Since such a wide variety of people will be exposed to it, it’s very tempting to try to advertise to everyone. Studies have shown that targeting a specific demographic using your billboard can often get the message across far more clearly than going after a broader group. Instead of a lot of people getting your message, it generally turns into no one hearing it.

When you decide on a target group, you’ll know who you’re talking to. Once you know exactly who’s going to be listening, you know how to craft your message in a way that they’ll hear it.

Keep It Simple

Too many words end up being too much information to remember. Don’t forget that people often see billboards when they’re driving or busy doing something else, so they don’t always have the chance to stop and read – even if they want to. Make sure you get your point across as quickly as possible.

A good general rule is to use a maximum of six words on your billboard, as this is about the most that people can quickly take in.

But, just because you can use six doesn’t mean that you have to. Using only one word can be great. Zero words can be amazing.

effective billboard design

Make Sure People Understand You

The next step is to keep your billboard understandable.  When you’re trying to sell something, you don’t want to show off in a way that strains the brain of your customer.  If someone really has to stretch to understand what you’re saying, they might start feeling stupid.  Once they associate your brand with that feeling, people aren’t really going to have a lot of motivation to give you their money.

But, if you make your billboard easy to understand, your customers will start to feel good about themselves.  Suddenly, you’re the brand that they relate to, and that’s who they want to have in their life.

Make Sure People Can Read It

We’ve already covered why your billboard should only have a few words and why it should be easy to understand, but it’s also extremely important to make sure people can read it.  By this, we mean to make sure the actual design can be taken in by the eyes of your customers.

Don’t use elaborate fonts that are difficult to make out. Don’t use colors that are so similar that they’re hard to tell apart. Make sure the billboard has lots of contrast between the different elements, but also make sure they’re colors that go well together.

Set a Goal

This is near the bottom of the list, but it’s still one of the most necessary parts of creating an effective billboard. It really should be done at the same time that you define your target. Make sure that you have a specific result that you hope for the sign to accomplish, or you’re just going to be creating a colorful banner.

Are you looking to create more brand awareness? Perhaps you’re marketing a specific product or service, for which you can track sales through the billboard campaign?

It doesn’t need to be a complicated or difficult goal.

Do you want to get more people in your store?  That’s a great goal.

Do you want to make sure potential customers learn about a promotion?  That’s another.

What about just making people interested in your brand?  That’s one of the most common reasons for creating a billboard.

effective billboard advertising examples

Define a Single Call-To-Action

What are you wanting your audience to do when they see your ad? Is there a phone number you want them to call? Maybe a website or social media channel you want them to visit? Is there a discount code you’d like them to enter? Don’t forget your contact info somewhere within the billboard advertisement, to make sure viewers don’t just see your ad – they engage with and respond to it.

Go With Brand Building

Now that we’re talking about your brand, that brings up a really good piece of advice.  Think about using the billboard mostly to keep your brand in the eyes of your consumers.  They’ll see your message every day on their way to work, but they don’t always have the chance to stop and read it.  Or, they may not even have a need for your products or services at the moment – but the sign will still be there.

If your name has been melted into their brains during a morning commute every single day, they’ll take that into consideration when they encounter you in a shop.  You’ll feel like a trusted friend who has always been there for them.

Don’t Be Intimidated By Overdone Effective Billboard Advertising Examples

If you do a search for “effective billboard advertising examples”, you’re likely going to come up with some pretty impressive results. You might find these amazing pieces of art to be inspiring, or you might be prepared to throw in the towel because you’ll never be able to think of an idea so great.

Take a deep breath and remember that out of millions of billboards, the internet will be happy to point out a few amazing success stories. These were developed by the top advertising agencies, and often had a bit of luck to really make them happen.

Just focus on the fact that the point of your billboard is to achieve your goals with your customers. Having an award-winning ad that will go viral online feels great, but it doesn’t contribute to your bottom line. Stick with the tips above, and you’ll be fine.

How to Buy Billboard Advertising

Now that you have more of an idea of how to do billboard advertising, you’re probably wondering the specifics of how to buy billboard advertising. Essentially there are two ways to go about it: building a billboard or renting space on one that already exists.

Pros of building a billboard:

  • You have more control over the billboard as a whole.
  • You don’t have to worry about the contract running out and not being able to renew.

Cons of building a billboard:

  • You need to either own or rent the land where it is placed (or the building it’s attached to).
  • You’re responsible for building and maintaining it.

Pros of renting an already existing billboard:

  • There is a lot less planning and commitment on your part, and the whole process can be significantly faster and easier.
  • If you decide the location isn’t working for you, you can move when the rental term is finished.

Cons of renting an already existing billboard:

  • Depending on the contract, the price or availability of the billboard could change in the future.
  • Some (but not all!) companies will place restrictions on what you can put on the billboard.

How bMedia Can Help With Effective Billboard Design

Now that you have all this new knowledge about billboards, why not put it to the test?  Give us a call, we are the largest provider of outdoor media in Puerto Rico and can help you get started with creating effective billboard advertising. As we consider your audience, your message, and the size of the ad, we’ll make sure that your billboard ad is most effective in its location and performance.