Brands choose a variety of advertising techniques to reach their target audience. Since people spend a lot of time outside their homes for work or leisure, companies need a marketing solution to enable their advertisements to reach a wide audience outside their homes. Here, outdoor marketing campaigns come into the picture and help deliver the required message at the outdoor locations where the brand’s audience is most likely to be present.

What are outdoor marketing campaigns?

Outdoor marketing campaigns refer to campaigns that help grab viewers' attention through techniques like billboards, transit vehicles, guerrilla advertising and shop banners. Since people commute to and fro multiple locations daily, outdoor marketing campaigns can be seen and remembered easily, especially if they frequently visit specific areas where the outdoor marketing activities occur.

If you want your audience to stop and look at a billboard on the street or take note of your campaign in outdoor locations, you need to ensure that your campaign is well-thought and executed. Location of the billboard, creative and content plays a crucial role when opting for outdoor marketing. We’ve listed the 5 things you must consider while creating your next outdoor media advertising campaign in this blog post.

5 things to consider while creating an outdoor marketing campaign

Site Location

In outdoor advertising, the site's location being chosen for the advertisement is the most important factor. The viewability- Head on or Parallel view, the Dwell time- amount of time viewers get to see the advertisement site, Traffic that site gets- number of viewers and type of viewers that location will attract, and so on, are the factors a brand must consider when choosing an outdoor site. Therefore, the site location dictates the major success of the outdoor campaign. For example, a site which is visible head on and cannot be missed when passing through it, is at a place where traffic/viewers halt for a while, and is placed at a location from where your target audience passes by, would be the most suitable location.

Frequency of advertisement

When planning an outdoor campaign, placing the advertisement across multiple touchpoints in a city helps spread more awareness and better brand recall. Therefore, the frequency of placing the advert across multiple locations plays an important factor in making the outdoor advertising campaign successful. For example, putting up advertisements across Hoardings on important roads, shopping complexes, malls or theatres, airports or railway stations, etc., covering the entire city so that when a person is traveling from one place to another, they get to see the brand multiple times.

Audience

Before an outdoor campaign is created, the first thing that the brand needs to consider is the audience. Unless this is defined, the company’s marketing budgets will go down the drain. Identifying your audience and knowing where you can find them will help you choose the location and placement of your advertisements. For example, millennials are likely to relate to recent pop culture trends, and brands can use appropriate messaging to target them. For example, Netflix is a brand that uses billboards showing creatives of those shows watched by millennials.

Planned Creative

Another important aspect that needs proper thought and planning while creating an outdoor marketing campaign is the creative. Unlike social media creatives, OOH creatives work very differently. Since the viewing distance, placement of the ad, hoarding size, and dwell time vary for each location, the creative has to be on-point for each location. To make your brand’s campaign stand out from others, keep following things in mind when planning the creative-

Colors

Using bright colors with a contrast of neutral colors helps ensure your advertisement stands out and is not missed. For example, you can choose colours like Yellow with Dark Blue or Black, Orange with Green. Colors in contrast to each other (black and white) also ensure proper visibility.

Brand logo

While creating the design of your outdoor marketing billboard or banner, ensure that the brand logo is clearly visible. For example, if the location of your campaign is on a busy street, highway, and so on, a passerby might only be able to view the logo and may miss out on the complete copy. In such a scenario, the brand recall happens through logo visibility. Also, since outdoor activities are more from a branding perspective, the logo needs to be big enough to be noticed.

Attention-grabbing copy & more imagery

The copy in the outdoor advertisement should easily grab the attention of the brand’s target audience. Witty/humorous copy or copy that surprises the audience is more likely to be noticed than generic outdoor advertisements. Crisp, concise copy is the key to an Outdoor campaign.

Since the dwell time is less, the viewers do not get a lot of time to read the content; hence keeping the content low and communicating more with images should be kept in mind.

Relevant call-to-action

Writing the copy on the outdoor advertisement is not sufficient unless the user knows what to do next. Hence while creating your outdoor advertising campaign, include a call-to-action. The call-to-action helps the advertiser understand what they must do next. (the specific action to be performed) For example, ‘’Call Now!” or “Download (name of the mobile application)” are examples of call-to-actions.

The Right Timing

Besides an advertisement’s copy and text, there’s one crucial element of an outdoor marketing campaign that businesses cannot miss: the right timing.

The timing of your marketing campaign must help the campaign achieve its goal. For example, an outdoor advertising campaign launched by a jeweller before Diwali aims to encourage brand sales during the festive season. Hence, in this case, the outdoor advertisement must be launched a few weeks before Diwali for the campaign to have the maximum level of impact.

Conclusion

Following the 9 tips mentioned above will help you craft an effective outdoor media advertising campaign for your target market.

Let’s Build Brands is an advertising agency in New Delhi offering services like Outdoor Advertising, Digital Marketing, and other modes of advertising. If you wish to know more about the services provided by Let’s Build Brands, head over to this page.