Many up-and-coming business owners and seasoned professionals have been looking to digital marketing to boost their company’s brand identity and visibility. Choosing to leverage the power of digital marketing may seem like a no-brainer in an era of increased internet use, influencers profiting and building personal brands from going viral, and the onset of virtual reality and the metaverse. Don’t be mistaken, though—traditional marketing is not obsolete. Traditional broadcasting channels like TV and radio, print channels like newspapers and magazines, and outdoor channels from posters to billboards can display advertising content in tactile, emotionally impactful, and memorable ways. One channel stands out among the rest, with a higher return of investment and a format that can still feel modern and trendy - out-of-home. Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is a means for your business to gain recognition and create a presence in the community in physical spaces that target audiences frequent.
Recognizing the lasting value of traditional marketing even in the digital age, many retailers and companies seek to find the best balance between traditional and digital marketing for their business and use these tactics in unison. In need of ways to combine your digital marketing and billboard ideas? Are you looking for a Chicago billboard company to create billboards and wallscapes to improve your brand’s offline and online visibility? At View Chicago, we help clients find the best locations and spaces to turn their creative billboard ideas into realities and transform designs into bus stop ads and wallscapes that effectively augment digital marketing methods. Explore the ideas described below for inspiration on how to boost the success of your OOH advertising and digital marketing tactics.
#1: Encourage Engagement by Getting the Public Involved
To carry out a marketing campaign for your brand is to embark on a promotional push involving promoting content like ads, photos, videos, articles, and blog posts. The campaign is typically motivated by and related to big-picture goals created by the company, like:
Driving sales and revenue
Launching new goods and services
Boosting brand awareness
Improving customer satisfaction
Improving customer engagement
Building community
OOH advertising can help you achieve several of these goals and more. Wildpostings and hot spots, for instance, will boost your visibility and brand awareness. Strategically placed along busy urban roads, these postings command the attention of drivers, pedestrians, and public transit passengers. Many viewers will see your ad more than once, no matter the time of day or night, because OOH can stay up for as long as your campaign lasts or until you’re ready to display updated creative.
Unlike digital marketing, OOH ads don’t allow viewers to change the channel or skip the ad, so your audience will have better ad recall. They’ll be more likely to remember your brand when scrolling their social media pages or planning a purchase.
Why Engagement Matters
Whether you display a massive wallscape to capture a wide audience or you use something smaller in size like a HotSpot to gear your message to a specific neighborhood, you can make this form of OOH advertising even more memorable and impactful by giving your audience a call to action that engages them and gets them directly involved.
For instance, when the co-founders and co-CEOs of Truff, a luxury condiments brand, wanted to expand Truff’s presence and get the look of its sleek bottles and truffle-inspired caps more easily recognized, they took their marketing campaign—the “Truff Best”—across the U.S. in a way that called for local communities participation. They came to the Windy City to ask Chicagoans which restaurant here has the best pizza and donate $10,000 to the winner. We complemented their contest with a robust OOH campaign in which we strategically placed billboards calling for Chicagoans to ‘vote for the best pizza in Chicago’ in key neighborhoods, including Wrigleyville, Lincoln Park, West Loop, Ukrainian Village, and Noble Square. This campaign helped make Truff more recognizable to Chicagoans across diverse neighborhoods. It allowed the audience to connect emotionally to the brand since the ad focused on Chicago’s culture and evoked a strong sense of community.
Ultimately, when you create an ad that encourages engagement and participation, you can generate valuable insights from members of your target audience. When an ad asks questions or requires consumers to cast a vote on something they’re passionate about, it drives discussion. It gets viewers involved and allows them to share their opinions, feelings, and beliefs. Companies can then use consumers’ opinions as inspiration for future creative billboard ideas, wallscapes, bus stop ads, future social media posts, and when developing new goods and services.
#2: Use Your Ads as Your Personal Business Card
Today, questions like, “do you have an Instagram?” or “are you on LinkedIn?” are increasingly commonplace in business circles or at networking events. Executives, entrepreneurs, career professionals, and students are encouraged to build a social media presence and use digital connectivity tools to increase brand visibility and awareness and connect with others. Still, business cards remain a quick, straightforward way to express yourself, what you do, and share contact information with those you meet on the fly at conferences, professional events, or coworking spaces.
Using OOH ads as your business card can help you be more far-reaching in your networking efforts. Hyperlocal advertising methods like HotSpots or wallscapes showcasing your name, picture, contact information, and a line about your professional services displayed in the diverse, populous neighborhoods of Chicago allow millions of people traveling across the city to become aware of you and what you do. Think of HotSpots and wallscapes as large-scale business cards with an informative message potential customers can receive without attending meetings or conferences. In this case, your OOH and digital marketing both get a boost, as your OOH ads can leave an impression on viewers and motivate them to visit your website, follow you on social media apps, and reach out to you to connect.
If you’re a realtor, healthcare professional, dentist, daycare center, home service provider, or other localized business, leaving your calling card in the form of an OOH ad is a surefire way to make a splash in your neighborhood.
#3: Make Your URL the Main Focus of Your Marketing Campaigns
In keeping with treating your ads like a personal business card, include just one URL with your contact information if you can when advertising your professional skills, services, and business through billboards, wild postings, bus stop ads, and more.
Why stick to one URL even though you’re building a digital presence that constitutes multiple sites and social media profiles for showcasing your work and connecting with others? Aside from those waiting in traffic or sitting at a bus stop, your viewers and prospective customers hustling through the busy streets of Chicago only have a few seconds to look at your OOH ad.
Give them the task of remembering only one straightforward URL and be sure it’s a URL they can easily connect to your name, brand image, and the creative of your ad. With the URL as the focal point of your ads, viewers can easily recall it and search for it when they pull out their phone or get home and are ready to browse and make purchasing decisions. To boost your digital marketing and presence through this tactic, be sure the URL you lead consumers to serves as a primary URL. It should connect everything in a way that makes any other sites, social media profiles, or portfolios you have easily accessible.
#4: Create a Campaign-Specific URL to More Accurately Track Web Traffic
Directing prospective consumers to one URL allows them to type it right into their phone’s internet browser when they see your wallscapes and billboards and visit your site or profile without distractions. For a more effective campaign, consider creating a URL specific to the campaign you’re displaying in your creative. A catchy, campaign-specific URL can:
Be more memorable and easily attract customers. When Chicagoans see your catchy URL on a HotSpot, wallscape, or bus wrap while going to or from work or school and see it again later on another ad or a label while out shopping, they’ll be able to recall it, connect your OOH ad and brand image to your products, and visit your site the next time they’re online. With your campaign-specific URL as the main focus of your OOH ads, you can increase brand awareness and recall.
Help you track web traffic more accurately. You and your marketing team should consider adding customized landing page URLs to your Chicago billboards and wallscapes for more effective analysis of campaign success. This way, if you’re having a seasonal sale that you’re advertising in multiple social apps, you’ll be able to determine which one is sending you the higher traffic numbers and the customers that generate the highest revenue.
#5: Direct the Public to an Instagram Handle
Creative billboard ideas don’t have to be overly complex to be memorable or gain attention.
Just as you can direct prospective consumers to a single URL for your brand, combining OOH and digital advertising can be as simple as referring your consumers to your (or an influencer’s) Instagram handle or asking them to follow your Twitter account or like your Facebook page. This straightforward call to action effectively allows your Chicago billboards to generate leads traditionally and digitally. By observing the traffic your social media platforms receive in the given time frame, you can approximate your billboard’s effectiveness.
If you have an ongoing, active social media ad campaign, consider showing any hashtags you’re using in addition to making your brand’s Instagram handle the main focus of your billboards, wallscapes, and HotSpots.
Traditional OOH and digital marketing campaigns can complement each other and help you develop a successful marketing plan and consistent image for your brand.
At View Chicago, we’ve worked with every type of company from small product-based businesses to international companies that offer digital services like Spotify to put up Chicago billboards, HotSpots, wallscapes, Wild Postings, and more. When you’re ready to make your digital marketing and billboard ideas come to life in a way that engages the neighborhoods here in Chicago, reach out to us. With information about who your target audience is, your budgetary considerations, and your ideal marketing timeline, we can provide you with a custom quote. Let’s get started on an outdoor advertising strategy that conveys your benefit proposition in the right format and in the ideal location.