Local advertising is a marketing tool that never disappoints. While digital marketing is important to efficiently express your message clearly, local advertising puts you in physical locations that your audience visits, sometimes on a daily basis. Picture your ad next to the neighborhood grocery store and it’s easy to see why local advertising works. While your audience might not take out their phones and make a purchase at that moment, you’ll build brand awareness with them and when they’re ready to make a purchase, they’ll think of your brand first. Below are five of the most popular advertising techniques that produce results.
Focus on a Neighborhood
Chicago is the city of neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has its own personality, and with that come different demographics and different audiences. For instance, while an ad might work in Andersonville, it might not resonate as much in Bridgeport (and vice versa). In a city like Chicago, knowing the neighborhoods helps you craft messaging that will resonate with the residents of those areas.
When it comes to neighborhood advertising, it’s not about reaching large numbers of people. It’s about a more focused approach. This is why billboards are so effective—there are many different formats to help you achieve your results. Large billboards on the side of a highway are one approach to try to catch as many eyes toward your product or brand. You’ll most likely catch the eyes of people who are not part of your target audience as well, but that's part of the appeal of billboards.
On the other hand, neighborhood-focused formats like HotSpots are all about the hyperlocal approach. The hyperlocal approach is about reaching your audience where they live, eat, and shop. In Chicago, people spend most of their time within a specific neighborhood. By focusing on a neighborhood, or even a specific block of a neighborhood, you can reach your target audience and provide relevant messaging that resonates with them.
One perk of HotSpots is that due to their size, they’re much more affordable than large highway billboards. Now, just because they’re smaller doesn’t diminish the impact you can have from HotSpots. It all depends on your results. Small businesses, for instance, can easily gain several new customers per month with HotSpots, which would cover the cost of the advertising investment. National brands can promote local stores or online shopping opportunities to their target audiences, reminding them in the real world about their brand or products.
Case Study — Adidas
The Adidas campaign is a great example of how you can really tie in outdoor advertising with a big splash on social media in order to get the most effective campaign. As part of the new campaign, Adidas created ads that were directed to specific influencers, peppered around Chicago. After the influencers were engaged, they switched to a more mainstream creative. The beauty of HotSpots is their flexibility—they can be adapted to any environment, any campaign, and any goal.
Design Compelling Creative
Ok, you’ve found your target audience in Chicago, and you’ve crafted specific messaging to fit that demographic and make it relevant. How do you increase the likelihood that your ad will be seen?
When developing an ad campaign meant for local appeal, thinking about the design and the creative is one of the most important aspects of the ad campaign once the messaging has been decided. Think impactful imagery that can easily describe an idea or a feeling. Remember, with outdoor advertising you don’t have the luxury of people spending several minutes ingesting your message. They walk or drive by, so your ad should be able to speak to them in a matter of seconds. The images, colors, and even typefaces you use can help make your ad campaign more effective.
Enter Wild Postings. If you’re looking for a format that is made for dazzling your audience, look no further. Wild Postings are street-level advertisements, which means anyone walking or driving past can easily see the ad while they scan the road. Their horizontal aspect ratio also gives you the option of multiplying your ad creative throughout the board, letting you showcase more than one messaging (check out our OkCupid ads with this in mind here).
Wild Postings also have an increased impact with social media campaigns. Because outdoor advertising is such a visual medium, it lends itself to promoting engagement on photo-based social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. When your advertisement is something that your audience can literally reach out and touch, it opens the door to creating the perfect content and messaging in order to leverage audience interaction.
Case Study — Timbaland
This image speaks for itself. The large and impactful creative featuring a shoe is immediately eye-catching, and the person running by can’t help but look at the ad. It’s a simple ad, without any flourishes or even design—it’s just a photograph of a shoe. But when you enlarge the image and you focus on the detail of the boot, you’re giving people a much more focused creative that catches their attention and makes them stop to learn more.
Be Big and Bold
Another way to ensure your ad will be seen is not only about design but about sheer size. As discussed above, size is important in outdoor advertising because it’s difficult to compete with it. Most people see ads on their phones or computer screens, and oftentimes these ads are pretty small compared to our ability to see them. There’s a massive difference between seeing an ad that’s a few inches big compared to a gargantuan ad on the street that can be seen from a distance away. This aspect makes outdoor advertising much more impactful.
Our biggest format is Wallscapes, towering advertisements that range in size from fifteen to thirty feet high. They’re fixed directly to the side of a building, although sometimes they’re painted, but the scale at which these ads operate is on another level. Wallscapes are almost like murals; they blend with the landscape of the city, connecting the audience with the message and creative, cementing the brand and building its acceptance within the community.
Wallscapes are also great at complementing online efforts. Big brands use Wallscapes to engage their audience on the morning commute or a stroll in their neighborhood and to drive people to their online presence where they are able to click and act. One of the best ways to increase your social media, Google search results, or website traffic is to complement it with Wallscapes.
Case Study — Fiverr
The famous gig website wanted to make a big impression in Chicago, and with this Wallscape, it’s difficult to argue with the impression they made. The colors are vibrant, the messaging is simple, and the impact is clear. When you have an ad this size in a large metropolitan city like Chicago, the results will follow easily.
Focus on Frequency
To go in the opposite direction, local advertising can also take the form of smaller but more frequent ads. So, instead of seeing one large ad that makes an impact, you can take the opposite approach—make smaller impacts but with more frequency, increasing the likelihood that your audience will remember your brand and hire your services or buy your product.
This is the underlying purpose of our Street Furniture format. Street furniture panels are everywhere—they’re the ads on bus shelters that you end up spending minutes reading when you’re waiting for public transit or stuck by at a stoplight. And they’re perfect to increase ad recall. Research shows that recall falls down to 25% after seeing an ad. In other words, after someone sees an ad, they’re only 1/4th as likely to remember the contents of the ad later. To help solve this problem, Street Furniture shows your ad with more frequency to the same group of people and audiences. The more they see your ads, the more they will remember your brand and will want to engage with your products.
Our Street Furniture format thrives in the Chicago suburbs. Most people think about Chicago advertising and they want to be in River North, but that’s because they don’t understand how the city functions. We know that many people who work in the city commute from the suburbs, and if you’re able to target them close to where they live, you’ll be more effective and save yourself some money.
Street Furniture joins the OOH family with the ability to increase web traffic. Often, bus riders wait minutes for their buses to arrive. That translates to minutes of impactful engagement with your brand, and it’s one of the rare moments where the viewer actually has time to pull out their phone and search for your product/brand at that moment. Who knows—they might still be looking at your website while they ride the bus to work.
Case Study — McDonald’s
Our McDonald’s Street Furniture displays are a perfect example of directional outdoor advertising. Showcasing their location 3 blocks away, McDonald’s is able to get you thinking about their food and letting you know they have a location close by—so why not stop there for a quick burger?
Make an Impact in Dense Locations
Finally, we can put all of these strategies together in the white whale of outdoor advertising: Bus Wraps. Bus Wraps are big and impactful, and they show ads with frequency because they make the same stops at the same time every day. For those who catch the bus at a specific time, or even walk by its route, you’ll catch their attention.
One of the biggest advantages of our Bus Wraps is the neighborhood and the routes we secure for your advertising. Our buses run a targeted route through the Downtown core. If you’re trying to reach Downtown Chicago, the best way to do that is with our Bus Wraps. It’s a lot of white-collar jobs and higher-earning people, so some interested advertisers include high-end retail brands, luxury brands, and hospitals.
Case Study — Amita Health
Short and to the point, Amita Health is able to showcase their branding throughout the entire city of Chicago with some of the most affluent audiences available. With bright colors and succinct messaging, this ad uses all the strategies laid out above to maximize investment and results.
So What Now?
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