Attracting consumers is becoming more difficult as the advertising market becomes saturated. Most people focus on digital ads, using new marketing strategies to leverage the online space.
A successful marketing and advertising campaign uses the best resources at hand. In Chicago, one of the best resources happens to be outdoor advertising, since there are so many opportunities to showcase your brand in Chicago’s various neighborhoods.
However, before starting your successful outdoor advertising campaign in Chicago, there are a few steps you’ll want to take in order to ensure your campaign is successful and repeatable.
Step 1: Develop a Billboard Strategy
In advertising, the best results come from detailed planning and goal setting. In order to ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing and advertising budget, make sure to set goals and plan for your billboard advertisements. This will also help ensure your objectives are met.
Know Your Goals
When you plan, you’re much more likely to get the results you planned for. When thinking about your outdoor campaign, ask yourself: what do you want to achieve with this billboard? Your goal might be driving traffic to a visit a specific web page, to call and book an appointment, to make a purchase, or simply to boost brand awareness.
This company used out-of-home to boost awareness of their brand in targeted locations:
When you establish your advertising goals before starting a campaign, you’re ensuring a sustained focus on meeting those objectives and if at any point those goals aren’t being met, you make adjustments as needed. Our account experts can help you define realistic goals and create campaigns from start to finish that meet those objectives.
Establishing Your Brand
While thinking about your billboard campaign, consider your brand and what it offers people. Your billboards will be a large part of cementing your brand messaging with people in those neighborhoods—the people who live near the billboard or commute by the outdoor ad will see it often, and your brand messaging needs to be well-planned in order to leave your audiences with the right impression.
Timing is Key
Consider creating a time-sensitive campaign. For instance, a Valentine’s Day billboard can go up in January and begin to grab market share for your brand ahead of time. Because billboards exist out in the real world, they’re directly correlated with the time of year, and in Chicago, you can utilize all of the seasons. You don’t want a billboard for hot chocolate to be up in July. But that same billboard can be a hit in December. Use the seasons to your advantage!
Billboard Location & Target Audience
Location is one of the most important aspects of a billboard campaign. In Chicago, this means defining your target audience by neighborhood. When we define your target audience, we can then find locations that we know will target those audiences throughout the city and the suburbs.
Step 2: Create Billboards That Get Views
Step 1 is planning your campaign. Step 2 is creating a billboard that is actually interesting to see and has an effective design. Details that might seem small, like color, font, and readability can make or break a billboard and its efficacy.
Billboard Design Suggestions
Billboards have been around for over a hundred years, and are still an effective advertising medium. In order for your billboard to be effective, you’ll want to ensure it’s designed to capture your audiences’ attention and stand out from other advertisements.
To help you create a billboard with top-notch design, we’ve written a blog with everything regarding outdoor advertising design. Find our guide to advertising design here.
Create an Impactful & Insightful Campaign
The best way to make sure a billboard campaign is effective is to design it in a way that ensures you’ll make an impression on your audience. Give your audience a good reason to think about your brand or products in a different way. When you make them see you under a new light, it can refresh your brand and make them excited to take part in your business.
Less Is More
A lot of billboard newbies want to take advantage of their billboard and end up cramming it full of text and imagery. That’s a mistake. Remember that your audience only has a few seconds to look at your billboard while they’re driving or walking, which means you’ll want to keep the text short and to the point. Choose images that support the messaging and easily showcase the point you’re trying to make.
Leave Them Wanting To Know More
People don’t want to be told everything. Plant the seed in your audience and give them the tools to find out more about your brand online and even make a purchase. Always include your website, social media, or phone number to give audiences a way to reach out.
Step 3: Print & Install
Once your planning and design are complete, you’ll need your printed vinyl design to display. View Chicago can assist in the entire production process, from printing your vinyl to installing it at your location of choice.
Investing in Billboards
Now that you’ve decided what you want to accomplish and you’ve created a design that is likely to meet those goals, it’s time to take action. The most exciting step in billboard advertising is actually printing out the vinyl and installing it in its location. Thanks to this real-world application, OOH is great at providing a return on investment by increasing sales, company exposure, and brand awareness.
Billboard Printing
Today’s vinyl billboard poster printing process produces billboards that look great with vibrant colors and text that instantly draws the attention of drivers and other passersby. View Chicago can design your billboard and arrange for it to be printed, using the best materials and workmanship. Over the years, we have developed strong partnerships with the best printers in the Chicagoland area. These professional printers specialize in large format, digital printing to provide you with the best in billboard printing.
Billboard Installation
At View Chicago, we make installation super simple. Our years of experience will not only ensure installation goes smoothly, but it gives us the ability to switch out your billboard if you ever want to change the creative. For instance, if you want to run a billboard for two weeks and then change it to something else, we can easily arrange that and get you the results you seek. Once your billboard is installed, your company’s message will be boldly communicated to thousands of people, 24 hours a day.
Step 4: Measure the Efficacy of Your Billboard
Once your billboard is up, the work is not done! Now it’s time to measure the efficacy of the billboard and make any adjustments that may be needed to increase results.
The Importance Of Metrics
There’s a lot of data available out there, and new methodologies to obtain data that can help analyze billboard campaigns. Although billboards have existed for over a hundred years, the technology that we use to gather and analyze data has been improving every year.
We can help you navigate through all the data regarding your billboard and use that data to improve the strategy of the billboard and even change the objectives if needed.
Many of our clients ask us: how do I know if my billboard is working? We answered that question in one of our blogs.
Data Sources & Geopath
We use a lot of sources to measure outdoor advertising. One of the ways we measure impressions is through the general amount of traffic that passed by the billboard.
Another way to obtain billboard analytics is through Geopath. Geopath is the industry leader in audience location measurement statistics. Geopath measures and analyzes how consumers engage with billboard advertising and uses data to create aggregated and anonymous audience measurements. This information can help determine who your advertising is reaching.
This type of analytical information can then help you determine whether or not your objectives are being met. If they are, we can leave the billboard up longer and increase your results. If not, we can adjust the design, the location, or any other aspect of the billboard campaign to obtain the objectives you’re looking for.
All Steps in Action: Two Case Studies
In order to get a good idea of how this really works in action, real world case studies are often a great way to see the steps and how they work with one another. We’ve worked with many brands, but often we see a big difference between national brands and smaller local businesses when it comes to each step of creating a billboard campaign.
Our McDonald’s and Deljo HVAC campaigns are two great case studies for building a campaign, so we’ll go step by step on each campaign to give you an insight as to how you might help your brand create a successful billboard campaign.
Step 1: Strategy
This can be the most important step for each brand, national and local. For a brand like McDonald’s, there’s an advertising budget allocated for each region. There are executives with a lot of pressure to increase sales, so they have to ensure the billboard campaign is successful (and that they can show it’s successful—more on that in step 4).
For a local business like Deljo HVAC, there’s a lot riding here, too. A small local business doesn’t have thousands of dollars laying around they can just throw into an advertising campaign. A billboard campaign represents an investment, and if it doesn’t work out, they’re never trying billboards again.
When it comes to strategy, national brands are often trying to increase market share. McDonald’s wants people to choose their store over one of their competitors, and it’s easier when you have a constant reminder of your brand. In this case, McDonald’s wanted to increase sales in the Chicago suburbs. So, how do you create a constant reminder of your brand in the suburbs? The answer is Street Furniture.
Deljo HVAC has a similar goal: to increase market share. But their market is a lot smaller. They fix and sell air conditioning and heating in specific Chicago neighborhoods, so their audience is a lot easier to find in some ways. Everyone in Lakeview has A/C or heating, so they’re all potential customers. A small billboard in Lakeview can show people who their neighborhood A/C company is.
Step 2: Design
Design often takes longer for big national companies that have multiple departments and need approval from different sources. A big brand like McDonald’s will often have a team of designers who create the creative themselves.
Smaller businesses like Deljo HVAC usually don’t have internal marketing departments so they outsource the creation of the billboard design, either to a company of their choosing or to us.
Step 3: Install
Nothing to do here for each company! We take care of all the installation and make sure it’s up to our high standards. Sometimes people like to take photos of the billboards right after they’re set up and share them on social media—we’ve seen a lot of success with this strategy.
Step 4: Analytics
Now it’s time to sit back and watch the billboards do their work. For a big national brand, it’s all about counting sales in stores. Did the stores surrounding the billboards have an increase in sales?
For a smaller brand like Deljo, phone calls might do the trick. Are they getting more customers after putting up the billboard?
Analytics let us know if we have the right strategy. If the results aren’t there, we can always adjust. The important part here is to know that our work doesn’t stop once the billboard goes up—we are constantly trying to find new ways to showcase your brand and make it stand out from your competition. That’s why clients from all types of businesses keep coming back to us. We get them the results they want, and it’s all thanks to our billboard planning system and the account executives who treat your brand as if it were their own.
Whether you need help creating a billboard campaign, or are looking to better understand how billboards can get you the results you seek, our account executives are always ready to help! Contact us today and get a free consultation for your billboard campaign.