Why Brands Turn To Out-of-Home Advertising

Today, the average person spends 70 percent of their waking hours outside the home. And yet, effectively reaching and influencing consumers on the go is increasingly challenging for brands. Not only has mobile and digital media become more saturated, the way people consume media is constantly changing – requiring brands to take a more targeted and hyper-local approach.

How To Leverage Data For Smarter Audience Targeting

As digital and mobile have evolved, so has out-of-home (OOH) media. With better integration of mobile and digital, smarter audience planning, and data-led buying and attribution, OOH now provides stronger ROI than virtually any other media investment brands can make.

In line with this, we continue to see media spend by brands increase as one of the strongest opportunities to reach consumers and shoppers in local markets. As more marketers integrate OOH into their marketing mix, it is vital that brands and media planners understand that building a successful OOH campaign requires both art and science.

With that context, here are 5 key building blocks to developing a smarter OOH plan:

1. Define KPIs with Quantifiable Goals

The first step in preparing an OOH media plan is to have an understanding of the brand’s marketing, advertising, and media goals. In addition to specific objectives, you want to define clear, measurable goals, as well as ask the right questions about your campaign. This step will provide a roadmap for your team to follow as you set KPIs to evaluate success tied to specific business outcomes, such as driving store traffic, website visits or another call to action with consumers while mobile.

2. Establish Data Points for Your Target Audience & Activation Markets

Knowing your target audience starts with looking at the customer journey and what influences their decisions along the path to purchase. Most brand strategists have already done segmentation and micro-segmentation to understand their audience, but make sure to continue to research. Where do they live, work, and shop? What does a day in the life of your target customer look like as they commute – whether to work, school, or other daily activities? How do they get there – a car, a rideshare service, by transit or on foot?

At Billups, not only do we have award-winning creative to help bring ideas to life, we also have location experts who know their cities and neighborhoods in and out. For example, the team here in Chicago can pinpoint where target customers live in the Windy City as well as reveal trip data to help understand their daily movements throughout the market. By combining our market expertise with the company’s outdoor advertising DSP, our clients have been able to effectively reach newer targets, such as younger, more affluent target groups, whose lifestyle may make it harder to reach through digital or social advertising alone.

3. Communication and Collaboration Still Reign

The biggest successes come from when all teams and departments are working together to bring a campaign’s elements to life. From creative to sales, to buyers and planners, marketing, PR, and social media – it truly takes a village and when all teams are fully integrated from the start and continuously collaborate throughout a campaign, they can tell a truly robust story from all avenues, driving maximum impact.

4. Optimize Your OOH Campaign, Like Every Other Channel

Executing your campaign doesn’t stop at launch. Technology allows media planners to monitor, change and optimize plans as they run. At Billups, for example, our data science team can leverage time-stamped GPS coordinates from anonymized mobile data to literally connect the dots of consumers habits during a campaign to produce a continuous trip across a map. This arms our media planners to work with the ebb and flow of eyeballs on a particular campaign and help optimize it to generate the best results. By leveraging location-based audience data, our team was able to continuously adjust their billboards to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right audience, making a big impact and driving impressive results.

5. Evaluate Campaign Success Including Measurement & Attribution for Real-World Outcomes
In the past, OOH media was more difficult to target and measure and companies lacked the precision and speed for brands to accurately measure and attribute their campaigns. But now, with the availability of mobile, geo-location data and data science, media planners can rely on trustworthy data and results from companies like ours to attribute their efforts and optimize them for future campaigns.

Brands may take a chance on an OOH campaign because its bold and exciting creative and smart placement, but what retains them is accurate measurement and results, the perfect marriage of art and science. Reach out today to learn more!