What are some of the biggest advantages of outdoor advertising in the modern age? Continue reading to learn more!
Digital Marketing has taken the world by storm, and while its benefits and power are undeniable, a lot of companies seem to have forgotten about the benefits that outdoor advertising still holds. This is especially true in particular areas, squares and streets where thousands of people pass daily.
For this reason, in this article we will discuss the advantages of outdoor advertising for lead generation, customer acquisition, and brand awareness, among others.
So, without further ado, let’s jump right into it:
Advantages of outdoor advertising. Example: Times Square advertising. Image source: maggenta.com
What is outdoor advertising?
Before we discuss the incredible advantages of outdoor advertising, let’s first see exactly what this means. So, what is outdoor advertising?
Outdoor advertising refers to all types of advertising that happen offline, outside of people’s homes, such as billboards, wallscapes, posters and guerrilla marketing. Also known as traditional advertising or outdoor media, it is a term that encompasses ads that don’t happen online (digital marketing) or with the help of electronic devices (TV).
Put simply, outdoor advertising is advertising that is shown…outdoors. It’s the billboards that we see while we are walking, running errands, meeting friends, having lunch, or doing any other outdoor activity. And now, let’s discuss the advantages of outdoor advertising.
10 Awesome advantages of outdoor advertising
1. It’s affordable
You may not believe this, but now that millions of companies are moving their advertising efforts online and focusing on digital marketing instead of traditional marketing, outdoor advertising is becoming more and more affordable.
After all, there is less demand than what it used to be 10 or even 20 years ago. Nowadays, you can find billboards in key places and areas for a few hundred bucks per month, the same budget that you would spend on Google Ads.
For example, you can advertise in Las Vegas for as little as $800 per month.
You may be thinking: sure, but advertising in places like Times Square is still very expensive. That’s not necessarily the case. In fact, you can even advertise in Times Square for as little as $500 per campaign.
For this budget, you can get an entry level board overlooking the Broadway Plaza and an estimated 1,500,000 impressions per day. You can click here to get started today.
2. It’s easy
As opposed to digital marketing, where you either need to master the art of running ads or hire a full-time agency to do that for you, outdoor advertising is a lot more straightforward.
All you need to do is decide where you want to place your billboard, contact the media company that’s responsible for this placement (or they can assess you on the best placements for your target audience), decide the budget and prepare the creative.
In some cases, the media agency can even prepare the creatives for you. Depending on the placement and the company, getting to see your advertisement published may take some time (it can be instant in digital marketing), but it’s typically no longer than a few days.
However, with platforms like Five Tier, you can speed up the process even more. In fact, you can create an account and set up the ads yourself, without the mediation of a third-party company, set your budget and placements, and wait to see your ad on the day for which you’ve decided to run your campaign.
3. It helps to increase ad frequency
As we mentioned previously, among the biggest advantages of outdoor advertising is that it helps you get more visibility for your company. In fact, it can be especially powerful for being highly successful with ad frequency.
Ad frequency is the amount of times in which an individual customer is exposed to an ad for the duration of a marketing campaign. Increasing the frequency of exposure increases the likelihood for the customer to purchase the product or engage with the brand.
In most cases, people won’t purchase from you just because they saw your ad once. Whether we are talking about offline or online marketing, people need to have continuous exposure or multiple touchpoints before they decide to purchase.
The ideal frequency will depend on the channel. However, according to experts, the rule of thumb is that a person needs to be impacted by the company at least 7 times before they decide to take action on buying the product or service.
The Marketing rule of 7. Image source: twitter.com
So, let’s go back to the advantages of outdoor advertising. Let’s imagine that you have purchased a billboard to promote your new cookies right next to a supermarket where people can purchase them.
Considering that most people shop at the same couple of supermarkets, and they can visit them various times per week, you can expect your billboard to have a great ad frequency of impacting the same person multiple times.
This is harder to achieve with digital ads where you are impacting much bigger audiences, so it can be difficult to impact the same person more than once in a shorter time period.
4. It boosts brand awareness
One of the most awesome advantages of outdoor advertising is boosting brand awareness, and this is tightly related to the ad frequency as well.
Purchasing billboards and other types of outdoor ads can give you exposure to hundreds or even thousands of people daily, which will significantly increase the awareness of your brand among people. Some cities and areas can be especially impactful – let’s take a look:
- Times Square – more than 50 million people pass through it per year;
- Piccadilly Circus – approximately 100 million people visit Piccadilly Circus yearly;
- Las Vegas – the city’s downtown is visited by more than 40 million people per year;
With these numbers in mind, it is safe to say that you can expect to build a lot of brand awareness when advertising in these places. And not only them, of course; there are plenty of affordable options with high-traffic where you can get amazing results as well.
More than 100 million pass through London’s Piccadilly Circus every year. Advantages of outdoor advertising.
5. It helps you stand out
It may come as a surprise, but one of the biggest benefits of outdoor advertising is that it can actually help your brand stand out and differentiate itself. Considering that everyone is online – both companies and potential customers – we have learned to successfully ignore online ads.
In fact, according to a study conducted by Goo Technologies, customers ignore online ads the most out of all channels:
- Online – 82%
- Television – 37%
- Radio – 36%
- Newspaper – 35%
Because so many companies are running Display ads on the Internet at the same time, and they are so cheap in comparison with other channels and ad formats, customers have successfully learned how to ignore them due to ad fatigue and overall ad saturation.
However, because there isn’t that much ad saturation and constant change of banners and companies when it comes to digital billboards, they are able to draw the attention a lot better.
It’s also important to keep in mind that a lot less companies are competing for traditional advertising than they are competing for digital advertising.
6. It helps you reach your target audience in key places
One of the biggest advantages of outdoor advertising is that it allows you to reach your target audience in key places.
Yes, it’s true that you don’t have the same flexibility or targeting criteria as in digital marketing, where you can easily set segmentation filters to deliver your ads only to very specific audiences.
However, smart ad placement can really do wonders for your outdoor advertising.
Think about the example with the supermarket where we gave earlier; in this case, you reach your audience right when they are about the enter the supermarket, meaning that they can purchase the product right after seeing their ad.
These smart advertising placements can be extremely effective. In another example, imagine that you are a bank advertising a new financial product or credit card – you can place a billboard right before people enter the bank, which will increase their chances of getting interested in the product.
Or you can place a billboard for a credit card that helps you earn miles for flying right in front of a travel agency.
7. It can be combined with digital advertising
Just as there are many advantages of outdoor advertising, there are also many advantages of digital marketing and advertising as well. For this reason, you can expect to get a lot of benefits and exposure when combining both strategies.
This way, you can ensure that you are not only impacting people when they are browsing the internet or even watching TV, but you can continue impacting them when they go outside, which will increase both ad frequency and brand awareness. And, at the end, they will be more likely to purchase.
For this reason, don’t tempted to select one over the other. Both have benefits, and you can certainly enjoy the best of both worlds when performing an all-in-one strategies.
And that was all from me for today! I hope you enjoyed my article on the advantages of outdoor advertising, and I hope to see you in the next one! In the meantime, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to let me know in the comments below.
