After people have had the unpleasant experience of being stuck in our homes for months on end during the pandemic, 2022 is definitely a year where being outside and socializing with loved ones is widely considered a premium priority. For businesses either looking to get started and grow an audience from scratch or pre-existing companies that want to rebuild what they lost during quarantining, it is definitely an exciting time to use out of home advertising (OOH advertising).
This demand for out of home media campaigns has been revving up, which is opening up real-world advertising to both big and small companies looking to engage with customers that feel fried from online fatigue.
Let’s take a virtual walk-through of what out of home marketing can look like when you put it into action to gain the collective concentration of consumers.
Out Of Home Advertising in Action
Out of home advertising (OOH) is a type of advertising that can be found outside of the homes of consumers. OOH can be printed or digital form as a powerful tool for advertisers and marketers in the form of placements at:
- Airports
- Billboards
- Busses
- Bus shelters
- Posters
- Street furniture
- Subways
- Subway Stations
- Taxis
- Trains
Benefits of Out Of Home Advertising
Out of home advertising can be a brilliantly fun alternative to online digital advertising as a tangible experience of the senses for potential customers. Adblockers have given customers the ability to block online ads before they even get a chance to see them in the first place. But when people are standing outside, they aren’t in a position of control to remove ads from their visibility. Billboards become part of the outdoor scenery that onlookers are experiencing.
Create Impactful Advertising Campaigns
Advertisers enjoy OOH advertising because of the potential impact that it can have on consumers once they feast their eyes on the gigantic size of bold billboards that become part of the outdoor horizon. OOH campaigns are something that is easy to ignore, like ads that are displayed on the radio, in the form of TV commercials, or on websites.
With out of home advertising, ads can be launched as a part of highly visual campaigns in a real-life way that cuts through the noise that overwhelms the internet and creates somewhat of a landmark in the public places that people visit in person.
In fact, if billboards are positioned in a close enough way to consumers, they could even become backgrounds that customers purposely take pictures in front of, then those photos can get shared on social media for continual exposure beyond the initial interaction.
Make something that is creative and cool enough for people to take pictures of or in front of, and you could have the ad that really gets people talking all the way to the point of getting them to visit your business in person.
Use the Location Wisely
Out of home advertising is not only location-driven, but it is also an opportunity to reach a multitude of people that fall under different genders, age groups, economic levels, cultural backgrounds, and even from other countries if they are visiting the area that they see the ad in.
Digital marketing services may have evolved to the point of being able to provide detailed analytical insights to anyone that purchases them. But now OOH advertising is catching up. Campaign impressions can be measured, and attribution is a now realistic offering that should make these outdoor spectacles even more of a necessary tool for marketing departments.
Even though you might find it extremely tempting to purchase out of home media in locations that are cheaper, if you really want to make a bigger impact, choose a high-traffic site that will have no difficulty reaching a ton of people, maybe more than multiple smaller and cheaper locations combined.
Real-time Purchasing
The purchasing of OOH ad inventory went from being time-consuming and laborious in the past to now having the time between the ads being purchased and them becoming viewable taking place in a matter of minutes thanks to technological innovations.
Campaigns are able to be more adaptive to engage with consumers’ current surroundings and situations.
In Closing
Careful planning is crucial to make sure you get the most value from out of home advertising, as you would with any form of marketing that you are putting into action. It is important to make sure your message is clear and simple enough for a broad spectrum of people to notice, understand, and be able to follow up once they are informed.
Being that you are out of home media will only have several seconds for people to place their value judgments on it, keep the number of words to a minimum, and use visuals that are likely to grab attention and keep the people that are passing by intrigued.