Outdoor marketing, also known as Out-of-home-marketing, is a form of advertising and reaching people outside their homes via Billboards, Transit ads, Retail ads, Street furniture, Experience ads, and outdoor signs.
Outdoor marketing can be a great way to reach a large audience and be cost-effective considering the large crowd you will be targeting. This method’s disadvantage lies in the fact that you cannot define your audience completely. You can choose an audience based on the location of your outdoor advertisement but there is no definitive way of refining the audience that will view your advertisement.
With this disadvantage, we must be clear and concise in our messaging with this type of advertisement. You must be clear in your design visual as well since people only have a few seconds to interact with the ad.
Depending on your goals, budget, and audience, you must choose the right type of outdoor ad for you. Before we do that, we must understand the advantages and disadvantages of outdoor marketing:
Advantages:
Max customizable – The best part of outdoor advertisements is that they can be easily customizable in terms of creativity. The more creative your ad is higher the chance that your ad will be remembered by your audience.
Depending on a brand’s requirement, you can choose the medium that suits you the best. It could be billboards, posters, kiosks, transit ads, and more.
High Reach – Since these ads are placed out of home, the reach of these ads is higher than digital marketing ads which are specifically targeted on the basis of user demographics. If the location of these ads is chosen correctly, we can see a high response from these OOHM ads.
These ads create brand awareness and recognition among your audience. Once, a brand is committed to audience memory, they are likely to make informed purchase decisions about your brand. In the long run, these ads bring passive leads and customers to your doorstep. On a later note, these can help customers remember your brand and move them to make repeat purchases.
Budget-Friendly – Investing in outdoor advertising is more cost-effective than digital marketing. It enables you to create customer impressions and acquire quality leads. You may be able to save money on outdoor ads placed in high-traffic areas.
Disadvantages:
Cannot track results – One primary disadvantage of OOHM is that you cannot track each and every interested audience. You may be able to track them once they have reached out to you but the rest of the sales funnel cannot be tracked. With digital marketing, each action is tracked and attributed to the right channel.
For Instance, You cannot understand if the sudden increase in sales orders is due to a new billboard installed in your vicinity or if is it because of any other digital marketing channel. You cannot track how long it takes a customer to finally convert into your convert.
Cannot measure the impact of the ad – As we discussed before, it is hard to measure if your ad is impactful enough to bring your audience to conversion. If you are not seeing any results from your ad, you may not be able to identify what is not working for your brand.
With digital marketing, you are able to measure your advertisement’s impact on each and every step of the funnel.
Used for brand building only- If you’re on a limited budget, outdoor marketing will only generate brand awareness and can be primarily used for brand building only. In the short run, it may lead to generating leads and sales but there is a high chance that the majority of your audience will not remember your brand after a short time.
Limited content possibilities- In OOHM, we will only have limited space for content to be displayed. You can only share a few words since the interaction time with each ad is very short. Either your ad can be visually heavy or content heavy but it is very hard to achieve a balance between both. Most content-heavy posts do not perform better and hence, OOHM ads are very limiting when sharing high content.
Types of OOHM
There are 6 types of out-of-home marketing. These types are
1. Billboards - Static and digital -
Upon mention of Billboard, every one of us is aware of large ads placed where drivers can see the advert clearly. They generally are placed in high-traffic areas as well as low-traffic areas if the audience and locations fit a business perfectly.
These billboards can be of two types: Static and Digital. Static billboards refer to classic banners that you will see in your city. These are non-digital banners. These can be cost-effective and attract a lot of traffic.
Digital billboards refer to LED screens that can display videos and animations. These billboards give you higher flexibility in showing different types of content. These huge billboards easily draw the attention of people and make it easier to achieve brand retention in a user’s memory.
2. Transit -
Transit ads are ideally seen on buses, trains, and cycles, and mostly wrapped around vehicles. They can also be seen near airport walkways. These adverts are placed at places visited regularly by people. These ads have a higher chance of retention since they are seen regularly by people. Many times content-heavy advertisements work well since people have time to read and interact with transit ads.
3. Banners, posters, and Kiosks-
Banners are similar to static billboards but are much smaller in size. Banners are a great idea for small businesses since they cost less than billboards. These banners can be outdoor banners set on a pole and they can be indoors as well such as sports stadiums, and airports. Kiosks are also a great way to provide informative and interactive ads to your customers.
4. Street Furniture -
These include signs at bus stops, benches at parks, bike racks, charging terminals, gas stops, and more. These spaces are easy to advertise since the rest of the spaces are competitive to advertise. Also, due to high traffic as well as a variety of people visiting these places using their facilities provides you a wide range of traffic especially if your ad is unique and eye-catching. These ads can be classic paper ads or digital ads too depending on the facilities available. The chances of these ads being successful are high because these ads are placed at eye level and they are a closer proximity to a customer.
5. Retail ads
Retail advertising is a great way to convert a customer since they are already seeing the ad with the intent of buying. This advertising form gives your brand an opportunity to stand out but this form can be costly and competitive too. This form can be easiest too if you own the space since the cost of the space and competition are automatically reduced. A few examples of retail advertisements are: Window displays, Point-of-sale displays, Packaging designs, Mall/in-store signage, and much more.
6. Experience ads:
Experience marketing involves creating a product or service involving experience for the audience. As defined in a Hubspot blog, Experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing, event marketing, on-the-ground marketing, live marketing, or participation marketing, might sound a bit like event marketing, which makes sense — experiential campaigns do tend to be event-centric. But there are also times when they have nothing to do with a specific event, as you’ll see from the examples we picked.
Consider pop-up stores or Apple’s iconic keynote as examples. These events are all examples of experience marketing. They are made to let potential customers become familiar with a product before buying it. A pop-up store for trainers or makeup allows potential customers to browse items that are often exclusively sold online.
Now, that we have determined the main types of OOHM ads, you can choose the most relevant type based on your budget, location, and marketing need.
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