How Local Authorities can support High Street Retail with Outdoor Advertising

A big focus for Local Councils, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and other local organisations, is supporting local Retailers to ensure a thriving High Street. A great way to do this is to give your local events or initiatives the best support possible through outdoor advertising. Bubble Outdoor’s marketplace lets you choose specific outdoor advertising locations within your BID so you can target your ideal local audience with ease. Plus, we’ve just added 2,500 exciting new digital sites for you to choose from.

Helping local businesses succeed with outdoor advertising

We all want local businesses to succeed, that’s a given. But how do we capture the necessary attention to give a much-needed push from visiting foot traffic? Bubble Outdoor works with councils, BIDs and local organisations to help them invest in public space advertising, where there’s a concentration of people.

Bubble Outdoor is unique because the power is in the hands of local business’. All of the information you need to get started is on tap, including live prices and the availability of OOH sites across the UK. That extends to the locations on your front doorstep, or in a prime position on your High Street.

OOH provides a complete solution for advertisers, whether you’re targeting residents or visitors. Outdoor advertising offers a fantastic opportunity to engage with customers and reach an extended audience in an uninterrupted format.

When it comes down to it, the best thing about outdoor advertising is the impact you get from engaging directly with your audience. Targeted locations allow for targeted messaging, which means you get to deliver relevant information and influence the audience to act. Bubble already works with businesses in this space, so they know how to make a campaign achieve what you want.

Utilising high traffic areas like a railway station as shown here, helps local authorities get the attention of residents and visitors.

Real results for BIDs with OOH

BID Leicester needed help to deliver a campaign to promote their 2018 extended Christmas Park & RIde service to local commuters and shoppers. Thanks to the way Bubble’s marketplace works, BID Leicester were able to book a high-impact, wide-reaching campaign utilising 48 sheet billboards, 6 sheet bus shelters and digital screens in shopping centres, all from the one place.

Bubble brings together all of the dates, prices and options any BID might need to target a local community, and the filters online let you narrow down your location, budget and sizes to make the whole transaction very simple. Bubble offers the flexibility to book single locations or multi-site campaigns easily.

The success of BID Leicester’s campaign was easy to see, with a targeted campaign built across multiple media owners and formats for a total of 375,000 shopping centre impressions and 3.9 million roadside impacts.

BID Leicester used Bubble's unique planning services to pick and choose the best positions for their campaign, like this 6 sheet on a bus stop.

“We’re really pleased with the extended Park & Ride campaign booked through Bubble Outdoor. The posters were an important part of raising awareness of the project with regular users of Leicester City Centre. Bubble made the process easy to pick sites from different media owners through one booking.” – Sarinda Bains, BID Leicester.

Targeted approach with hyperlocal out-of-home

There are three main benefits to using OOH for local business advertising:

Exposure – You can choose high-traffic areas in ideal locations to get the most impressions with your target audience.
Awareness – Your local knowledge helps to reinforce trust in your brand with local residents and visitors.
Timing – Whether you choose digital or traditional, you can optimise your exposure by making the most of seasons, store openings, brand launches or sales.

While some people may look at outdoor advertising as the grandfather of advertising, the trend shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. With thousands of traditional paper and paste poster sites being converted to digital screens, outdoor advertising is becoming more flexible than ever before. BIDs and their local businesses can activate tactical short term campaigns to respond quickly to events, have multiple creative changes across a campaign and deliver dynamic adverts that engage customers better than ever.

Using screens as BID Leicester did, is a great way to entice a local audience as you can add to the hyperlocal effect of OOH. Video screens in shopping centres where retail businesses want to drive foot traffic is a great way to make the most of a location-based approach to marketing.

Outdoor advertising provides outstanding brand recall, especially when compared to TV. A study from MediaCom and the University of Alberta found that OOH was able to sustain brand awareness longer than TV. For local brands, that means that strategic placement and relevant content can have you being seen and remembered.

OOH can give a huge boost to local business awareness, simply by the way you catch customers off guard while going about their day. If you need some help getting started, read this blog for a step by step guide.

Bus stop advertising is a great way to keep a local presence where there is lots of foot traffic.

Ready to see how outdoor advertising can make the businesses and services in your BID locally famous? We’ve added 2,500 brand new locations including large digital billboards, bus shelters and more. Click here to see what’s new and secure the prime positions.

If there’s something you need help with, more advice or personalised support, our team are experience working with BIDs around the country to tailor the perfect plan. Just get in touch with Bubble’s planning team.