When to use Outdoor advertising

Any regular reader of this blog will be sold on the benefits of Outdoor advertising, especially given falling costs over recent years thanks to platforms like Bubble. But effective marketing comes down to choosing the right mediums to use at any given time. This short post offers some suggestions on when it’s best to use Outdoor advertising.

When you want to bring it all together…

These days brands have to run ads across a bewildering range of mediums to keep up with the advertising Joneses. There are great benefits to this such as reaching audiences via the wide range of channels which they engage with everyday. But one drawback is you end up with a myriad of ad creatives strewn across a range of different media. If this is the case for your brand, it may be time to look to Outdoor advertising to draw all these disparate threads together.

When you want to convey brand authority…

It’s almost as if brands don’t really exist until they have an Outdoor presence. There’s something about Outdoor that signals to consumers that a brand is legitimate, authoritative.

So if you’re looking to communicate that your brand is on the map and means business, and want to place adds that convey your brand authority, that’s when to use Outdoor advertising.

When you want to make a big impact…

Outdoor is about making a big impact. It should be used sparingly, as your budget allows. Outdoor is a bigger investment than, say, promoting some Twitter ads. But as with most larger investments, they can lead to a larger ROI. It also allows you to utilise physical space and take advantage of scale to make an impact in a way that you can’t do on phone screens, laptops and even most plasma screens.

When you want to deepen brand recognition…

As a long-term investment, Outdoor is an unparalleled way to build brand recognition. In fact, research shows that investing in brand building in the long run is more effective than short-term sales activation by a ratio of 60:40.

When you want to create a splurge in sales…

Long-term campaigns are not always the right way to go, however. Sometimes the most important thing to do, especially if you have already built up brand awareness, is to go all-out to drive sales around a specific deadline, like a new store opening, drawing in the seasonal crowds, or relating to public events and holidays.

When you want to trigger point-of-purchase sales…

Over 70% of people reveal that they are influenced to make impulse purchases by out-of-home ads. Outdoor creatives are often the last media a consumer will see before making a purchase. Turn to Outdoor when you want to drastically boost your influence on consumers.

When you want to reach out to tourists…

Reaching consumers when they’re at home has lots of benefits, but if you’re going for the tourist crowd, it’s going to have practically zero effect. Outdoor advertising lets you engage with tourists when they are exploring local landmarks. It allows you to tap in to the impulse buys they are exceedingly likely to make when shopping for gifts for loved ones or simply treating themselves on their hols. In fact we’ve written a guide on how to advertise to tourists that you may want to check out.

When to use outdoor advertising?

To cut a long story short, Outdoor is an incredibly dynamic arena with lots of benefits to marketers. It’s up to you to think about your marketing needs and how they are best met, including when to use outdoor advertising. Browse the many posts and ad reviews on this blog and it will help you get a picture of what Outdoor advertising can do for you, and when it makes the most sense to use it.