How can out-of-home media improve digital marketing strategies?

Digital and out-of-home media (OOH) may seem like an odd pair when talking about ways to improve digital marketing. If you’re a digital marketer, you might even be thinking, “What’s an OOH media company going to say that will improve my digital media performance?”

We’re glad you asked!

OOH media can help you, digital marketer, in many ways:

• Improve clicks and conversions
• Build brand credibility in the real world
• Drive awareness and preference
• Enhance the online story with creative impact
• Fuel offline buying closest to the point of sale to close the loop on digital spend
• Motivate user-generated content
• Encourage online engagement
• Multiplies the effect of digital messages by reinforcing them over and over

So let’s tear down those siloes. Digital there. Traditional here. Let’s be honest; that’s bullshit! Great marketing is achieved when we can come together. When we collaborate on the strategic level, amazing things happen. Both channels are reinforced and the efficient output is just better.

Online. Offline. Let’s both get on the line.

If you’re wondering how you can improve digital marketing performance, OOH is an effective tool.

CAMPAIGN GOALS

We spend over 70% of our waking hours away from home. OOH reaches 90% of U.S. residents age 16+. OOH should be included to any media campaign, because:

• People trust physical OOH messages; OOH is one of the top ranked media for credibility following print.
• Our creative is huge – it gives you ample real estate to make a bold statement and grab attention.
• We don’t have to contend with skip buttons, ad blockers, bots or fraud – sound familiar? We can surround and immerse people in real life.
• With massive reach, we can help scale your campaigns to build awareness, familiarity and even custom audiences.
• Location, location, location. OOH can drive contextual relevance to your online messaging – based on proximity.
• When you add OOH to the mix, your overall ROI improves.

Goal: Brand Awareness
Are you weary of opening emails from unknown senders? We humans have learned to be suspecting of new names popping up on our devices.

One of the benefits of out-of-home media is that it is well perceived and trusted. So whether it’s a new brand or a new product/service offering, OOH is a safe place to introduce people to what you’ve created.

With channel proliferation and fragmented media, advertisers are turning to OOH to reach a wider audience. OOH also reaches specific audiences in a hyper-targeted manner, aiming the message at segments in places where the message most resonates. Its large creative dominance cuts through the clutter in a natural way – in someone’s real world environment.

Dual-channel targeting increases the frequency of the message. It’s important to use cohesive creative across both channels to ensure optimal recall.

During its integrated campaign, Drinkfinity saw a surge of branded searches and decreased the cost per qualified visit. Their OOH + mobile case study shows how an integrated campaign can build brand among a key audience in a cost-effective way.

Goal: Drive In-Store Visits
Cuebiq’s annual footfall attribution study shows that out-of-home media outperformed both mobile only and mobile and web by far. Our advertisers have been able to vouch for this truth for years. OOH media near the retail location absolutely influences brick-and-mortar visits.

Cuebiq’s report shares how a fitness brand generated a visit lift of 303.24% when using OOH alone. This is greater than the results of digital marketing alone, which only generated 69.76% lift. However, when they paired the OOH campaign with the mobile campaign, the results grew massively. The combination media mix demonstrated a visit lift of over 554%. What’s more, 42% of those who visited the store did so within one day of being exposed to the advertising showing an immediate response.

We’ve found over and over and over and over again that when mobile and OOH work together, the campaign achieves greater results than the simple sum of both parts.

Goal: Online Engagement
Nielsen’s 2019 OOH Advertising Study reports that 66% of smartphone users took action after seeing an OOH ad. This includes online search and social activity. An OOH ad can generate more online engagement than a digital ad!

Our advertisers have found time and time again that when they plan their mobile display ads in conjunction with the OOH campaign, their clicks skyrocket. Mobile billboards literally drive higher click-through-rates.

• Sam’s Club: 1.07% CTR
• Ulta Beauty: 0.84% CTR
• Comcast Xfinity: 1.32% CTR
• DB Schenker: 0.96% CTR

The correlation between the OOH audience and the digital audience drives better clicks. In fact, Ocean Outdoor and NeuroInsights found that 48% of us are more likely to click a mobile ad after seeing the same OOH ad. One builds real-world familiarity, and the other provides a point of conversion to learn more or take action.

You may also want to encourage direct mobile interaction with the OOH creative. Spotify used a mobile tag on their creative to deliver people attending Pride events in Miami a specially curated playlist. You could use a Snap Lens, QR code, augmented reality trigger graphic or other point-and-click image that will unlock digital content for the OOH viewers.

OOH campaigns make great social media content, too. Celine earned 161K views of an Instagram post featuring a mobile billboard. That doesn’t count all of the bystanders who were also snapping and posting photos and videos of the 6 mobile billboards that dominated NY Fashion Week and the high fashion districts of Manhattan. Great OOH creative can spur user-generated content and communication.

In short, the large OOH ad sends people to their small screens.

LOCATION DATA + OOH
83% of marketers say location-based marketing achieves higher responses.

With location marketing comes location data. Location helps us understand more fully a customer’s needs or interests, how the flow about their days and what stores they actually go to versus what their digital behavior may otherwise suggest.

Location is an effective trigger when personalizing content or delivering ads to the right person at the right time – when they’re nearby the point of sale. Location is a mighty powerful way to strike when the iron is hot. It’s a last-touch marketing influence that has equally mighty powerful results.

So let’s think about location. We’re talking local marketing, but what’s a local audience? A market? A DMA? A zip code? City limits?

When we in OOH media talk about proximity audiences, we get nitty gritty and rather granular. It’s this particular polygonal-shaped store. Or this particular sporting event. It’s the exact route where we send our mobile billboards.

Advancements in technology have allowed us to improve digital marketing by tightening up our geofence, which allows us to hone in on the precise OOH audience seeing our ads. Our optimization strategy is to bid aggressively but bid small at these pre-defined locations and to the devices closest to the OOH message.

By collecting first-party data once we serve an impression, we’re able to curate an OOH audience for your digital campaigns. This allows advertisers to retarget the same people who saw the OOH message with digital ads. Of course, every mobile display campaign can be personalized based on various segmentation, daypart or ad sequence that makes the most sense.

We can also gather audience insights. From this data, you can start to profile the OOH audience by location. You’ll be able to understand the OOH audience based on age, gender and affinity. You’ll know which OOH placements are engaging your target demo the best, so you can optimize your media spend in those locations.

But beware! Affinities and location data don’t always match up. Someone could be doing a lot of dream-searching on Nordstrom but actually shopping at TJ Maxx. Location data helps to identify real-world behaviors.

We can also report on verified walk-ins. This is a count of devices who were seen near the OOH message, served a mobile display ad and then later entered a store.

OOH has notoriously been hard to track in attribution reports. Today, we can measure the OOH impact on any campaign. When you leverage OOH + mobile advertising at scale across multiple markets, you’re going to see fantastic results and collect a lot of data that can be turned into insights.

At the end of the campaign, the digital marketing team receives a lot of information:

• Device IDs that were served impressions at each point of interest inside and outside
• Audience exposed to the OOH message for retargeting purposes
• First-party audiences based on event attendees or location visitors
• Density and performance of each location or location category, such as entertainment venues v. retail stores

Ready to improve digital marketing efforts with OOH? We’re ready to talk! Contact us today!