How Digital Out of Home Advertising Helps Your Business Geotarget Customers

Out-of-home advertising is the original geotargeted advertising.

Advertisers buy billboard and bulletin space partially based on location. So if you are looking to sell Rolex watches, you buy out-of-home (OOH) advertising spaces in upscale neighborhoods. If your product is title loans, you target areas with low income.

But now digital OOH advertising can work together with mobile devices to get your messages seen exactly where your customers are.

Going Beyond Mobile

You may already have a mobile strategy. So why do you need to add OOH?

The ROI advertisers usually see from OOH advertising is one reason.

The other reason is because you know your marketing strategy can’t rely on one technique. Advertisers disagree on the number of contacts required, but most everyone agrees on the idea that you need multiple touches before a prospect buys. OOH adds to those touches.

OOH advertising also shares one huge advantage with mobile over other media: it’s where your customers are. People spend most of their time outside of their homes now, not watching TV or reading newspapers or magazines on their couches.

And there are a number of ways to integrate OOH advertising into your overall strategy so you can target the right customers at the right moments.

Use Your Digital Displays to Build Trust

The weather, directions, recommendations: these are things we look for daily. (And we hope people aren’t looking for them on their phones when driving or walking.)

Break up your advertising with informative content to get your customers in the habit of going to your displays for the information they need. This builds trust – your displays become an authority while also getting customers to look at your advertising.

Beacon Technology

Beacons activate when a recognized mobile device comes with their range. Once activated, they pull information on that customer’s activities from the database.

Then the company’s app (or the third-party app they’ve contracted with) sends push notifications to the person’s phone. If the area includes digital signage, that content may appear on the displays, too – giving you those additional touches without much work.

The benefit of beacon technology is that it works on the customer’s existing relationship with a brand. But it is limited to that – beacons won’t work if your customers haven’t downloaded your apps or if you don’t have an app. Or if your customers have opted out of receiving offers.

Use Your Knowledge of the Area

If you already have a display in a place you know your customers, or people like your customers, frequent, tailor your ads to what’s going on there.

Let’s say the Memorial Day celebration in that neighborhood is a huge draw and you sell designer sunglasses. Your advertising leading up to and during the event can focus on reminding people to kick off their summer with the latest styles.

Digital OOH (out of home) advertising means changing out marketing messages is just as simple for billboards and bulletins as it is for mobile ads. So when the weather turns foul, maybe several days of hard rain or a tropical storm, you can replace the current ads for your department store with ones pushing emergency supplies or rain gear.

Bring In New Customers

While mobile marketing and beacon technology tell you a lot about a single customer, OOH allows you to take all of that information and use it with a large audience – whether they’ve opted in or not, or have your app or not.

For example, through the data your mobile apps have collected, you know many of the customers in one area have purchased dining room sets from your store. Since they probably have similar tastes and budget, your next OOH ad may focus on a popular dining room set to bring in more customers from that neighborhood.

Outside of Retail

OOH advertising in stadiums and airports is a little different. You have large groups of people with different backgrounds converging on one place.

But you already know a little bit about them. You know what type of music or sports they like. You know they’re traveling and maybe even where they’re going.

And there’s plenty of opportunities for OOH advertising in these places. LED scoreboards, video walls, directories – they all run ads. Space for messages that are seen by a large, often captive, audience.

Mobile Data Streamlines Your OOH Advertising

Beacons and other mobile technologies have given us plenty of information about our customers. Now it’s up to you to use that data to inform your highly-localized OOH advertising to reach an even bigger audience.