It’s no secret that businesses should increase brand awareness, regardless of how long they’ve been in operation. As such, even long-running businesses with strong reputations should never cease growing their brand awareness.
Luckily there’s outdoor advertising, which serves as a critical component of brand marketing campaigns. All businesses, including franchises, should consider using digital billboards, as they are one of the most effective forms of OOH (out-of-home) advertising.
This blog post explores how OOH advertising, particularly digital billboards, can increase your brand awareness on both a local and national level.
The Importance of Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is crucial for the success of all businesses. It keeps your brand fixed within the minds of your customers, shapes their perception and influences their buying decisions and preferences.
Although consumer preferences change periodically, some things remain consistent, such as consumers’ being prone to buy from brands they already know. In fact, a study found that consumers are 2.5 times more likely to choose a brand they recognize over a lesser-known competitor.
Brand awareness is especially important in a saturated marketplace with seemingly endless competitors, as it helps differentiate your brand from others. While many associate brand awareness with recognition, it goes beyond this concept alone, as it also cultivates familiarity and trust among your consumers.
It is then no wonder that 89% of marketers say that brand awareness is their top goal. Despite this, many businesses still struggle to build their brand awareness and some are at a loss of ideas on which means to use and which campaigns to run.
Digital OOH advertising is the key ingredient to this solution.
How Digital Billboards Increase Brand Awareness Locally and Nationally
There are many channels that help increase your brand awareness through advertising. A few examples include search engine results ads, social media ads, email marketing campaigns, and even traditional mail marketing.
OOH ads, particularly digital billboards are an especially powerful way to advertise and boost your brand awareness on both a local and national level. They offer several benefits for increasing national and local brand awareness that other forms of advertising don’t.
The following details why outdoor advertising is a proven way to uplift brand awareness:
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- Visibility: Digital billboards attract attention with vibrant, high-resolution displays, increasing visibility for your brand among both local commuters and travelers who pass through from faraway cities, states and regions.
- Flexibility: You can display multiple ads in rotation, which in turn lets you promote different products, services, or messages to diverse audiences, both within your city and throughout the country. (This will depend on the digital billboard service you use).
- Geotargeting: A strong OOH digital platform allows you to program your digital billboard to be displayed throughout the country. As such, you can target your ad to locals and even potential customers in different regions.
- Tailored Messaging based on location: Digital ads on billboards allow you to tailor your message as you see fit. This provides a great opportunity to personalize your ads to fit their locations. This enables you to connect with those locations’ local audiences better.
- Data Insights: Digital billboard SaaS companies provide data on impressions, engagement and other metrics, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize your strategies for greater impact nationwide and within specific local markets.
- Repeated exposure: Repeatedly exposing consumers to your brand message renders your target market to recognize and recall your brand when they consider making purchases or are in the process of doing so.
- Affordability: The best digital ads company will offer affordability in that your business doesn’t need to spend thousands of dollars within just one month for some ad slots. Some providers allow you to pay per blip.
- Power of recall: Out-of-home media has the highest percentage of consumer recall at 86% compared to other platforms such as radio and TV. Coupled with the bright and dynamic nature of digital billboards and your brand is sure to not just capture attention but to maintain recall.
- Testing and Optimization: With the ability to run campaigns for short 8-15 durations (these slots are called blips) and measure performance metrics such as impressions, advertisers can test different messages and creative elements to optimize their campaigns over time.
- Full control: A strong digital billboards platform will grant you total control over your ad campaign. That means no more bureaucratic red tape, no additional phone calls and reaching out to third-party advertising agencies.
How to Increase Brand Awareness Nationally and Locally through Digital Ads
Achieving both national and local brand awareness requires a strategic approach that integrates both broad-reaching national campaigns and targeted local advertising projects. Here’s a how to accomplish this dual goal with several best practices:
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- Develop a Comprehensive Strategy:
- Identify your target audience both nationally and locally.
- This should involve running primary and secondary research on your customers across regions.
- Determine the key messages and brand identity you want to convey.
- Allocate resources for both national and local campaigns within your budget.
- Create Compelling Content:
- Produce visually appealing and engaging ads that resonate with your target audiences.
- Craft messages that can be customized for both national and local contexts.
- Utilize clear calls to action that encourage interaction or drive traffic to specific locations.
- Leverage Targeting Capabilities:
- Use the capabilities of digital billboards to target specific demographics and geographic areas.
- Use geo-targeting to deliver personalized messages to local audiences based on their location.
- Implement dayparting to display different content during peak hours or specific times of day.
- Strategically Choose Locations:
- Select high-traffic areas for national campaigns to maximize exposure.
- Identify local communities or neighborhoods where your target audience is concentrated for your local campaigns.
- Integrate with Digital Marketing Channels:
- Combine digital billboard campaigns with online advertising efforts such as social media, search engine marketing and email marketing.
- Use consistent branding and messaging across all channels to reinforce brand recognition.
- Track and analyze data from both digital billboards and online platforms to measure effectiveness and optimize campaigns.
- Monitor and Adjust Campaigns as Needed:
- Regularly Monitor the performance of your digital billboards both nationally and locally.
- Analyze metrics such as impressions, engagement, and conversion rates to gauge effectiveness.
- Adjust your strategy as needed based on data insights and feedback from your target audience.
- Build Brand Consistency and Trust:
- Continue maintaining consistency in branding, messaging and customer experience across all advertising touchpoints.
- Build trust with your audience by delivering on promises made in your ads and providing quality products or services.
- Develop a Comprehensive Strategy:
By following these steps, you can effectively leverage digital billboards to achieve both national brand awareness and local success simultaneously. It is also key to adapt your approach based on the unique characteristics of your target audience and market conditions as these may differ radically from business to business.
Blip Billboards offers an exceptional solution for your digital billboard needs, as it connects you with billboards all across the country. You can thus confidently increase your brand awareness for both local and national success. Our digital billboards provide all the flexibility of online ads: they’re easy to set up and cost you nothing extra to swap out ad content as often as you want, to match campaigns, current events, and even the local time and temperature in different regions.
Blip can help you set up a digital billboard campaign on over 2,000 digital billboards across the country. You just sign in to our platform, choose the locations you want, optimize for time of day, upload creative, and you’re all set. We also help you design your ad should you need help with it.
