Brand lift is a much-needed phenomenon for most brands, especially if they partake in any marketing campaigns, let alone advertising. That’s because not only does it contribute to sales, but to other interactions that help grow your brand.
Brand lift can be achieved through a number of advertising and marketing efforts. Implementing OOH advertising is a surefire way to foster band lift among your target audience. But how do you do so and how do you know billboards are effective for this purpose?
In this article, we cover what is brand lift, its importance, how to measure it, how OOH helps you achieve it and more.
What is brand lift
What is Brand Lift?
Brand lift is the outcome of a marketing campaign. It refers to the measurable rise in the perceptions, engagements and interactions that customers have with a brand after seeing (or hearing from) its marketing campaign. In plain terms, this concept shows that a marketing campaign has had an effect on customers, typically in favor of the brand.
The immediate effect of brand lift is an uptick in consumer interactions with the company and increased brand awareness and consideration. Brand lift is part of the customer journey and is used to push potential and current customers further down the sales funnel, with the ultimate goal being a lift in sales and revenue.
In the context of Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising, brand lift refers to the impact that an advertising campaign has on brand perception when it is displayed outdoors. This includes ads being featured on digital billboards, bus shelters, train stations and others.
In short, brand lift is a term used to refer to an increase in user interaction with a brand after an advertising campaign.
You can quantify the brand lift of your advertising campaign via multiple metrics, including brand awareness, brand perception and intent to purchase.
Why is brand lift important
Brand lift is critical in advertising, as it can improve the overall perceptions of your brand. But it does so much more. Here are a few key reasons why this concept is significant for your brand.
Engagement:
The most salient and direct effect of brand lift is customer engagement with your brand. That’s because this lift doesn’t solely refer to a shift in positive perceptions of your company, but to increased interactions with your brand as well. This builds your customers’ familiarity with your brand and even contributes to trust (more on this below). And don’t forget, the more engagements you have, the more your customers become closer to being qualified buyers. See our article on QI or qualified impression, which entails a readiness to purchase from you.
Sales potential:
While brand lift doesn’t lead to an immediate sale, it demonstrates a positive shift in user engagement with your brand. When you continuously engage your customers through numerous advertising and marketing programs, you’ll be able to guide them into making a purchase.
Improve brand strategy:
Calculating your brand lift provides insights that show what’s working well in your advertising campaigns, along with what can be improved upon. You can use these insights to then make well–informed adjustments to your marketing strategy. Thus, you’ll be going forward in the know of what keeps your customers interested in and engaged with your brand.
Brand trust:
Trust is imperative for gaining customers, as well as for retaining them. Aside from delivering on your promises and providing great customer service, you can gain trust through brand lift. That’s because the more your customers are engaging with your brand, the more they’re familiarizing themselves with it. Couple this with the fact that they wouldn’t continue interacting with your brand if they didn’t trust it, and you’ll see that this lift contributes to brand trust, a key component of retaining customers.
Maintain your advertising budget:
Brand lift metrics help you reveal the marketing and advertising channels that reap the most traffic, along with pinpointing the interests and demographics of your customers. In turn, you can optimize your advertising budget to concentrate on the most effective marketing channels and form relevant content for your customers. This is particularly useful to bootstrapped companies.
Make your brand more memorable:
Branding is an immense portion of the success of your business, as it surpasses anything it can sell or offer. Brand lift is a brand-building occurrence, so it adds value to your brand and makes it more memorable. As a business, your best bet at longevity is remaining top of mind within your customers’ minds. To do so, you’ll need to establish a strong brand that can’t be easily missed or forgotten.
How to measure brand lift
Brand lift is often measured through what’s known as a brand lift study. Such a study measures how effective a particular marketing or advertising campaign is in improving a business’s customer perception.
Since brand lift can refer to a number of increased interactions and perceptions of your brand, it is measured using a variety of metrics and approaches.
Regardless of which metric you study, a brand lift study involves comparing two sample groups through questioning: one that has seen your ad and one that hasn’t. By comparing these two groups’ reactions to your ad, you can evaluate your ad’s effect on the brand metrics, thereby determining your brand lift as a whole.
The following shows the most prominent brand lift metrics:
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- Brand awareness: The extent to which customers are familiar with a brand and its products.
- Ad recall: How well your customers remember a certain advertisement.
- Brand recall: How likely customers are to remember your brand and any other concept associated with your company through aided or unaided prompts.
- Brand consideration: How likely buyers will be to consider a particular brand when purchasing a product.
- Brand favorability: The extent to which customers view a brand positively.
- Intent to buy: The likelihood of customers buying from a specific brand.
- Keyword searches: Your positioning in the SERP (search engine results page) indicates whether your customers are finding you online through popular search terms associated with your business.
- Web traffic: An increase in web traffic can be the result of customers who’ve seen your ad.
- Conversions: While not an immediate result and metric, those who buy from you are also the results of brand lift.
- Brand trust: Trust exists in the form of credibility and worthiness associated with your brand. You can test customers on trust following a brand lift campaign.
It’s entirely up to you and your team to choose which brand lift metrics to measure, as there is no single approach. It will largely depend on the parameters of your brand lift campaign and the needs of your brand lift study. To measure your brand lift and conduct a brand lift study, you can employ a wide variety of testing techniques.
These include:
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- Surveys
- Market research firms
- Email questionnaires
- Brand buzz and mentions tools
- Social media comments and messages
How to generate brand lift with OOH advertising
Small and large brands alike can increase their brand lift through OOH, or out-of-home advertising methods. OOH advertising grabs the attention of customers when they’re out and about in the real world, which is crucial, as no one spends all their days entirely fixed on a digital device.
DOOH, or digital out-of-home advertising is especially potent for generating brand lift, as it brings the glossy, bright nature of the digital space outdoors.
To generate brand lift with OOH advertising, follow these steps:
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- Leverage a DOOH platform. Use a SaaS platform, as it enables you to control everything from a remote setting.
- Design ads that are sure to resonate with your target audience.
- Touch upon their key pain points, needs and desires.
- Use beautiful and compelling imagery in your ad.
- Set an advertising budget to keep track of your ad spend and remain within budget.
- Choose your DOOH locations. The platform you use should allow you to do so.
- Upload your ad design on your DOOH platform.
- Make your ad go live and iterate daily, weekly, monthly or through whichever frequency you need.
- Assess your ad analytics to see how your ad is faring and keep track of your spending.
- Run a brand lift study to measure your lift.
Why DOOH advertising is great for generating brand lift
As we briefly explained in the previous section on how to use DOOH for brand lift via a step-by-step process, let’s learn why this form of advertising is ideal for producing brand lift. In the context of DOOH, we are primarily referring to digital billboards.
These powerful tools are brand lift magnets. They demand attention from yards away. Consider drivers and even passers-by on a busy highway or road. A flashy digital billboard demands attention more than any other element your customers see outdoors.
Consider this, in order to generate lift, your ads need to be seen and given enough attention in the first place. Fortunately, digital billboards excel in commanding attention, as 71% of customers reveal that digital billboards are very effective at attracting their attention. Little to no other advertising methods attract such high levels of attention.
Rotating digital billboards are great, as they keep customers tuned into your ad, along with others, so they’re never bored and suffer ad fatigue, which creates negative associations with your brand. Rotating digital billboard ads are also proven to be the best tools for brand recall.
Digital billboards enable your brand to reach a large amount of people in a short time. This quickens your customer journey and attracts more potential customers to it. Thus, it creates a quicker path to interactions with your brand, which is a major aspect of brand lift.
When your ad viewers enjoy or view your ad messaging positively, they are more likely to discuss your brand with their friends and loved ones. Thus, they spread positive messages about your brand, which is another crucial facet of brand lift.
Digital billboards are not just the foremost DOOH advertising channel; they are also the most powerful for brand engagements, a fundamental aspect of brand lift, as this lift refers to a rise in engagements. In fact, a massive 78% of customers have recently engaged with them in some way.
Moreover, digital billboards are not just seen once. Since many of the people who drive past them are the same people, i.e., those who take the same route to work, school, those who run errands, et al., so digital billboards are seen repeatedly. This means they constantly provide a means of brand lift for your business.
The lift they provide is monumental, as digital billboards help drive impressions, thus driving potential customers into becoming qualified buyers. These qualified impressions are the people who have seen your ads at least 6 times or more, as it is at this impression count that they are nurtured enough to make a buying decision and choose your brand over others.
DOOH is an unimpeachable method for driving up your brand lift. You just need to use the right DOOH platform to reach your brand lift goals.
Improving your brand lift with Blip Billboards
Blip Billboards is your conduit to brand lift. Our DOOH platform partners with billboard owners across the country, in 2,000+ locations in high-traffic areas. Our platform makes it easy to reach your target audience wherever they are, whether they’re on the go on a highway, or in a commercial part of a city.
With Blip, you can target your ad viewers by location, set your own ad schedules, set your desired ad budget and bet on blips (8-15 second ad slots). It’s also super easy to upload your ad designs, or build an ad creative using our templates.
Blip makes it easy to form, manage and run your digital billboard campaigns. What’s best is you can innovate at your own pace, and change your ads whenever you please. Reach your audience today and generate the brand lift your business deserves.
