Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is one of the most successful ways to reach the masses. With people spending most of their time outside of their home, using outdoor advertising is a great way to find new customers, build your brand, and take your business to the next level.
What people running small businesses might worry about is how much it costs. Is it worth paying for OOH media? It might also be difficult to decide what kind of OOH media you want to use for your advertising campaign. Physical and digital billboards can make billions of impressions throughout a four week advertising campaign.
An impression is when a user simply sees an advertisement. Because billboards are placed in highly visible areas that typically have heavy traffic, it’s not surprising that there are this many impressions with billboards.
It can be difficult to decide whether or not to use a physical billboard or a digital billboard.
You might consider things such as billboard prices, billboard placement, and your goals for brand awareness. Depending on what your goals are, you can decide which billboard is best for your business.
Billboard Pricing
Of course billboard prices are a major thing to consider when running an advertising campaign. Pricing can determine what kind of ads you can run, how many you can run, and how long you can run them for. Physical billboard prices are often less than digital billboard prices. For a four week campaign, you might be paying on average $800 to $900 to place your ad on a physical billboard.
Digital billboard prices run a little higher than that. You might be paying on average around $2,000 to $2,200 for a four week advertising campaign. Although the difference may seem significant, there are other things to consider when you are thinking about billboard prices for your business.
Billboard Placement
There’s a lot more strategy behind billboard placement than you might think. Depending on what your brand is, you might decide that you want to advertise in large metropolitan areas or smaller rural areas. With physical billboards, they are often found in both large cities as well as more rural areas. This makes advertising to targeted areas a little easier than using digital billboards.
You can pick and choose where you want to run ads based on the different populations you are trying to reach. Although digital billboards are gaining more popularity in smaller cities, they are more common in large cities where there is a dense population and heavy traffic.
This is a great way to create brand awareness to a large number of people at one time. Digital billboards may also be located on the side of buildings, in the the heart of cities, or where there are large attractions for tourists, concerts, and sporting events. Depending on where you want to run your advertising campaign, you may choose physical or digital billboards.
Billboard Impressions
There are some more differences when you compare physical billboards and digital billboards. Physical billboards simply display a print ad that is static. You create an ad and place it on a billboard, and that ad does not change for however long you run your campaign. With a digital billboard, you have a little more room for different styles of advertising.
Your ad on a digital billboard may have different colors of flashing lights and motion. This can be attention-grabbing for the people simply walking down the street. The downside to a digital billboard is that your ad often rotates with other ads, making your ad visible for only a few seconds. This makes the impressions a lot smaller than an ad placed on a physical billboard.
The trade off for less impressions is that your digital ad may be more exciting and have a higher engagement rate than a printed ad on a physical billboard. You can also edit digital ads much easier than an ad that has already been printed and placed on a physical billboard. When advertising, you have to think about the goal you are trying to achieve with your campaign, then decide what matters more: more impressions overall or attention-grabbing ads in dense populations.
Grow Your Brand
Deciding what advertising is best for your business can be difficult. There are many things to consider when deciding between physical billboards and digital billboards. You obviously want to consider billboard prices, and how much it is going to cost to run an advertisement. However, you also have to consider what you are getting in return for those billboard prices.
Considering the location of the billboards, the audience you are trying to reach, and the ads you want to create are very important. Maybe you want to advertise in cities large and small and make a lot of impressions. Or maybe you want to advertise to a dense population in one area with creative and attention-grabbing ads. Depending on the goals for your business, you can decide what style of billboard is best for you to succeed.