Outdoor Advertising: Get Outdoors and Get Offline

By Eric Shafer

Today’s obsession with everything online has led to a lot of great innovation —and a lot of pop-ups. If you’ve ever logged on to use a search engine, you know the gamble that comes with surfing the web. One wrong click and you’re suddenly on a page with sixty different images flashing phrases like “You Won a Plasma Screen TV” or “Click Here for a Free iPhone!” So why are people still turning to online advertising? The answer is simple. People are online, so advertisers are too. We agree that it’s important to establish your business online and have several guides and articles on making the most of your online branding. However, we also know that there’s an intrinsic value to connecting with your customers IRL. That’s “in real life” for the more traditional among you. With so many businesses making the switch and pouring all of their resources into one big online campaign, there’s plenty of room for error. Outdoor advertising is quickly becoming an untapped market, and it might be just what you’re looking for.

Building a Strong Reputation Online

Today, if your company isn’t listed on Yelp, it’s going to be very difficult to bring in business. When customers hear about a new restaurant, the first thing they’ll do is search for your name online or on maps. If you haven’t created a profile on Yelp or Google, they’re going to be suspicious. For that reason, it’s absolutely imperative to get your company listed. From there, it’s really up to you to show up and show out. You’ll need to generate the right buzz in your reviews to earn 5-star status, and anything below may dissuade customers from checking in. However, those reviews can be a double-edged sword. Negative reviews are more visible than positive ones, and some sites will even require business owners to pay a fee to remove or deemphasize a negative review. With such volatility in the game, it’s often difficult to know how a business really compares to their competition or what to expect from their service.

Building a Strong Reputation Offline

For local businesses, it’s important to advertise locally. Building a strong image within your community will allow you to grow your business and bring in more customers. This is why so many of our clients look into grocery store advertising, allowing businesses to meet people where they already feel at home. Placing the right supermarket advertisement in the right store is also a geo-targeting factor, which is another factor in educated advertising. Through geo-targeting, businesses hope to meet customers where they already spend their time and weave their brand into their customer’s daily lives. The best example of this is placing outdoor signage around the places where your customers live, work, and play to really hone in on your community brand. In print media, outdoor signage can face damage as the weather changes, leading many businesses to be wary of advertising outdoors. However, this situation’s reality is that no matter the weather, customers, and communities will continue to commute to the places they work and love. For some, this will bring us back to grocery store advertising and the fact that people are never going to stop buying frozen pizza no matter how cold it is.

Keeping it REALtor

This leads us to real estate bus-bench advertising. Over the past thirty years, bus benches have become dominated by realtors. Other outdoor platforms are a toss-up, with competitors vying for billboards on the tops of taxi cabs, but bus benches seem to belong to realtors. Real estate bus-bench advertising has become so competitive because it is so prevalent. Realtors who are unsure of making the jump might just be losing out on one of their already advertising competitors. As one of the safest, weather-proof outdoor advertising options, it is little wonder that Realtors have made the switch. There is only one reason for bus-bench advertising to be so popular: it works! Not only is it a safe option, but it’s a short-cut for any realtor trying to warm their way into the community. People house-shop with their heart, and so it can be a pretty emotional game. The more familiar someone is with your image, the more likely they’ll trust you with their home. This is why using real estate, bus-bench advertising to connect your image within the community is ingenious. For every bench you secure, you can count on hundreds of people passing by on their daily commute, viewing your ad at the same time and place every day. That kind of regularity is unheard of in online advertising, and part of why it can be so difficult to build a brand through fleeting interactions on the web. The battle for recognition and repetition doesn’t stop outside. Indoor mini billboards on grocery shopping carts are another place where the battle of an image takes place. The competition is so fierce that Realtors will frequently spend more on advertising to make it exclusive. There may be lawyers or ER clinics advertised, but the exclusivity ensures that only one Realtor greets the prospective customer.

Give Me a Sign!

Whether you’re looking into real estate bus-bench advertising, renting your first billboard, or trying out grocery store advertising, you need to find a way to promote your image in your community. The greatest threat to small businesses is wasting money on the wrong online campaign, and unless you do your research, you can risk your most cherished asset: your checkbook. Imagine spending hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, on a campaign that promises you’ll reach hundreds of thousands of people —only to find out they were located all across the country, the wrong type of customer, or they ignored the ad with a click of the close button. Even if someone can promise you impressions within your state, some restaurants have difficulty securing new customers from just the next town over. Outdoor advertising is a time-proven way to know that you’re reaching customers within your community, and the more you learn about them, the more successful you can be. As the weather changes and you begin to gear up for the holidays, you may feel wary of beginning a new campaign. However, make sure to check out all of our tips for grocery store advertising because the same customers who are avoiding the cold weather are about to start shopping for pumpkin pie.

Tags: Advertising 101 , Brand Advertising , Real Estate Advertising

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