7 Steps to Effective OOH Advertising

If you would take so far as a glance at your surroundings while you are out in Hong Kong, you would find yourself surrounded by OOH advertisements. Hong Kong has embraced OOH advertisements to the extend that one of its staples is an entire type of OOH on its own. The neon lights that illuminate the dark sky is exactly why 84% of Hong Kong marketers bought OOH to advertise rather than other advertising methods. With 7 simple steps, you too can make your OOH advertisements effective.

Step 1: Define Your Objectives

Before jumping into action, take some time to consider what you aim to achieve with your OOH advertisement. To decide what tactic or the details of the advertisements, you should know what you are working towards. For example, if you are hoping to increase brand awareness you would put emphasis on your brand and repeat your advertisement to make it memorable. If you are hoping to boost sales you would remind audiences of the price, leading them to the objective you set. This lays the foundation of the other steps in the sense that you have a goal you are hoping to achieve instead of waiting for any reaction to happen upon placing your ad. Your objective to OOH advertising could be one of the following:

• Increase brand awareness
• Boost sales
• Enhancing brand image
• Lead generation
• Creating a brand presence
• Inform customers of new products

Objectives of OOH do not usually involve communication or engagement with audiences since OOH are not one for one to aid direct communication. Rather, objectives in OOH advertising usually shifts towards the perception of you brand or the direct response in sales.

Step 2: Set Up Your Target Audience

Like all advertisements, OOH advertising requires you to choose your target audience to achieve effective advertising since no advertisement could interest an entire population, some people would be more interested in your brand and product and some less; to make your OOH advertisement more effective, you must target the people more interested in your advertisement and potentially become a customer. If you have never considered your target audience, you can use the following questions as an inspiration to help you determine your target audience:

• What is the usual age range of your purchasing customers?
• What gender are your customers usually?
• Customers of which social class do you wish to attract?
• What interests do your customer have that correlates to your product or brand?

You may not have a definite answer for all the above questions, but a rough estimation could already narrow the demographic range and does wonders for targeting your audience.

Step 3: Set Up Your Location

Now that you have a target audience, you can start setting your location that accommodates more of your target audience. Since there are OOH advertising spaces scattered around Hong Kong and each area have their demographic, you can determine where to advertise by choosing the location with a larger population of your target audience so that your advertisement would be shown to more of your target audience. You can also refer to the traffic of different locations to determine where you can get higher exposure. These are some examples on the traffic and demographic of different districts.

Step 4: Set an Advertising Budget

OOH advertising spaces in the same area can vary significantly, depending on the size, location, and time you are placing your advertisement. You should set a budget for how much you are willing to pay for the entire campaign. You can then search for specific OOH advertising spaces according to you budget and steadily manage the price you should pay. This can avoid finding the perfect advertising space but learning afterwards that you cannot afford the specific space. 

Step 5: Determine a Timing and Duration

As mentioned above, advertising spaces from the same location can have quite different prices, with time being one of the factors affecting the cost of OOH advertising spaces. There are certain periods where more people would be outside and be more prone to be exposed to OOH advertisements. Times such as Christmas or Lunar New Year would mean more people are going out to celebrate so your advertisements would have a higher exposure than usual. People would also be in a holiday mood and are more willing to spend money, increasing the chance of them purchasing the products you advertise. Due to that, the cost of the OOH advertising space around these times would be more expensive. You can decide when and how long you wish to advertise to stay within the budget.

Step 6: Create Advertising Message and Graphic

This is the most important step in your advertising campaign. You need to create your message and graphic to make sure you get your message clearly across to the audience and can attract their attention. Since you have defined your objectives in step 1, your message should be aimed at meeting the objectives, and therefore the focus would be put on different parts of the advertisement. OOH advertisements would be shown to pedestrians or passengers who usually passes by quickly, vivid colours and eye-catching images can help draw in audience’s attention and bring forth your message to them.

Step 7: Measure Your Results

Your advertising campaign is not finished once you have posted your OOH advertisement. To maximize the effectiveness, you need to learn from the data and improve your OOH advertisement if needed. Unlike digital advertising, it is impossible to directly check how many people has seen your advertisement, so the best method is to check your sales. It would take some time for you to see any result but remember to check for any spikes or increase in sales to determine if your advertisement is effective. If you have included your company website or social media account onto your advertisement, you can also check the website traffic to spot any increase. 

Reference:

 https://www.thedrum.com/news/2021/04/07/hong-kong-marketers-set-increase-spending-significantly-programmatic-ooh