Category: Media Analysis & Measurement

Want to accomplish a quality ad campaign with a unique out-of-home experience? Partner with a media buying agency to take your campaign to the next level.

Three billboards inside Orlando, Florida.
Sounds like an Oscar-nominated film, right? In reality, it’s a simple and underused advertising strategy that can deliver serious results. By working with a top local media buying agency, businesses can reap the substantial benefits offered by out-of-home advertising.

Let’s take a closer look at why this approach has proven remarkably resilient — and effective — in a world that’s leaving other legacy advertising approaches behind.

The value of an out-of-home experience

Mobile ads, OTT ads, and other digital approaches are certainly exciting, valuable, and worthy of the attention they receive. It’s important, however, for businesses to find value wherever they can. Sometimes it’s more profitable to zig when the competition is engaged in synchronized zagging.

In this case, we’re talking about conventional advertising methods that may lack buzz, but still pack a punch in terms of practical results. Out-of-home advertising is one great example; it’s no one’s idea of bleeding-edge adtech, but it has particular attributes that make it especially well suited to today’s market. This is one reason why it’s becoming increasingly popular with brands and media buying agencies.

Why are billboards effective? One key reason is context. We’re deluged with digital advertising, and naturally have grown somewhat immune to it. While we’d probably wager that someone somewhere has actually watched a YouTube ad without hitting the skip button, we’ve never actually encountered such an individual. In the same vein, there are probably people who watch TV ads instead of immediately picking up their phone, but they are undoubtedly a rare breed.

Billboards and other forms of advertising, on the other hand, are harder to tune out. We don’t have the same conditioned response to ignore them. The scale is vastly larger. They have a physical presence that tiny screens lack. Additionally, modern technology (including 5G) can be used to deliver billboard ads dynamically, allowing for better targeting.

As these technologies grow more refined, it’s not hard to envision a day when out-of-home installations can display hundreds or thousands of individual ads programmatically, based on the interests or characteristics of those passing by.

If the inherent benefits of the outdoor model are combined with creative, eye-catching content and execution, the end result can charm, intrigue and even astonish audiences — as you can see in the following two examples.

Two great out-of-home experiences in 2018

Beer-maker Corona used out-of-home advertising to create a deeply memorable ad campaign pegged to World Oceans Day. The company built a massive digital billboard depicting a beautiful ocean scene — then installed a “wave” made from huge piles of trash directly in front of the billboard. Passersby could even deposit their own trash on the pile.

The outdoor installation drew attention to the fact that eight million metric tons of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans every year — while earning Corona global media attention and goodwill.

McDonald’s, meanwhile, turned eight of its popular menu items into weather icons on a giant billboard in London. The billboard delivered a real time weather forecast for pedestrians, using Big Macs to denote sun and upside down fries to indicate rain.

The billboards were especially effective in that they gave Londoners very useful information delivered in a highly unusual and eye-catching form — one that also might just spark an appetite for a burger or fries.

These examples are indicative of a larger trend toward out of home ads. According to Magna, out-of-home advertising saw 4.6% growth in 2018, a much higher figure than seen with any other legacy medium.

The takeaway

At BIGEYE, we’re experts at creating effective ad campaigns using both legacy and cutting-edge approaches. If you’d like to hear more about what our media buying agency can do for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out today.

You don’t need to be clairvoyant to see the future. By harnessing your customer data and predictive analytics, you have all the tools you need right in front of you. The good news is, you don’t need to be a statistician or regression analyst to use predictive analytics either. With the help of your team, a few simple metric tools, or your local Orlando marketing agency, you can predict hundreds of business outcomes and behaviors that will inform your marketing efforts, so you and your team can work smarter, not harder.

With so many options to choose from, it can be difficult to narrow down the key metrics you want to predict. To begin, take a look at your sales or conversion funnel. Most industries have benchmarks for each step of the funnel. By comparing your demand generation movement, sign up rates, conversion rates, and retention rates to those averages, you can see where you’re doing well and where you could use some help.

This quick needs assessment will help you focus your efforts and decide which data to hone in on first. As a rule, the following five metrics are a great place to start no matter how your business is performing.

1. Predictive analytics and customer lifetime value

Using the data from your conversion or sales rate and retention rate, you can predict the average lifespan, and thus the lifetime monetary value, of each customer or sale. As you invest in campaigns that turn prospects into customers, you can balance that return on investment (ROI) against what you predict those customers’ lifetime value will be. If you’re spending tons of money to acquire new customers, but their expected lifetime value is below that figure, it’s time to take a new approach.

2. Churn, funnel efficiency, and cart abandonment

Although we often try to optimize for our sales, sometimes it is just as effective to optimize around our losses. If you can predict the risk of your customers defecting to your competition or leaving your site before they complete the sale, you can plan to close that gap through other initiatives. Your churn rate, funnel efficiency, and cart abandonment are all easily forecasted using simple analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics and will help you understand what types of retention or conversion initiatives will be most profitable.

3. Purchase intent

In that vein, you can close your anticipated business gaps by predicting who will buy your product and who won’t. Using behavioral cues that signal the seriousness of a shopper will help you spend more time, energy, and resources on customers who are more likely to convert. For example, if your company offers a free trial for business software, try targeted marketing campaigns aimed at those who signed up with a business email address rather than those who signed up with a personal or “junk” address. By using predictive analytics to determine what behaviors correlate with purchases, you can aim your marketing efforts accordingly.

4. Getting pricing right:

Predictive analytics can also reveal pricing trends or price elasticity, which is one of the most important keys to success. Combining big data market behavior with your customers’ reaction to various promotions can help you tweak your pricing to maximize gains throughout the year so that you aren’t leaving money on the table.

5. Internal forecasting:

Last, but certainly not least, you can also use predictive analytics to help set your annual business goals. By forecasting demand, your revenue run rate, and periods of growth, you can prepare for and strive toward measurable outcomes that will catapult your company forward. This type of forecasting also helps you understand if your goals are too high or too low so your team understands the impact of their work.

See, we told you that you could see the future. Big data is the future … and so are the insights it provides.

Go ahead, #AMA about impressions and social media analytics: we have the skinny on the ROI of your KPIs, and we’re not even newsjacking or clickbaiting your RSS feed to tell you about it. We know, we know, the social media jargon can get a little overwhelming (some might even say annoying). Instead of embracing the wealth of information we have about our customers, we sometimes shy away from media analytics because it’s easy to get confused or misled by the myriad of abbreviations and trendy marketing terms associated with data analysis. But any good marketer will tell you that we don’t need code words to make our data more glamorous because it’s one of the most powerful and sexy marketing tools we have in our arsenal.

Social media analytics KPI’s

To help you feel more comfortable telling the difference between everything from engagement to impressions and social media analytics, we’re breaking down the top three key performance indicators (KPI’s) and analytics terms you need to know as a social media marketer. 

Understanding reach:

Your brand’s reach is one of the most simple, straightforward media analytics metrics to capture. It represents your network or the total audience your brand interacts with. Reach is made up of your followers, users, and subscribers. When analysts talk about reach, they often use it as a proxy for how recognizable your brand is, how popular your company is within the marketplace, or how likely customers are to switch to (and stay with) your brand compared to your competitors because reach represents how loyal and proud customers are to follow and interact with your brand.

Not to be confused with impressions:

Unfortunately, people often confuse reach with impressions. If reach represents your self-identified audience as a whole, your impressions represent the actual number of times a single piece of content (a post, tweet, or picture) is seen by users. Impressions aren’t always limited to your audience – or reach – because additional impressions occur through sharing, digital ads, or promoted content. The number of impressions, or times your content is seen, is often used to help calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a certain campaign or marketing initiative. For a deep dive into impressions, click here to read our blog on actual versus potential impressions. 

But none of it matters without engagement:

Your brand might have an incredible reach, and your posts might be getting thousands of impressions, but if your engagement metric is low, chances are your content isn’t working. Engagement describes how often your viewers interact with your content via likes, shares, comments, tweets, or reposts. It tells you how relevant your posts are to your viewers and helps you discover what they enjoy reading or seeing in their newsfeeds. The more people that interact with your posts, the greater their engagement is. This is one of the most important social media analytics metrics because it reveals whether your social media is breaking through the clutter and reaching your target audience in a meaningful way or just getting lost in the sea of posts.

Now that you understand the basics, you should feel more confident digging into your data to understand what your customers need from you to trust and interact with your brand on the internet. Social media marketing is one of the most powerful and ubiquitous marketing channels and we’re here to help you use it to its fullest potential.