Do I need a billboard for my business? Learn how out of home advertising and digital marketing work together for great results.

While scholars believe human societies were first introduced to oral advertising, it did not take long for those old-time marketers to discover the power of signs. At least, they've found papyrus advertising posters that date back to ancient Rome, Greece, and even Egypt. In societies with low literacy rates, they relied upon pictures.

In the Digital Age, you might wonder how an out of home advertising agency can possibly still help achieve your business goals. After all, isn't everything online now? Actually, buying a billboard and working with an OOH advertising agency may serve as the perfect solution to some struggles you face attracting more attention to your social media, digital ads, and business site.

Is an outdoor advertising agency beneficial to digital businesses?

When you think of the largest players in online advertising, companies like Amazon, HBO, Apple, and Google probably come to mind. According to The Outdoor Advertising Association of America, these companies ranked in the top 10 for money spent on out-of-home ads. Netflix, the online streaming service, made it to the top 15. Just as surprising, the OAAA said that tech-related companies made up 25 percent of the biggest spenders.

Together, Facebook and Google will contribute to over one-quarter of the total spend. Not only that, outdoor advertising had experienced constant growth every quarter since the Great Recession, not counting the coronavirus outbreak. According to the president of OAAA, Nancy Fletcher, companies spend money on this kind of advertising because it provides the perfect complement to their social, mobile, and search tactics.

Of course, these days, an out of home advertising agency might suggest electronic billboards and not just static ones. In that way, you might think of them as giant monitors in very visible locations. These allow advertisers to display very slick, sophisticated ads that can cast a very wide net. In other cases, the old-fashioned, static kind may also serve your purposes.

How can a billboard advertising agency help your business?

To understand how an OOH advertising agency might help you find outdoor ad placements to help improve your overall marketing plan, it will help to consider an example. For instance, Apple solicited images from iPhone users to use on the digital billboards they used for their ads. The "Shot on an iPhone" campaign helped demonstrate the types of photos that people could capture with their phones. It also gave contributors and their own social circles plenty of incentive to share images on social sites.

In this case, the digital and outdoor advertising worked together to help Apple enjoy a sort of synergy that they could not have achieved with either one alone. People saw the billboards who might not have visited the company's digital platforms. In turn, contributors were quick to share their own photos to have them displayed both online and outdoors.

In simpler cases, businesses can use a billboard at the top of their marketing funnel to help attract more attention. Interested people will return to their computers and phones to seek out more information about the quick message they saw while they were commuting or running errands.

Does outdoor advertising work?

Some outdoor advertisers have also used mobile phone data to detect when people pass near their outdoor signage. In that way, the physical and virtual world of advertising merge even more.

For some other examples:

• A study from Ocean Neuroscience found that almost half of mobile users were more likely to click on an advertisement after first seeing the brand advertised on a billboard.
  
  
  

• Another study found 46 percent of people said they'd searched for something after first seeing it mentioned on an outdoor advertisement.

Online advertising has grown increasingly competitive and expensive. Ad blockers or simple online ad blindness have also made attracting attention on the internet more challenging. Engaging billboards can help attract more visitors to your business site or social pages and serve as the perfect complement to digital marketing. If you've been considering ways to grow your audience, don't overlook the power of signs.