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How to reach your target audience with creative outdoor campaigns
Few marketing channels provide room for creativity as much as Out of Home (OOH) campaigns. OOH is constantly pushing the boundaries of marketing, with many OOH ads verging on being art in their own right. If you’re stuck on how to reach a target audience, it might be time to turn your mind to how you can use OOH ads to disrupt the spaces that people see every day.
Creativity plays a vital role in making your campaigns stand out in an overcrowded sea of advertisements. In this guide we’ll explore how you can reach your target audience with creative outdoor campaigns designed to leave a lasting impression.
Who Are Your Target Audience?
You should know the answer to this question before you embark on your creative campaign. If you don’t know how to reach your target audience in simple language, you have less of a chance of being able to make contact with them through a creative, and potentially slightly abstract campaign. When researching your target audience, consider:
Demographics - including gender, age, occupation, and geographical location. These will help you to understand how and where to reach your target audience.
Behaviours - these may indicate what kind of creative campaign your target audience is most likely to respond to; for example, art-lovers may be more likely to appreciate avant garde advertising.
Paint points - because even when wanting to lure your audience in with captivating creativity, it’s important to be able to show them you can still provide the solution to their problems.
What Does Creativity Mean in OOH?
Creativity can mean lots of different things in OOH advertising. Thinking in the context of reaching your target audience, it can be thought of as making a bid for the attention of potential customers in a way that stands out, or hasn’t been done before. This can be achieved in a wide variety of ways.
Innovative Design
Creative OOH campaigns leverage innovative design elements to capture attention. Playing with scale, unique layouts, bold colours and eye-catching imagery can help to draw in passers-by. One example could be a billboard that uses perspective to appear different depending on where the viewer is standing. As well as grabbing attention, this would also encourage people to look at it from multiple angles.
Clever Messaging
A play on words, a provocative question, or a powerful call to action are all examples of clever messaging that could make the difference in your ad lingering in someone’s mind throughout the day. What can you say to convey how different you are to your competitors?
Unexpected Presentation
If you can surprise your audience, it’s a guaranteed way to grab their attention. Supporting your OOH campaign with interactive elements or guerilla marketing tactics can help to leave a lasting impression. Sometimes searching for creativity and pushing boundaries can feel like toeing the line between luring people in and turning people off, so tread carefully.
Creativity vs Clarity
To expand on that point - don’t sacrifice the clarity of your messaging by being unique for the sake of it. Yes, you want your OOH campaign to stand out, but people still need to be able to understand your brand’s purpose. With the right creative spin, you can even convey a message without words, so being clear doesn’t mean that you have to be boring.
It’s also important to maintain consistency with your brand identity - it would be terrible to produce a stunning creative OOH campaign and for passers-by to not be able to link it back to you. OOH campaigns can and should be creative, but they should be creative in a way that conveys the unique aspects of your brand’s personality.
Get Interactive
Interactivity is the perfect way to use creativity to enhance the effectiveness of an outdoor campaign. One increasingly popular method of doing this is through gamification.
Gamification involves incorporating game-like elements into your OOH advertisements to make them more engaging. Interactive games, challenges, quizzes or puzzles can be used to encourage viewers to interact with your ad - you might even want to offer prizes to serve as an additional incentive. Gamified ads work well through DOOH and tend to garner a lot of attention - meaning they could attract far more than just your target audience.
Another way you can prompt engagement through interaction is by using augmented reality (AR) experiences. AR can be used to truly bring your ads to life, as it allows users to overlay digital content into the physical world, turning spending time looking at your ad into an immersive experience.
Amplify Reach through Creative Placement
Play around with the placement of your ads. You can use contextual relevance to make your message pop - for example, placing an ad that features lots of leafy green foliage in an otherwise grey built-up area, or using high-contrast black and white typography to stand out within a colourful supermarket.
You should also think about factors such as dwell time - the amount of time someone will spend looking at your ad, and how to increase it with creative placement. Placing ads in areas where people are likely to spend at least some extended time - bus stops, train stations, or outdoor high traffic areas - increases the chance of them engaging with your ad.
Don’t Forget to Record Your Results
If you’re confident that you know how to reach target customers, it’s important to analyse the results of your outdoor campaigns to confirm your predictions. Using tools like RADAR can help you to gather information on how people have interacted with your campaign, providing you with insights that you can use to make your next move.
Partnering with Clear Channel for Creative Outdoor Campaigns
It’s only right when being brave enough to be creative is rewarded with the results you were hoping for. If you want to design unmissable OOH advertisements and you’re concerned about how to reach your target audience as you do so, we have the resources to support you.