How to make an OOH brand awareness campaign

With research indicating that people are growing tired of the endless stream of digital communications they’re receiving every day, and as many as one in five consumers deleting a social media account in the past year, brands are being faced with a new challenge. How can you boost your brand awareness without contributing to your customers’ digital fatigue? Out-of-home (OOH) advertising may provide the answer.

What is brand awareness?

The term brand awareness refers to how well your brand is known, both among your target audience and beyond. Brands that are easily recognisable and widely known tend to be well-trusted, and this trust is more likely to make your brand spring to mind when a particular product or service is mentioned. There are many examples of where brands have become synonymous with whatever it is that they provide - this is the dream scenario that many brands are striving to reach. 

Why is brand awareness important?

As well as strengthening trust between your brand and your existing audience, strong brand awareness can give you the edge you need to outshine your competitors, and secure a steady stream of new customers. This happens thanks to several factors:

The power of OOH in brand awareness

Let’s circle back to our earlier mention of digital fatigue. Brand awareness is essential, but so is being sensitive to consumer needs and feelings. With the burnout people are experiencing as a result of excessive use of social media and mobile devices, how can you familiarise them with your brand without contributing to digital fatigue? The answer is by reaching out to them in the real world.

Utilising OOH brand awareness advertising can give you a chance to meet your audience in the places they go in real life, away from their laptop and mobile phone screens. These interactions and encounters feel like chance meetings, and can come across as less intrusive than digital advertising. This makes consumers feel more like they have made a discovery instead of simply absorbing an advertisement. Combine this with the creative opportunities that OOH advertising provides, and you have the potential to leave a lasting impression on anyone who crosses paths with your campaign.

How to create an OOH brand awareness campaign

Here are the key steps to creating a successful OOH campaign that’s guaranteed to boost your brand awareness strategy.

Set clear objectives

Make sure to define clear goals for your campaign. While brand awareness on its own is a difficult metric to track, there are goals you can aim for that would indicate an increase in brand awareness, while at the same time giving you concrete numbers. For example, improved website traffic or an increase in brand search volume following your campaign would both show a rise in brand awareness.

Understand your target audience

Before you can create an attention-grabbing OOH brand awareness campaign you need to know exactly whose attention it is you’re trying to grab. Brand awareness hinges on being relatable - if your brand were a person, you want your target audience to think your brand is the kind of person they’d want to be friends with. This means you need to have an idea of their likes and dislikes, the problems they’re facing, and their behaviours. All of this can be gleaned through thorough research.

Choose the right location for maximum impact

Your choice of location for your campaign can have a dramatic impact on how successful it may be. Whether you target the highstreet, the roadsides or public transport stations, location is a vital consideration for your brand awareness advertising. Does your target audience visit this location frequently? Are there eyes on it at all times of day? You want to be able to ensure the highest levels of visibility and engagement, while at the same time focusing on the likelihood of it reaching your specific target demographic. Our intelligent campaign planning tool, RADAR, can help you.

Craft a memorable message

Are your brand awareness campaign ideas unique? The average person sees about 10,000 ads a day in some shape or form. That’s a lot of competition to stand out from, so it’s important that your campaign has a memorable message that can stick in the minds of your target audience. Whether your power lies in a catchy phrase, striking visuals or captivating narrative, this is really a chance to flaunt your creativity.

Integrate with other channels

While one of OOH advertising’s unique strengths is the fact that it’s a change of pace from standard digital advertising, this doesn’t mean that you can’t support an OOH campaign through other channels. Your OOH digital poster or billboard might be where consumers are introduced to your brand, but it then becomes the job of social media and digital advertising to support this first impression with more interactions, creating an overall positive brand experience.

Measure and analyse campaign performance

As we mentioned, brand awareness itself can be a difficult thing to measure, but there are still ways to deduce the effectiveness of your campaign. This is another reason for integrating your campaign across multiple channels - it gives you multiple sources of data. This data can then be used not only to measure your campaign’s success, but also to inform your decisions when planning your next campaign. 

Brand awareness surveys are an excellent way to gather qualitative data and gauge how well-recognised your brand is by consumers. Running the same survey before and after rolling out a brand awareness campaign could help to measure the impact your campaign has had on your audience. These surveys can ask questions around topics such as:

• Unaided and aided recall - this involves asking respondents to recall brands they associate with products or industries, or choosing brands they recognise from a given list.

• Brand association - this involves asking respondents what comes to mind when they think of your brand.

• Buying intentions - this involves questions surrounding the likelihood of respondents purchasing your products or interacting with your brand in the future.

When it comes to OOH advertising in particular, there are plenty of analytics available, even down to establishing the precise number of people who see your ad every day. 

Go outdoors with your brand awareness campaign

OOH advertising is a powerful platform for building brand awareness, and the perfect way to reach out to consumers in the real world - especially at a time when social media might be causing them to switch off. Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas for how to create brand awareness campaigns that not only find your target audience, but engage and absorb them as well. 

New to OOH advertising and unsure of how to start your awareness campaign? Take a look at our advertising portfolio to see how we can help.