When choosing where to advertise your business, here are some other things you should keep in mind:

Invest Time in Demographic and More Detailed Customer Research

If you want to target a specific target market, or understand your target market better, you should also consider carrying out user demographics and detailed consumer research on sites such as Acorn.

This powerful resource works by segmenting the population into 62 different types, enabling you to drill deeper into your target market and provides a more detailed insight into audiences and their behaviors.

This can be applied when tracking any behavioral changes in existing audiences and identifying profitable prospects, while it can also be used throughout campaigns to make any necessary adjustments to ad locations and content.

Focus on Levels of Traffic and Footfall

It’s also important to appraise potential target locations in terms of the level of traffic that they benefit from on a regular basis. This will ensure that you’re targeting key areas based on a number of seminal factors, and there are several tools and metrics that you can utilize to monitor locations.

One of the most widely used is a travel survey. Participants are given a device with an in-built GPS tracker and Wi-Fi connectivity as well as a compass and accelerometer, which they carry with them for up to two weeks.

Participants also answer extensive questions pertaining to their lifestyle and shopping habits, providing practical insight into where people are going on a daily basis and the high-traffic locations that they’re likely to frequent. Acquiring data from a travel survey can therefore provide you with invaluable insights into your target demographics.

Determining the effectiveness of individual ad locations

  • Reach & Impressions – Reach refers to the number of unique individuals who see an advert, and impressions is the number of times that a particular ad is seen.
  • Frequency – Frequency can be determined by dividing impressions by reach within a specified time frame (e.g. two or four weeks). Knowing the frequency that an ad is seen at will help you understand which locations benefit from the most traffic over time.

When To Run Your Ad Campaigns

Once you’ve created a plan in terms of where and how to target your audience, the next step is to time your campaign to achieve the best possible levels of engagement.

This is particularly important if running a time sensitive campaign, as you’ll need to identify precisely when your prospective customers are most likely to engage with your brand.

If you’re planning a campaign around peak trading (in the lead up to Christmas, for example), to maximize the impact of your campaigns, you may wish to also run strategically placed billboard ads in advance of these peak times. This way, you can build brand awareness early on and ensure that local shoppers are already aware of your brand.

When to Book Your Ad Space

When planning an outdoor advertising campaign, especially around peak times, you will need to be proactive, as there is likely to be intense competition.

This is especially true for those targeting the most popular, high traffic locations, such as on main roads leading into city centres or around shopping centres.

If you are planning an out of home campaign, you should start contacting outdoor advertising firms as early on as you can. But as a rule, if you want to secure your preferred locations, be sure to book 3-6 months in advance.

Tip: You can sometimes minimize your advertising costs by securing paper or digital billboards on long term bookings that extend beyond the typical two week hire time.

Planning your campaigns in advance, looking beyond the immediate term and booking early can be highly beneficial.