If you’re a small business, it’s easy to think that digital signage and digital out of home advertising (DOOH) in general isn’t accessible to you – either budget-wise or resource-wise.
Whilst that might have been true once, digital signage is fast becoming SMBs’ tool of choice for mass audience targeting, driving brand awareness and reaching audiences when they’re most likely to convert. This is all due to new methods of buying digital out of home ads, which remove expensive third parties and offer more advanced targeting options.
Traditionally, OOH was all about increasing visibility and mass advertising. Whilst that’s still a huge part of modern digital OOH, new tools, approaches and techniques mean that DOOH offers so much more than that.
Below, we outline how digital signage can transform your marketing campaign strategy.
What Is Digital Signage?
Digital signage screens are simply any sort of digital installation used for marketing or informational purposes.
Digital out of home advertising (DOOH) is the process of using these digital signage screens to reach consumers in public spaces.
You can find digital signage both indoors and outdoors in any public place. Examples include:
- Digital billboards in town centres or next to roads and highways
- Screens at airports as well as inside taxis, train carriages and other modes of public transport
- Digital signs on street furniture
- Video walls and other large-scale digital displays
- Digital signs found in shopping malls, office buildings, entertainment venues and stadia
Digital signage is a fantastic way to target mass audiences, increase your business’s visibility and enhance an in store or in-business customer experience.
How Do You Access Digital Signage?
If you want to provide your target audience with memorable digital experiences, you can either buy space on digital inventory traditionally via a media buying agency or use cloud-based digital signage software.
This second method of buying digital ad space is called programmatic buying or programmatic DOOH. Utilizing specialized pDOOH platforms is quicker and more cost effective than going through an agency as the software automates the bidding process – much like the process for buying online ad space.
This makes pDOOH platforms a great option for SMBs looking to leverage the advantages of DOOH. Below, we explore the major benefits digital signage offers, particularly when bought via programmatic buying platforms.
1. Programmatic Buying Offers Major Time Savings
In the past, digital OOH was out of reach for many SMBs due to the resource- and time-intensive buying processes involved. If your marketing department is small, that sort of commitment is difficult to maintain without losing sight of other essential activities.
By contrast, because programmatic DOOH platforms automate the bidding and buying processes and automatically make your ads live as soon as your pre-set conditions are met, DOOH campaigns now don’t need to be any more resource intensive than online campaigns.
Ultimately, with DOOH, your business gets an unparalleled amount of visibility with a more receptive audience than online ads typically offer, whilst powerful pDOOH platforms ensure you are able to easily manage your DOOH ads alongside other facets of your campaign.
2. Programmatic Buying Allows Enhanced Audience Targeting
Traditional OOH media such as static billboards are great for visibility and general awareness – but lack the ability to target audiences most relevant to your product or service. Programmatic DOOH platforms, on the other hand, let you bid on digital signage based on specific parameters. These include:
- Time of day
- Day of the week
- Temperature or other external conditions
- Footfall
For example, French fashion retailer La Redoute created a series of billboard ads which showed different looks depending on the weather at the billboard’s location. In the realm of food and drink, Stella Artois, McDonald’s and Campbell’s Soups have all used weather-based campaigns to target cold ciders, icy soft drinks and warming broths to audiences already receptive to their products.
(Image source: springwise.com)
With the right approach, a DOOH campaign won’t just generate mass awareness of your product: a well-executed digital signage strategy means you can reach your target audience with contextually relevant messaging in the real world.
3. Digital Signage Converts Directly into Revenue
For brick-and-mortar and online businesses alike, digital screens can be huge revenue drivers.
A recent Neilsen study suggests that 52% of respondents noticed digital street level ads 51% of the time. Meanwhile, 69% of viewers engaged in actions like visiting the advertiser’s website or store after seeing a street-level ad.
In addition, 51% noticed digital street level ads which contained directions to a business. Of these, 65% visited a business immediately after seeing an ad and the vast majority made a purchase (92%).
Whether you’re an international franchise or an independent local store or restaurant, those are powerful figures indeed.
4. Digital Signage Software Offers Real-Time Analytics
In an increasingly data-obsessed world, one major stumbling block for both traditional and DOOH media has been that it’s difficult to track. You have to trust that your campaign is working, or else rely on reports from media agencies, which are often outdated by the time you receive them.
Programmatic digital OOH advertising is automated, which generates real-time campaign data. Using a programmatic buying platform, you’ll be able to track:
- Planned and spent budgets by campaign, publisher and creative
- Audiences reached and number of impressions obtained
- Individual screen delivery and performance, including number of playouts
- Effective cost per mile (eCPM), which is the cost per thousand ad impressions
If you can track and analyse your DOOH advertising campaigns, optimizing them becomes significantly easier. As a result, your campaigns become more effective as you can use your real-time analytics to make immediate changes when and where they’re needed – a powerful advantage for SMBs that needing to get big results with relatively small budgets.
Finding the Right DOOH Platform for You
To realize the benefits of a DOOH-inclusive marketing strategy, you need a programmatic buying platform that offers real-time analytics and time-saving automation options.
With The Neuron’s intuitive, easy to use DOOH platform, you get access to up-to-the-minute reporting features, automated bidding and ad display functionality and you can get started with just a couple of clicks. Simply upload your creative, define your ad criteria and budget, and let the platform do the rest.
