How to Boost Your DOOH Campaign Using Mobile Marketing

Could your DOOH and online campaigns complement each other to significantly increase brand awareness and drive an increase in sales?

Given the potential for audience targeting, real-time bidding and cost-effective buying options offered by modern Digital Out of Home buying practices, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. 

Because your Digital OOH advertising is displayed out of the home, by far the most effective bridge between your digital billboards and street signage is a consumer’s mobile device – usually a smartphone or a tablet. 

Here are three key ways in which to give your DOOH advertising campaign a boost using mobile marketing. 

QR codes are mobile barcodes which users scan with their smartphone camera to open websites, bring up directions or perform a range of tasks in response to your OOH ads. 

In a mobile marketing context, this makes them a hugely powerful tool. Imagine being able to do the following from just a little square in the corner of your advert: 

• Direct consumers to online deals on your website
• Help consumers find your business by providing onscreen directions
• Direct users to a booking site for your event or hospitality business

QR codes are now a mainstream technology and US consumers can’t get enough of them. In a major survey conducted by marketing site The Drum and international polling company YouGov, 45% of US consumers said they had used a QR code related to advertising, marketing, or a promotional offer within the previous three months. 

On top of that, the majority (59%) agreed that QR codes would become a permanent part of using their phone in the future: 

(Image source: thedrum.com)

With most of the US public already using QR codes regularly, now is the perfect time to incorporate them in an appropriate DOOH campaign. 

Think about where users are best placed to use their smartphones. If you’re running a DOOH campaign mostly based around large, roadside billboards, QR codes aren’t an option as you don’t want to distract drivers or encourage pedestrians crossing the road to start looking at their phones. 

However, they work fantastically for location-based advertising or digital display screens on street furniture and public transit including train stations, bus stations and inside carriages. This is because potential customers are free to use their phones and interact with their surroundings more.

Using mobile marketing, you can take your digital OOH ads far beyond their physical location to significantly increase audience engagement and amplify brand image and awareness. 

To do so, your ads need to be eye-catching, impactful and ultimately ‘shareable’, meaning ‘appealing enough to an online audience to interact with across social media platforms’. 

What constitutes a shareable ad? 

Whilst it’s impossible to predict with 100% accuracy what will capture the zeitgeist on social media at any given time, there are a couple of steps you can take to make your DOOH campaign instantly more appealing:  

Relevant and, where appropriate, humorous ads get shared more via mobile social media channels. This tactic has been a lifeline for businesses who hoped to leverage DOOH ads over the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. 

Small UK snack brand Emily’s Snacks used this to their advantage when they timed their first outdoor ad campaign for April 2020. Very few people saw these ads in person, given the timing with the first of the global lockdowns to combat COVID-19. 

Equally, the company’s use of wry, self-deprecating British humor struck a chord with the few who did. Photos, taken on smartphones, circulated on social media and the campaign ended up being a huge success for the brand. 

(Source: marketingweek.com) 

Why not go one step further and actively encourage consumers to interact with your DOOH ads? 

This doesn’t have to involve super high-tech facial recognition technology or any sort of directly interactive experience. All it takes is an eye-catching ad, a social media hashtag and a bit of creativity. You could: 

• Encourage consumers to share their recent purchases
• Upload selfies with your ad to spread it further than its physical location
• Suggest what dish they’d like to see next on your menu

Encourage users to share their thoughts over social media for a huge engagement and visibility boost. Of course, these are just a couple of ideas to get you started. 

Social media presents a unique opportunity to start conversations with your target audience, so let those creative juices flow – you could even incentivize this interaction with some sort of competition or prize.

The great thing about mobile marketing? It’s responsive, dynamic and, thanks to programmatic buying methods for online ad space, can be optimized immediately based on current events or campaign metrics.

If you want your DOOH campaign and your mobile marketing to work in sync, you need a similar sort of responsiveness for your DOOH buying platform.

To run a creative, multichannel DOOH ad campaign that makes your brand stand out, you need: 

• Audience targeting options to increase opportunities for engagement
• The ability to update ads in real time to keep everything relevant

Traditional digital OOH buying options can’t offer this, because they rely on a network of intermediaries that sit between advertisers and media owners. Performance reports come through too slowly to be immediately relevant, so you can’t get the level of adaptability for multichannel campaign success. 

To run truly data driven, impactful DOOH ad campaigns, you need programmatic DOOH. That’s where The Neuron comes in.  

The Neuron is a programmatic DOOH buying platform that allows you to automate bids on DOOH advertising space that fits your exact criteria (for example footfall or weather data) for audience targeting. 

As The Neuron connects you directly with media owners, it is considerably faster and cheaper than traditional OOH buying methods. You’ll also benefit from real-time campaign performance metrics that allow you to optimize your campaign with just a couple of clicks. 

Try The Neuron today