A lot of advertising campaigns nowadays focus on digital marketing and online strategies. There’s certainly a good reason for this, with the digital climate and high rates of online activity, but sometimes it’s nice to go back to the basics. As important as it is to build a digital presence and gain an online following, print and outdoor advertising strategies are still alive and well.
A few years back, we created billboards for Yankee Harley-Davidson using Blip to showcase their massive inventory. We had them positioned ONLY during rush hour on routes 95 & 84 through Connecticut to attract as many customers as possible on their commutes.
While we also do email marketing, SEO, and the occasional social post for Yankee Harley, we wanted to test out this creative outdoor campaign to see how it would go. We love trying out new things and experimenting with different, creative ways to advertise. Advertising is not a one-size-fits-all field, and different strategies work differently for every business. It’s all about finding the strategy that works for each individual company.
Billboards have fallen a bit to the wayside in the face of digital marketing, but that’s what makes it different and unique right now. Having a billboard and tapping into that population of potential customers is something not everyone is doing at the moment. Using a medium that not a lot of others are using sets you and your business apart from others and gives you a different kind of exposure that you can’t get from other types of advertising campaigns.
Instead of being just another ad that gets swiped past on a phone screen, outdoor advertising campaigns like posters and (especially) billboards are big, bold, and loud. When you’re driving, it’s impossible to miss all the massive billboard ads along the sides of the highway. This also means that the design of your billboard is super important. Since it’s huge and going to be seen by everyone who drives by, you want to make sure that it’s enticing and makes people both want what you’re advertising and remember you.
With Harley being a fairly well-known name already, we wanted to target the surrounding area so that more people would hopefully be drawn to the Yankee location in Bristol, CT. We wanted to influence people to head over to Yankee Harley and check out what they had to offer.
We showed off their impressive inventory using the billboards and made sure they were shown during rush hour when the most amount of people were going to be on the road. Our billboards had drivers wishing they were cruising down an open road on a Harley rather than sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in their SUV.
Creative outdoor campaign strategies are a branch of advertising that can help your business stand out from the crowd. Focusing efforts on non-digital advertising can expand your audience and allow you to get exposure to groups of people you don’t have any online presence with. While algorithms and data about your customers can be super helpful in advertising online, it’s nearly impossible to get the same level of exposure as a physical advertisement that everyone who goes by will see.