How to Choose the Right Billboard Locations: 6 Data-Backed Tips for Success

Billboards are one of the most effective ways to put your brand in front of your desired customers on repeat. But not all billboard locations are created equal for every campaign message in search of an audience. And since location can make or break a campaign, a well-planned billboard campaign can amplify your message, connect with your audience at the right moment, and drive measurable results. To make the most of your media investment, here are 6 smart tips for choosing the right billboard locations:

1. Know your audience

Before you consider locations, you need to know who you want to talk to. Are your ideal customers busy commuters, local parents, tech-savvy millennials, or sports fans? Understanding demographics, being knowledgeable about daily journeys and routines, and knowing the interests of your desired audience will ensure your billboards show up in high-value locations where your message will be most relevant.

Data-backed tools like CCO RADARView, our audience insights platform, combines aggregated demographic data, behavioral insights, and location and proximity targeting to easily discover and select the OOH locations that most efficiently delivers your desired audience. When you align your billboard campaign’s placements to the habits and interests of your target audience, you boost engagement and outcomes. Better understanding of your audience can drive better results.

2. Follow the flow of traffic

Most people travel on consistent journeys.  We take our kids to the same schools.  We go to the same office for work.  We buy our groceries from the same stores. When your billboard ads are located on the roadways that are key to so many of these regular trips, consumers have frequent exposure to your messaging during these journeys. Highways and regular commuter routes allow you to reach a lot of people fast, offering more chances for audiences to remember your brand and keep you top-of-mind.

Campaigns delivered along these commuter corridors build frequency and memory among the same high-value audiences at the same times of the day. Consistent routes, combined with consistent timing, can result in strong connections and the kind of frequency levels necessary to facilitate behavioral changes.

3. Match placement to objective

Having clear campaign objectives is crucial. Aligning ad placements with campaign goals boosts effectiveness and helps to achieve your business needs. Here are two examples:

If your goal is increased awareness of your product or service, bulletins on heavily traveled highways and major arterials are great options. They offer broad reach quickly, prolonged exposure time when roads are congested, and fewer distractions for a broad mix of consumers to view your ads.

Consider posters if your goal is to drive people into your stores. These displays are hyper-local, neighborhood-specific, oftentimes located at busy intersections and provide opportunities to localize creative to be more contextual by aligning ad messages with the physical surroundings and unique elements of local neighborhoods and communities.

4. Stay close to points of interest(POI)

One of the most powerful ways to add context to your campaign is by selecting billboards close to POIs that matter to your audience. Advertising near POIs helps your message land when people are primed, effectively shortening the time between awareness and action.

What’s more, specific POIs often attract specific types of consumers. By placing ads near those hubs, you’re positioning your campaign to engage the audience you want to reach.

5. Use data to plan your campaign

Modern OOH planning is more sophisticated and data driven than ever before, backed by data analytics and automation that has reshaped how OOH campaigns are planned, bought, optimized, and measured. CCO RADAR, our proprietary suite of data-driven solutions, uses mobile location data to help understand consumer behavior and mobility. By leveraging our RADAR solutions, advertisers can plan with more precision, understand campaign performance, and identify ways to drive even better results in the future. These smart tools unlock the power of OOH, making it more essential and accountable than ever.

6. Leverage digital flexibility

Digital OOH (DOOH) provides brands the scale of outdoor advertising with the flexibility of digital. Dynamic content, a digital superpower, turns OOH into a living, responsive channel that allows campaign creative to be adjusted by time of day, day of week, or even triggered by external conditions such as weather, traffic, or live sports scores, making campaigns more aligned with audience needs.

Plus, DOOH can add creative dimensions to campaigns like motion, Augmented Reality, 3D anamorphic video, animation, interactivity, and more. This creative agility allows advertisers unmatched freedom to tell brand stories that are immersive, relevant, engaging, memorable, and more likely to be shared by audiences across their social media channels.

An expert team helps you navigate OOH success

As outlined above, many factors come into play when deciding on the most effective billboard locations to reach your desired audience. And CCO’s team of OOH specialists are well versed in them all. They’ll leverage these smart tips and others to build a campaign that is carefully tailored to your brand’s goal, ensuring every placement works strategically to reach and resonate with your audience.