We often speak with businesses that have been considering billboard advertising for some time. Perhaps you've seen high-profile billboards on your daily commute or walk past a billboard regularly and recognise how impactful and memorable the messaging can be. 

The biggest barrier to this type of high-return and maximum engagement advertising isn’t budget, creative inspiration or interest in public promotions – it’s simply not knowing how to find a billboard, reserve a panel, or book a billboard placement in your local region.

In this article, we'll explain how media booking works and the variety of guidance, support and design expertise our multiskilled outdoor advertising team offers, ensuring you know all you need to know about billboard ads and can get your brand out there without further delay.

1. Think About Strategic Billboard Placements and Locations  

Step one is to consider who you want to see your billboard. For some businesses, that's an easy question since their product range or service has mass appeal, and they want to shout about it to as many people as possible across their city, town or area.

Others, however, benefit from professional advice, ensuring that any billboard space they access meets their core advertising objectives. For example:

• Is your business highly localised? Do you sell a product or service that is relevant to a refined geographic audience – and if so, where do your boundaries lie?

• Do you have a key customer demographic? Are you looking to engage with viewers of a particular age or profession or with certain interests or hobbies?

• What is the big takeaway you want viewers to have? Do you want to drive interest in an event, encourage people to visit your website, or purchase a product or service from you?

As a nationwide integrated advertising agency, we can offer support throughout, researching demographics and billboard spaces, and suggesting locations that fit with your advertising aspirations – whether you have a flexible brief, or need to evaluate footfall metrics down to a granular level.

Of course, you might also need to think about seasonality, particularly if your billboard will showcase something most relevant to, say, the summer tourist period, the Christmas season, or an event or promotion taking place on a predefined date.

2. Compare Billboard Sizes and Formats

If you're new to billboard advertising, it's important to recognise that there isn't one set format, and billboards come in a massive array of sizes. You might, for instance, want a huge 96-sheet billboard erected over a major roadway or a 96 digital billboard featuring immersive moving graphics positioned near a local landmark.

Businesses also opt for 48-sheets within public spaces like shopping centres and tourist attractions, 6-sheet face-level adverts that slot into the architecture of a pedestrian zone or travel hub, or bus shelter ads communicating information to commuters.

This decision-making process goes back to the assessments we’ve mentioned – thinking about who your target audience is, where they are most likely to encounter your advertising, and how that messaging will be crafted to incentivise a response.

Most businesses assume that bigger is better when it comes to billboard advertising, but if you have a finite budget, it's more important to consider tactical advertising spaces that will generate engagement without costing the earth.

Public transport billboards are a great example, where an impactful billboard placed somewhere with extended dwell time might perform very well, compared to a much larger billboard that isn’t in quite the right spot to capture the attention of your ideal viewer.

3. Design Your Billboard Graphics or Digital Displays

Once the initial research and planning are complete, it's time to turn your attention to the billboard itself. The focus is impact – because your billboard will need to leave an impression in just a few seconds, in most cases, and simplicity is king.

Billboard design is somewhat different from other advertising formats, and so an illustration or imagery and captions you use within digital advertising, broadcast media or print media may not be instantly transferable to a billboard format.

The best billboards say everything they need to in as little as eight or nine words, but leave no doubt about the brand the billboard is representing or what it is communicating. We can provide suggestions throughout the design process, but we would advise thinking about decisive calls to action, high-colour graphics that stand out, and memorable formatting that a viewer will be able to instantly recall.

If you’re looking at moving ads, this stage is equally important, where you want to maximise the responses you generate, while using your billboard space to extract optimal returns – using tracking and monitoring to oversee performance.

4. Evaluating Impressions or Engagements From Billboard Advertising

Seeing your billboard in all its glory is a brilliant moment, and unveiling a vibrant, bold and attention-grabbing billboard is a moment to savour! However, this is where the next phase of your marketing project gathers pace – where we utilise mapping, tracking and monitoring to log exactly the responses you achieve, and from where, if you have more than one billboard within your campaign.

This aspect is just as important as any other, since you can see how billboard messaging is aligning with other touch points within the same campaign, or fine-tune your billboard displays based on real-time feedback and reactions.

There are numerous ways to track billboard responses, from using promotional codes, scannable tags and QR codes or footfall monitoring – we can guide you through this at any point, so you know what we look for, and why it matters.

5. Collaborating With a Specialist Billboard Marketing Team

High-profile advertising and integrated promotions are our sole focus, and we work closely with every brand to pinpoint their objectives, make customised suggestions, design high-performance billboards, and report on returns and engagements achieved.

If you’re interested in crafting the perfect billboard display for your brand, or want to compare formats, pricing and advertising durations in Manchester, London, or other high-traffic locations around the UK, we're always here to help.

To learn more, simply complete our quick enquiry form with your contact details and a brief outline of how we can help. One Day will get in touch to discuss your advertising needs and begin building a billboard advertising campaign to optimise the engagement you achieve, within your targeted audience.

To learn more about how we can help with Billboard Advertising in your Local Area, please get in touch with our team!