Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It’s no secret that big data has changed the world. Capturing and processing information at scale have impacted every sphere of our lives, including health, wealth, business and leisure activities. Advertising is no exception, and marketers continue to discover how data empowers them to rethink promotional strategies. The enormous outdoor advertising market, which is projected to be worth $34.4 billion by 2027, is a prime arena for companies to apply data to boost their marketing activities.
Discover how to optimize outdoor advertising and spur your company’s growth by harnessing and applying data in your marketing plans.
Related: It’s Time to Shift Your Advertising Budget to Outdoor Media. Here’s Why and How to Do It.
Using data in outdoor advertising
All advertising strategies depend on specific criteria for success. To implement an out-of-home (OOH) campaign, marketers need in-depth knowledge of the target audience, recognition of the prospect’s media channel preferences and an understanding of consumer behavior concerning the product.
Big data provides valuable intelligence on these issues, including what advertising methods work and which don’t. Analyzing data and applying the insights enables your enterprise to maximize specific OOH media, such as billboard advertising, digital out-of-home (DOOH) and even wild posting tactics.
With the detailed analytics available and the right tools to use them, you can now optimize your outdoor campaigns beyond any previous capability.
Related: Outdoor Advertising Is Conquering. Why Aren’t You Using It?
Applying data analytics in outdoor advertising
Data analytics is the processing and examination of datasets and the drawing of conclusions about the information they contain. Business intelligence derived from analytics enables you to create OOH advertising strategies focused on the needs and preferences of the people passing through each touchpoint.
The types of outdoor advertising analytics you can generate include descriptive analytics and predictive analytics. The first interprets historical data to identify trends and patterns and determine what happened in the past, spot potential problems, or uncover opportunities for improvement. The second — predictive analytics — uses statistics and modeling techniques to project future outcomes and performance.
Generating useful metrics and insights
The intelligence delivered by data analytics allows OOH marketers to segment their audiences effectively, determine media placements and audience movement patterns, and use performance metrics to optimize their outdoor advertising campaigns.
For example, location analytics add a layer of geographical information to datasets to generate more valuable insights. These might include audience saturation, the population’s purchasing power and brand affinities, and the product categories that usually do well in each location.
Mobility analytics provide information about foot traffic, peak hours in specific locations, and the hours of highest demand. When you know in detail which consumers will be exposed to your advertising, your company is in a much better position to maximize its return on investment.
Determining data validity
It’s one thing to have access to a ton of data and quite another to know that it’s valid and you can rely on it to improve your campaigns. Bad data is a perennial problem, with Gartner estimating that poor-quality information costs organizations an average of $12.9 million annually.
If inaccurate or unreliable data make their way into a company’s outdoor advertising analytics, the resulting poor strategy choices could be devastating for both the marketing department and the company as a whole. To ensure decision-making accuracy, you need to ensure you’re using data that has been validated. Companies can use first-party data that belongs to them, combined with second- and third-party data purchased from reputable suppliers. Examples of this type of quality data include Geopath’s impression numbers and their Insights Suite for audience measurements.
Related: Marketers, Turn Your Data Literacy into a Data Superpower
Benefits of data analytics in outdoor advertising
Data analytics delivers multiple benefits for outdoor advertisers. The intelligence provides a 360-degree, unified view of the customer’s journey, including all their interactions with the company.
Purchase insights: Evaluating OOH impressions in tandem with your website activity, social media engagement and digital chat records offers insight into customer needs and wants and helps you clarify the consumer’s typical path to purchase.
Audience targeting: With analytics, you can see which customers contribute the highest percentage of your revenue. You can also identify customers with the highest lifetime value and those who consistently share positive information about the brand. This information enables you to define your “ideal customer” characteristics, which creates valuable insights for audience targeting based on these metrics.
Customer personalization: Consumers these days typically expect highly relevant offers and messaging across all their media channels, not just OOH. Analytics insights support more personalized outdoor advertising designed for each target segment. This tactic benefits the customer journey and increases your chances of making a sale.
Effective iteration: Analytics enables precise performance measurements across all your campaigns and marketing channels, including OOH. These insights allow you to identify real-time improvement opportunities and iterate your actions mid-campaign to achieve them.
Accurate forecasting: Performance projections are complex because they include multiple campaign variables, but analytics enable you to examine past performance and make more accurate future predictions. Scenario modeling helps identify likely outcomes of an OOH campaign depending on external factors. This allows you to accurately forecast lead volumes and conversion rates and take more effective actions.
Improved ROI: By analyzing the performance of each channel and platform, including OOH, social media, email, websites, smart TV and direct marketing, you can identify those performing best for any given market segment and customer journey point. Based on this data, you can reallocate your ad spend and improve your ROI.
Organizations that use data-driven insights to inform their outdoor advertising strategies typically experience a 10% to 30% improvement in overall marketing performance. Data takes the guesswork out of outdoor and billboard advertising. It helps you optimize your marketing budget, improve your customer experience, and understand which channels, touchpoints, and strategies work. And insights like that are invaluable when it comes to increasing ROI.
