Social Age: The misleading data of purchasing billboards

Can you recall the last three billboards you’ve seen? Don’t struggle thinking about it, but you can probably tell me three billboards in the Shreveport/Bossier area though. Let me guess…

• A big yellow injury attorney billboard.
• A big red injury attorney billboard.
• The other 10- 20 injury attorney billboards.
• You may also remember that cute little puppy billboard too.

The reason you don’t recall the others is that there is no real call to action from those billboards. Usually, there is a phone number on the billboard advertising the business; but the potential customer is DRIVING at the moment and not in a mindset to get onto to path of purchase. They may try to remember the phone number but they get a call on the way to work, someone is in their parking spot, or maybe the co-worker they’ve been wanting to talk to for weeks says “Good Morning” and BAM your “customer” doesn’t remember they saw a billboard this morning. Their focus has changed.

Billboards are strictly impressions. The only data for billboards is the number of vehicles that drive by it on a daily basis.Whether the billboard has good creative content on it or not, a potential “customer” will probably not take any action towards making a purchase.

But… let’s take a step back and look into who is seeing your billboard. Because in the Shreveport/Bossier area you are paying 1.5- 10k monthly for a billboard your potential customer will not even remember seeing after someone cuts them off in traffic. Let me paint this picture for you because I really want you to fully understand.

You own a pet store (or whatever your business is) and this quarter has been above average. Your pet store has some extra advertising dollars in the bank and your decision to spend it on a billboard. You look into a few companies and decide the billboard on the corner of Airline Drive and Beene Street. You are so excited you even take a picture of you standing underneath it. Now the waiting game- cue musical chair music…

Let’s say for every 100 cars that pass your billboard on a daily basis. 30% of those people do not own a pet, 5% are from out of town, 10% are already customers, 10% like the other pet store across town and another 10% are allergic to animals. This leaves only 35% to buy your pet food/products. You are paying for 100% of these cars to see your billboard with a 0% chance of 65 of the 100 cars will buy your product/service.

Look on the bright side that cute puppy made a lot of people smile today!

But…with a Facebook ad run properly (not done properly- could possibly yield the same results as a billboard) you can target only people who have pets and skip paying for the people who do not or are allergic to them.

Whenever you put advertising dollars into a magazine, tv, radio, billboard or flyers your advertisement is reaching a large portion of people who are not interested in your product/service; which a waste of money. So out of $100 spent; only $30-$60 worth of advertisement will actually be reaching potential customers, people interested in your product/service.

Yet with a Facebook ad, 100% of your dollars are being spent on showing your advertisement to people who are pet owners. If you really facebook savvy, your ads can not only be shown to people who own pets but also advertise to the people that actively buy pet products. You can have control over who is seeing your advertising on Facebook, whereas with billboards you have ZERO control over who is seeing your advertisement.

Done correctly Facebook ads can target any genre of business, not just pet stores. The CPM for a billboard is very overpriced and not very effective at the time we are currently. That doesn’t mean that billboards will forever be out of the equation, They are just overpriced right now for the attention. The driver is the only occupant of the vehicle who sees it because the passengers are not looking at billboards they are on their phones scrolling thru social media. So why not put your product/service in front of where the attention is right now?

Here at Berry Branding, we like to think that we are pretty good at Facebook ads. We would like to show you how we can use the Facebook advertising system to get your business more leads and more sales than your traditional advertising that you are using right now. If you would like to schedule a call with me or meet up please email me at [email protected]