As a business owner, you have one essential task in addition to providing high-quality goods and services: ensuring that target audiences are aware of them! You have to advertise the products you create or the services you provide to consumers. Perhaps you wish to inform your business investors of your brand’s growth, profitability, and vitality. You might want consumers, investors, potential team members, and community members to know you’re expanding your business to new locations. When you have a message to send to the public, implementing effective and efficient marketing tactics will help you spread the word. A crucial part of getting your message out is knowing who you want to receive it.
A successful marketing campaign is built on the foundation of business owners knowing their target audience. Why should you identify a target audience and market to them? Because it’s impossible—and costly—to try to reach everyone all at once. Advertising campaigns that aren’t aimed at a specific audience can ultimately come up empty because marketing in such a general way resonates with no one. The classic marketing idiom, “a wide net catches no fish,” rings true. Whether you operate a small business or a large corporation, you’ll be able to reach more qualified consumers and compete with others in your industry by targeting your advertising campaigns to members of your defined audience.
Something to consider is that targeting your specific audience doesn’t mean you’re excluding individuals who don’t fit the criteria of your audience. It just means you’re focusing your money, time, and efforts on the groups most likely to buy from you. You can reach these buyers and generate business leads through out-of-home (OOH) advertising tactics like billboards, bus stop ads, and wallscapes. OOH can help you get the job done in an affordable, efficient, data-backed manner. If you want to reap the benefit of billboards, bus stop ads, and more in Chicago and seek a Chicago billboard company to make it happen, look no further than View Chicago. The team at View uses their ad expertise and knowledge of this great city to help you explore targeted outdoor advertising campaigns by way of marketing to your audience’s demographics by neighborhood, hyperlocal advertising, and more.
Target by Neighborhood: Knowing the Neighborhoods Can Inspire Creative Billboard Ideas, HotSpots, and Wallscapes
In every advertising campaign we do here at View Chicago, we help clients make the most of one of the city’s greatest assets: the unique demographic breakdowns of each neighborhood. Chicago is truly the city of neighborhoods, filled with different audiences of diverse incomes, ages, cultural backgrounds, and more. When you know which areas your target audience members live and conduct business in, our experts know how to use demographic data to help you place creative, eye-catching billboard ads, HotSpots, and wallscapes in the areas audiences frequent most.
Geotargeting and Hyperlocal Advertising Can Help You Effectively Reach Your Target Audience
Our clients get to leverage robust OOH marketing campaigns built on geotargeting and hyperlocal targeting. Geotargeting refers to strategically choosing a location your target consumers frequently walk, drive, or ride by, so they can easily and repeatedly see your billboards, wallscapes, Wild Postings, and other OOH ads. It delivers the right message to them at the right time.
We help clients follow a focused approach. Billboards—especially those located along busy roads—are so large that they can naturally catch many people’s eyes, including those who aren’t in your target audience. Using more neighborhood-focused and smaller-scale formats such as HotSpots and Wild Postings empowers you to advertise your brand in a way that meets and greets your target audience where they live, shop, eat, and engage in other activities.
Personalized hyperlocal advertising methods appeal directly to consumers by aligning with their purchasing habits. Suppose you own a shoe business and want it to gain the attention of Chicago’s most frequent shoppers. Consider opening and advertising a store near luxe clothing shops and boutiques in the River North neighborhood; this area receives recognition as the go-to place for shopaholics because it’s the most stylish, urban, and trendsetting neighborhood.
Target by Culture: Speak Your Audience’s Language
At View Chicago, we help clients celebrate the cultural diversity of our great city in respectful and inclusive ways that establish credibility. It’s beneficial for businesses of all sizes and industries to recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate that the consumers they focus their marketing efforts on may come from various cultural backgrounds.
In Chicago, where Hispanic audiences are growing, for example, including the Spanish language and culturally specific images in advertisements can be beneficial. We’ve helped large companies like Spotify succeed at targeted advertising in neighborhoods with a solid Hispanic cultural presence. The Wild Posting we created for Spotify was successful for several reasons, including:
It was located at eye level in a heavy-pedestrian area
Wild Postings work well for campaigns you can pair with social media campaigns
Wild Postings are great for campaigns geared toward millennials— one generation Spotify is targeting
The ad was inclusive of and geared toward Hispanic audiences, so it included Spanish text and advertised Latinx artists. Incorporating Spanish and other languages into OOH ads can become a natural addition to brand marketing as the Hispanic audience, and audiences of different cultures continue to grow in Chicago’s communities. Doing so means being careful to use a professional translator or native speaker when creating content rather than relying on Google Translate, which can produce errors that make your audience think you don’t care about them, their culture, or their language. When working with us and using different languages to speak directly to audiences of diverse cultures across Chicago, you can trust that we know the best locations and formats to speak to your key demographics.
Target Customers with Directional Ads or at the Point of Sale
When you think of point-of-sale advertising, you may think of sweets and magazines displayed along the checkout counters where customers line up to make their purchases and leave. Cleverly marketed and conveniently placed, these items encourage shoppers to make last-minute, impulsive purchases.
Out-of-home ads, too, can be point-of-sale ads themselves. A strategically placed, well-designed billboard near or at your location can boost sales, whether it’s providing general information about your brand or making a direct call to action for viewers to heed. A creative wild posting on the side of your storefront may be the extra push a passerby needs to stop in. Or, a directional sign 3 blocks from your restaurant can help build awareness of your brand in the surrounding area and increase foot traffic.
For example, McDonald’s chose to place this directional ad on a bus shelter near the bustling O’Hare Airport, where Chicagoans and out-of-towners pass by all day and night. The ad creative shows delicious cold coffee drinks, encouraging tired travelers to stop by as they pass through.
Stay on Target and Get Creative
Targeted approaches boost outdoor marketing campaigns and generate leads, but they’ll only go as far as your ad creative. Along with having the right location for your OOH ads, you should have eye-catching, memorable content that intrigues your audience and makes them want to purchase your goods and services. Our professionals at View Chicago use local expertise and knowledge about Chicago and its neighborhoods to help clients effectively and creatively build emotional bonds with target audiences. Creative billboard ideas allow consumers to see the details of their everyday life in Chicago broadcast on a large scale. When your billboards, bus stop ads, or wallscapes reference local delicacies, events, songs, notable sports moments, landmarks, and more aspects of Chicago culture cleverly, your brand demonstrates relatability and authenticity that your consumers are drawn to.
At View Chicago, our marketing experts can help you find placements across Chicago and its suburbs that will make your message resonate with viewers. We’ll craft a plan unique to the image you want for your brand, relatable and targeted in a way that suits your audience and motivates them to take action. Reach out to us to get started with developing an OOH advertising campaign that utilizes targeted approaches according to your advertising goals and financial needs. We’ll provide a custom quote with exact numbers based on your campaign objectives.