There may not be a highway in America that you can drive and not see a Cracker Barrel billboard. The southern style restaurant/country store spends nearly half of their advertising budget on billboards and it’s really paying off.
Billboards, combined with the restaurant’s other advertising, have lead to an annual growth rate of 10.4%, according to analysts. Their restaurants are strategically placed near exits and the billboards easily direct customers hungry for home style meals and relaxation to their locations.
So how can we account for this in the age of digital technology and hand held devices that put other ads right in front of our faces? It seems we spend so much time in front of screens, that traditional, real life advertising has more power than it used to. In our digital addiction, we’ve learned to ignore the pop up ads all over the screen, but when we see a billboard we take notice.
That’s not to say that if you choose billboard advertising, you should slack off on your design. You still have to make it pop, maybe even more so than in the past. Cracker Barrel uses witty sayings and pictures of their food to entice customers.
Here are four tips for a killer billboard campaign:
- Follow the lead from other brands using outdoor advertising. If you like what you’ve seen on other billboards, adapt it to fit your brand. Listen to the positive chatter around the campaign and make it work for your ad.
- Create memorable, eye catching visuals for your billboard. Billboards might still have traction, but the best ones stand out from the rest because of what’s on them. Be creative to get viewers engaged with your ad and into your business.
- Most people viewing your ad will be commuting to work or traveling. Make that work for you and play to that audience.
- Traditional vinyl billboards may have some retro appeal now that LED billboards are on the landscape, but that doesn’t mean you can’t modernize your message. Examples include IKEA…they ran a billboard ad cut into four parts and mixed them up, showing a piece of their furniture not put together correctly. It was an ad for their assembly service. A bakery did a billboard made of 13,000 cupcakes. Coke and Carlsburg beer have run ads with taps that serve samples of their products. The possibilities are endless.
If you’re worrying about tracking the success of your campaign, you could try doing billboards as the sole component of your advertising for a bit. That’s what Instacart did. Their increase in subscribers during the campaign gave them an idea of how well it worked.
If you’d like more information about how to get started with your billboard campaign, click here or call 770-391-8528 today!
This article adapted from Drew McLellan’s piece in Entrepreneur magazine.