Picture this: towering billboards, vibrant transit ads, street furniture, and wallscapes that command attention amidst the urban landscape. Out-of-home marketing is the oldest and most resilient form of communicating with commercial interests. Dating as far back as 3000 BC in Thebes, Egypt, the use of papyrus business posters was discovered with ad copy still intact. One fabric factory boasted they’re “…where the best cloth is woven to your desires.”

Or in China’s Song dynasty, around 1,000 AD, a needle poster read “We buy high-quality steel rods and make fine quality needles that are ready for use at home in no time.” Isn’t it kind of eerie how, even when translated, this copy holds up to today’s standards?

Vendors in Italy, Rome, and Greece would carve or paint ads onto boulders and buildings in areas with high foot traffic. Here’s one of a gladiator giving a thumbs up in the direction of a path that leads to an amphitheater used for combat.

So… How do you master OOH marketing? Where do you start? Let’s start with the needed context.

1. What is OOH marketing?
2. What are examples of OOH marketing?
3. What is an example of OOH branding?
4. What’s an example of digital OOH?
5. What are some best practices for OOH marketing in 2024?
6. How do you measure OOH marketing?

What is OOH Marketing?

OOH, or Out-of-Home marketing, is the art of capturing consumer attention when they’re on the move. Think of it as branded graffiti decorating the city walls of consumer consciousness, always there, always making a statement. If you’re out and about, and you see an advertisement that isn’t on a personal device, that’s most likely out-of-home advertising.

The streets reward vigor. A one-person team with cardboard signs, a staple gun, and telephone poles mapped out in their head is no less a pristine example of OOH advertising than a team of 10 with a $1M budget.

In terms of revenues, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) estimated that US streets, subways, and more generated $1.96B in 2023 — just over a 1% increase year over year. There are around 2,100 out-of-home marketing operators in the US, with an average of $9.3M in annual revenues.

Much of that advertising is being done in the form of billboards, of which there are more than 350,000 in the USA. Billboards aren’t the only form of out-of-home marketing, though.

What Are Examples of OOH Marketing?

Out-of-home advertising examples are extremely diverse and can include:

What Is an Example of OOH Branding?

Take a moment. Think of a billboard campaign you remember from a long time ago.

For many readers, one of those billboard campaigns is from Chick-Fil-A.

Chances are, Chick-Fil-A’s billboard ads were seen as a huge risk by some of the team members that created that lasting memory for some of us. Back in 1995, getting the cows up there and anchoring them might very well have cost more than the billboard itself, but we know it was the right decision because those cows have lived well into 2024 encouraging us to do things like “eat mor chicken.”

Even at a great distance, all you really need is to see a bovinated rectangle to know Chick-Fil-A isn’t too far. The consistency and duration of Chick-Fil-A’s billboard campaign is their biggest testament to success at OOH branding. That they’ve achieved brand awareness and sales with cow-themed visuals is also something not to be ignored.

What’s an Example of Digital OOH?

Times Square is one of the most iconic landscapes known for its digital out-of-home advertisements. Their cost? About double – compared to their static counterparts. Digital billboards in Times Square cost between $10,000 – $22,000 per month vs. regular billboards, which hover around $3,000 – $15,000. Digital OOH advertisements are more expensive in general because of a good handful of benefits.

Digital OOH benefits:

• Digital out-of-home ads are easier to buy because ad sales can be automated. This method of buying digital OOH ads is referred to as Programmatic DOOH and saves advertisers lots of time because of how efficient it is compared to manual buying.
• DOOH ads have digital screens with vibrant backlighting that’s more prominent than traditional lamps on printed canvas.
• Animations and dynamic content capture more attention than static images.
• Privacy concerns that plague traditional digital marketing channels vanish because no personal devices are required.
• Real-time data can be plugged directly into the creative, like when Benadryl shared local pollen counts to drive antihistamine sales in the UK.

What Are Some Best Practices for OOH Marketing in 2024?

1. Speak With Brevity

You don’t have a lot of time to communicate with your target audience. When someone’s looking at an OOH advertisement, they’re very often moving. Don’t give them something that requires them to slow down.

2. Leverage Past Learnings

Typically, organizations that have a budget for billboards also have digital ad budgets. Ad platforms like Meta offer a wonderful testing ground for different creatives and messaging. Users on Meta and other social platforms will go so far as to actually tell you what they think of your ads, even if you don’t ask them.

By testing different creatives and messaging before rolling out an OOH campaign, you can use assets already known to have a proven built-in audience. You don’t want to roll the dice when you put OOH ad units up, and it’s great when you can prove you aren’t rolling the dice with something tangible, like metrics from previous ads.

3. Be Persuasive and Bold

You need your most effective comms here. Turn the volume up as loud as you possibly can without jeopardizing branding or trust. This isn’t the place to say, “Sign up today.” Many people have seen this phrase more than 5,000 times in their lifetime. Hit them with verbiage that forces them to read the end of the phrase or sentence.

4. Factor Audience Distance in Your Creative

The distance you are from your screen right now is much closer than the average distance between your future OOH audience and your copy. I know what you might be thinking; “But billboards are 48 feet wide … so it’s okay if they’re far. It should all still translate, right?” No, fellow marketer! Make your OOH text a little bigger than your typical (digital) creative assets.

5. Physically Visit Your OOH Ad Locations and Research Them Before Purchasing the Ad Unit

Playing on the environment and adding something innovative to the ad that ties into the surrounding area isn’t the only benefit. There are also (rarely) viewability issues with locations that you just can’t know until you get there.

Some examples of viewability blockers include:

• Rain: It’s best not to purchase OOH advertising units that rely on foot traffic during the rainiest month in any particular city.
• Foliage: Your OOH ad unit could be partially blocked by foliage that you can’t see in pictures that are used to sell the ad.
• Graffiti: Enough spray paint can invalidate an ad unit. If you’re purchasing wall posters in LA (not to name anyone in particular), walk down the street and do a quick spray paint check on what’s already live.
• Broken Pixels: It happens. Giant vertical or horizontal lines and squares of off-color (or even totally dark) pixels can splotch your DOOH ads. Sometimes, it’s only one or two pixels, but you can also have 15% of the board out of service while clients unknowingly continue to pay full price.

6. Being Clever Can Work

Cleverness is a common theme among those who populate first for “best outdoor ads of all time.” Providing something clever speaks to the soul and can be a true breath of fresh air for someone rightfully numbed by your typical “ACCIDENT? CALL NOW!” injury attorney billboard. It should be no surprise these billboards are strategically placed in high-traffic areas where accidents can occur.

What is surprising, though, is the frequency at which injury attorneys are featured smiling. Now, I get it. You gotta smile. I wouldn’t advise an injury attorney not to smile for their billboard. I mean, just look at Mr. Pritchard here. His smile is damned fantastic.

At the same time, 42,939 US drivers die annually behind the wheel. So, why do we expect injury attorneys to smile in their out-of-home marketing? It could be because, at this moment, our happy congregation and opportunity with the Pritchard injury firm supersedes anything that has happened in the past.

It’s this juxtaposition of smiling and the subject matter of escaping death that can feel so novel when you look at it through the lens of whether or not real-life examples of dystopia could exist in OOH marketing, but I digress. Let’s talk about measurement.

How Do You Measure OOH Marketing?

If you’ve been spoiled by the dashboards of digital platforms that tell you every iota of information you could ask for, prepare to take a small hit to attribution. The reporting aspect of OOH marketing is not as great as that of its digital counterparts.

• Unique Identifiers: QR Codes, Email Addresses, Hashtags, Phone numbers, Promo codes, and URLs specific to your out-of-home campaign can be tied directly back to your efforts. These are your best bets for attribution.
• Foot/Car Traffic: Estimates of foot traffic specific to your target area can be used to derive how many people could have seen your ads.
• Web Traffic / Social Mentions: A spike in website traffic that corresponds to the time and geo-location of the OOH campaign can be an acceptable indicator of impact.
• Surveys: A geo-specific before and after survey to measure lift in awareness is one way to test the effectiveness of an OOH campaign. Surveys can be done via Google, various third parties, targeted social media polls, or in person at places like malls.

There’s a near-infinite number of approaches one could take to the streets for their out-of-home ads. Nature rewards successful outcomes for those marketing efforts no differently than it does a primal animal marking its territory to claim the resources that come with it. 

The post Things that make you go “OOH:” The Ultimate Guide to Mastering OOH Marketing in 2024 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Does LinkedIn do lookalike audiences?
• What is the difference between predictive and lookalike on LinkedIn?
• What is LinkedIn’s audience expansion feature?
• What is a LinkedIn matched audience?
• What is the difference between matched and saved audiences on LinkedIn?
• Who is LinkedIn’s target audience?
• Final Thoughts

Does LinkedIn do Lookalike Audiences?

Not anymore. On February 29th, 2024, it’s over. LinkedIn will be officially retiring its lookalike audience targeting feature launched in 2019.

Lookalike audiences are widely used by advertisers to expand their existing user base and ad viewers with people who resemble existing customers or other desirable cohorts. Anyone advertising on the platforms below can incorporate lookalikes into their advertising audiences (with some exceptions for products and services related to credit, housing, or lending).

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Google
• Snapchat
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Microsoft Advertising

That’s quite a lot! So, why is LinkedIn getting rid of them? It’s because they’re moving towards a more forward-looking approach to predict future behavior versus lookalikes, which work on behaviors from the past. The changes are so significant… it’s worth renaming the feature altogether.

Social platforms are collectively evolving, and one of the components of that evolution is AI incorporation. LinkedIn’s lookalikes will officially turn into the AI-powered predictive audiences feature (and also audience expansion). Will this make LinkedIn’s predictive audiences more formidable than those platforms above? Incorporating machine learning into predictive audience creation is likely just starting and will eventually make the jump to the other platforms before becoming the industry standard.

Meta and TikTok are already using machine learning to inform their ad delivery, feed presentation, etc., and AI incorporation in other capacities for social platforms is only expected to rise.

Marketers, if you’re reading this before February 29, now is the time to get your audience data in order to create your final lookalike audiences (if, for some reason, you still want to). LinkedIn says they’ll continue to function after the 29th as a “static audience.”

This means no more data will be factored into the development of your lookalike audience, and you can expect no additions or removals of audience members from here on out. No edits either. In other words, there’s not going to be any more continuous replenishing of your pipeline with new prospective leads.

The result? LinkedIn lookalike audiences will become “tapped out” for everyone, and how long that will take is a function of audience size, spend and goal … but there is no escape. Eventually, those who’ve incorporated lookalikes will have reached everyone that LinkedIn thought was relevant to them as of February 29th, 2024.

Rest assured, though, because LinkedIn has a few alternative features that are almost just as well as their lookalike counterpart. The first one of note is LinkedIn’s Predictive audiences.

What Is the Difference Between Predictive and Lookalike Audiences on LinkedIn?

Before we talk about how they’re different, it’s important to understand how they’re similar — because they’re very similar. Lookalikes are a functional equivalent to predictive audiences on Linkedin, just… with more data sources.

Here’s how LinkedIn defines Lookalike audiences:

​​”LinkedIn’s lookalike audiences [feature] combines the traits of your ideal customer with our rich member and company data to help you market to new professional audiences similar to your existing customers, website visitors, and target accounts.”

These are the data points LinkedIn used to create lookalikes:

• Profession
• Educational Background
• Skills
• Company Industry
• Employee Count
• Work History
• Interests & more

Age and gender weren’t on the table when it came to creating lookalikes on LinkedIn. Pre-2019, age and gender were actually incorporated into lookalike audiences on Facebook. This eventually contributed to civil suits that helped inform LinkedIn on which data to incorporate for their own lookalikes. 

Now, when you take a look at how LinkedIn defines predictive audiences, it’s nearly identical. LinkedIn defines a predictive audience as one that’s composed “… of people with similar characteristics to your existing data source who are more likely to convert. To create a predictive audience, we combine your data source and LinkedIn’s AI to automatically generate a new custom audience to use in your campaigns.” Whoa, wait a second. AI? Does this mean targeting is getting better?

You can manually upload anywhere between 300 and 300,000 users to create a predictive audience on LinkedIn. The data points LinkedIn incorporates into creating predictive audiences are as follows:

• LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms
• Manually uploaded customer credentials
• Insight Tag Data (Insight tag data includes visits to your website, timestamp, IP address, referral platform or URL, browser, and device info.

The main one to celebrate here is “manually uploaded customer credentials.” This is the primary benefit of lookalikes, and it isn’t going away. Phew. This is the part of the blog post where fellow marketers can rejoice.

What Is LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion Feature?

LinkedIn defines “audience expansion” as a feature that shows “your ads to audiences with similar attributes to your target audience.” It’s fairly similar sounding to its description for lookalike and predictive audiences. LinkedIn’s audience expansion feature pairs quite nicely with predictive audiences for marketers who want to target users that have similar qualities to their audience of choice.

For example, if you’re targeting business professionals with experience in banking, LinkedIn’s audience expansion could incorporate a broader audience of finance.

It’s just one more way LinkedIn methodically increases your audience size with users who share similar characteristics with adjacent qualities you didn’t include in your original targeting.

What Is a LinkedIn Matched Audience?

Matched audiences let you manually upload lists of customers or even companies to reach on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn defines matched audiences as “…custom audience segments you can use as targeting selections in your advertising campaigns.” With matched audiences, you can actually hit specific segments of people. This is the most direct form of audience targeting because you’re reaching an exact group versus an interest-based group.

Matched audiences allow you to directly target users on LinkedIn who’ve:

• Visited a page on your website
• Engaged with your ad
• Viewed your video ad
• Submitted a lead
• Engaged with your company page or event

The use of matched audiences is perfect for retargeting because you can tap into folks that have already established a proven interest.

What Is The Difference Between Matched and Saved Audiences on LinkedIn?

Advertisers can create saved audiences by selecting specific demographics and interests that align with their target market and saving them for future campaigns. You can save a matched (or modified matched) audience too.

Saved audiences allow advertisers to target users based on predefined criteria such as job title, industry, company size, location, and interests. This is different from matched audiences, which are specific audiences composed of people you upload or create cohorts of based on specific behaviors like video views. Modifying a matched audience with member attributes can be saved for use in future targeting.

Examples of types of brands that benefit from saved audiences:

• Brands with numerous SKUs may want to target different audiences on a regular basis
• Brands that sell one product to different audiences may have different messaging and unique cohorts to deliver tailored creatives to.
• Brands who do A/B testing with audiences of all types can save audiences to avoid the need to manually build them out again.
• Brands who manually create matching or predictive audiences won’t have to produce/upload that audience again when creating campaigns unless they feel like refreshing the list with client-side data.

Who Is LinkedIn’s Target Audience?

LinkedIn’s target audience is business professionals. They come from diverse backgrounds, from seasoned executives to fresh-faced graduates eager to make their mark. LinkedIn’s users devour articles on market trends, career advice, and leadership insights. This is where B2B ads rule. Whether you’re a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley or a chef in Tokyo, LinkedIn provides a platform for revenue to grow.

LinkedIn users have more income than the average social media platform. A recent study from Statista showed that half of U.S. LinkedIn users earned more than $75,000. 21% of its user base earned somewhere between $50,000 and $74,999 and another 21% fell between $30,000 and $49,999. All but 12% earned less than $30,000 per year.

LinkedIn’s user base is one that’s goal-oriented. People connect on LinkedIn to achieve a handful of goals such as:

• Networking: At its core, LinkedIn is a networking platform, allowing professionals to connect with colleagues, peers, industry leaders, and potential clients. LinkedIn provides a convenient and efficient way to connect with individuals across industries and geographical boundaries.
• Career Advancement: LinkedIn serves as an online resume and portfolio for professionals, allowing them to showcase their skills, experiences, and achievements to a global audience. Whether actively job seeking or passively open to new opportunities, maintaining an updated LinkedIn profile can significantly enhance one’s visibility to recruiters and potential employers.
• Brand Building: Not just for businesses, but individuals too, LinkedIn is a platform for brand building and thought leadership. You can establish trust on LinkedIn more than you can on other platforms. By regularly sharing insights, industry news, and original content, users establish themselves as experts in their field and build credibility within their professional community.
• Learning and Professional Development: LinkedIn is a treasure trove of resources for learning and professional development. Through features like LinkedIn Learning, users can access thousands of courses covering topics ranging from technical skills to leadership development. Additionally, engaging with industry-specific content and participating in discussions within LinkedIn Groups can broaden one’s knowledge and keep them informed about trends and best practices in their field.
• Lead Generation and Business Development: For businesses, LinkedIn offers opportunities for lead generation and business development. Through targeted advertising, content marketing, and outreach efforts, companies can attract potential clients, customers, and partners. LinkedIn’s advanced search features also allow businesses to identify and connect with decision-makers and key stakeholders within their target industries or organizations.
• Recruitment and Talent Acquisition: LinkedIn is a go-to platform for recruitment and talent acquisition. Employers can use the platform to post job listings, search for candidates based on specific criteria, and engage with passive talent. With features like LinkedIn Recruiter, companies can streamline their hiring process and reach a larger pool of qualified candidates.

Final Thoughts

Lookalike audiences are going away for good on LinkedIn, but for all intensive purposes, you can still reach people who resemble folks in lists you manually upload with predictive audiences.

While lookalikes’ original targeting options appear to have been limited, the ability to manually upload leads and target folks who resemble them didn’t go anywhere. In fact, AI is now enhancing that audience creation process. Could ROI go up from here?

Curious to see what AI can do for audience creation and ROI…

The post Are They Really Gone? LinkedIn Lookalike Audiences Are “No More” appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

I think it’s safe to say the industry is inflated. At any given moment, there could be more than 10,000 digital marketing agencies willing to take your business… for better or for worse. Here’s what to consider when hiring the right growth marketing agency.

How Do You Select a Growth Marketing Agency to Hire?

Your business goal should determine your agency selection. When you begin your search for growth marketing agencies to work with, try including your industry in your search. If you’re in the healthcare industry, you’ll want a “healthcare marketing agency” sooner than you’d want a generic one. To help you get a better idea, here’s more on types of agencies out there.

Growth marketing agencies that specialize in your industry will naturally rank higher in search for the industry-specific keyword you searched for. Ranking within the first page or two is a great testament to that agency’s success. The same know-how that got them there can now be unlocked by you and your team if you so choose. The growth marketing agencies on the first couple pages of Google will likely be more expensive to hire than agencies that show up on pages 3+, and for good reason.

Most agencies feature brands they’ve worked with on their website. Looking up the current health of those brands is a great indicator of the long term effects that particular agency can have on your business. If a brand tells you they improved ROI for a client by 250%, but that client no longer exists, it means the 250% wasn’t enough. Sounds like a big number, right? It’s a great time investment to do the needed digging.

Already have a few agencies in mind but don’t know how to choose the right one?

What Should You Ask A Growth Marketing Agency Before You Hire Them?

Ask the world of them. Ask them for case studies, previous client testimonials, and hard numbers. What’s their client renewal rate? How long has everyone on the call been with the agency? Where were they before?

It sounds like a lot to ask, and it might feel a bit nosey … but the truth is, even after you’ve asked these questions above, there’s still a good deal to learn about which digital marketing agency you should hire.

Ask them for channel-specific success stories from marketing campaigns of clients in your industry. Ask them for exact pricing that’s tailored to your needs instead of the whole shebang they may be trying to upsell you on.

Let’s say you’re meeting a Google or Meta ad expert from an agency for the first time. Go snag a question or two off of a Google Ads/Blueprint Certification exam to see how they respond. If you’re trusting a small group of individuals to carry out a $1M monthly Google campaign, there isn’t room for error. Prod away, but not with antagonizing intent.

You want to give them an opportunity to sell you on their genius. It’s totally fair to expect that a marketing geek will handle a geeky question by geeking out with you. To ensure yours is a high-caliber candidate, geek out with them you must.

If you aren’t sure what questions to ask, here are some 2024 SEO trends to get the ball rolling. What are some major predictions the candidate you’re talking to has about the future of SEO? In a perfect world, they’d have a few strong opinions!

What Are Some Green Flags To Look Out For When Hiring a Growth Marketing Agency?

• Website Quality: Their website needs to be extremely polished. There’s no excuse for anything less when it comes to being a digital growth marketing agency. How else can you establish your ability to obtain leads without having a conversion rate optimized piece of digital art of your own?
  
  It should also be obvious that a marketing expert wrote the copy on their website. Did they entice you creatively with a unique CTA, or are they simply asking you to “click here to talk to us?” You’re going to be tapping into whatever copywriters and marketers they’re using for their own website, so make sure you’re impressed before you strike up a convo.
  
• Ranking High: The likelihood you’ll rank higher in search goes up if the agency you’re talking to ranks higher. If you have some other goal that’s not SEO/AEO related, it’s still a solid indicator for an agency you’re considering hiring to rank within the first 2 pages of Google, given the multitude of agencies out there.

• Specialization: Everyone is a PPC expert. Everyone is an SEO expert. It doesn’t necessarily mean these folks are experts in your industry. In a perfect world, you’d have evidence this is going to work for you. If you’re a SaaS, your extended growth partner better be a bit “SaaSy” already, or you’re going to be the guinea pig. You shouldn’t be the first type of client in your industry to hire any particular marketing agency.
  
• They’re a partner in growth: The team you hire needs to identify as more than just a marketing agency. You want an extended famiglia. You want the agency you’re hiring to actually share your marketing goals. If your goal is high-intent service quality leads, but your agency contact has more of a focus on internal goals like retention, upsells, and lowering employee turnover, there’s going to be a disconnect.
  
  The agency should see itself as your internal team, and the line between the agency’s goal and the client’s goal should be nonexistent.
  

What Are Some Red Flags To Look Out For When Hiring a Growth Marketing Agency?

• Excessive Hyperbole: There are charlatans out there who have mastered this as a full-time language. If you’re listening to a pitch, and they’re spending 20 minutes talking about “…providing a framework for growth via a cohesive team that develops proven, measurable lift with strategic, results-oriented, dynamic data approaches…” just get off the call. It’s fluffy, disingenuous cockamamie that can envelop the senses and hemorrhage your spend. Proceed with caution if you find one of these Jedi-like wordsmiths. The hyperbole-speak is often born from marketers’ inability to demonstrate results. It’s okay in small doses.

• Stock Photos: Social media and web users don’t respond to stock photos. If your go-to-market strategy involves ads or a website that resembles Shutterstock photos (with respect to our friends at Shutterstock), you’re going to have a hard time outperforming those brands that have more creatively designed assets. You can comb through the library of any active client on Meta by searching for them to see firsthand the ads that are being run on their behalf.
  
  If an agency is comfortable telling you they’re running ads for Client X on Meta, go through their ads yourself to make sure you love what you see. Now, there is a universe where stock photography does entice users, but you’ve got to be spot-on with your delivery to resonate.

• A Pushy or Automated Sales Team: A good agency will pull you in, not push you. If you’re receiving 5 consecutive emails from “Rick@agency.com,” that’s likely a computer sending those messages under the guise of a person … even though they’re signed with an individual’s name. It’s something of a programmatic fishing net. Now, there may be an actual Rick on the receiving end of those outbound emails, but great agencies typically don’t have outbound efforts. They have too many leads as it is. Good client communication is marked by trust and transparency. The people you’re talking to should sound indistinguishable from internal team members in the sense that your business goal is front of mind.
  
• Upsell Mentality: If you don’t need organic social, for example, but an agency is trying to convince you otherwise, it might be because they’re focused on their own goals instead of yours. If you get a sense there’s a greater concern on the agency’s part for striking a big deal than there is figuring out your actual growth levers that need an investment, don’t move forward. A good sales team will have mROI at the front of mind. It should be obvious that your growth is more important than the growth of the agency on every call you’re on.

Final Thoughts

It comes down to the culture of the people behind the agency you’re talking to. If they’re always looking for the bigger, better deal, it’s going to complicate things when it’s time to focus on lean and efficient growth. If they identify as team members of your own – that’s what you want. Make sure you spend enough time talking with the agency you plan to hire to give yourself as much runway as you can to pick up on all the red and green flags you’ll find along the way.

The post Red and Green Flags to Look Out for When Hiring a Marketing Agency in 2024 appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.