Amplifying your direct sales team with ecommerce for OOH comes with a host of benefits and is a great way to drive extra revenue for your Out-of-Home business. By making your inventory available to buy online you’ll capture long tail advertisers efficiently, and allow them to purchase from anywhere, at any time and in any language or currency they choose.

There are a few companies doing this well already, take a look at JC Decaux’s Mon Affiche in Belgium, Global Outdoor in the UK or GSTV in the US.

But for your OOH store to be successful, you cannot simply build it and expect them to find you. You’ll need to support it with a robust marketing plan to ensure you reach the right advertiser at just the right moment.

In this article we’ll look at five tried, tested and almost free strategies for marketing an online store for OOH.

Set goals

First things first, you need to understand what success means for your business and set some goals to keep your team on track. For most businesses, money in the bank is the most important metric and an easy one to measure through an ecommerce store.

But additionally, you might want to measure your success against other, less direct metrics. Is your online store driving more enquiries to your direct sales team? Perhaps brand new advertisers have discovered your poster sites? Or maybe you’re seeing greater retention of existing customers who are impressed by your new service?

Figure out what success means to you then set your team some SMART goals to aim for.

Turn traffic into revenue

Unless you’re just starting out, you probably have a strong online presence with established traffic already. Nurturing that traffic and converting it into revenue is your website’s most important job. So why delay and risk disappointing customers who are ready to purchase, by making them fill in an annoying form in the hope that someone will call them back? By which time they may have changed their mind or worse, heard from your competitor.

By adding an online store to your OOH website, you will transform your website into a revenue generating machine that allows visitors to act right away with no barriers to purchase.

Review your website for every opportunity to call a customer to action. Your website will be filled with opportunities to entice advertisers to search your sites and book. Do you have a blog? Pages dedicated to your different OOH formats? Evaluate each page for opportunities to add contextual links and a compelling call to action. Taking the time to do this will not only drive visitors to your online store, it will also encourage them to browse more content and help search engines crawl and rank your site.

Using a pre-built ecommerce platform Console, which has been specifically designed for selling OOH, you can curate the experience to focus on what your customer is looking for.

For example, if your customer is reading a page dedicated to the benefits of advertising in railway stations, you can display live availability for all the sites you have in that environment, without any distractions.

Generate more traffic

It only takes one Google search to know there are a multitude of tactics for driving more traffic to your website. Here are a few that have been tried and tested specifically for getting more eyeballs on your OOH inventory.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

One of the most effective ways to drive quality traffic to your website is by making your site visible to those searching Google for the solutions you sell. This is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Very broadly, there are two main types of SEO: on-page optimisation and off-page.

On-page optimisation

On-page optimisation is about improving the technical workings of your website to be more ‘Google-friendly’. If Google likes the way your site is built and functions, you’re more likely to rank highly for any given search term.

There are a vast array of things you can do here (many of which need a developer to implement) but as a general rule Google likes anything that makes your website more user-friendly for humans. If you choose an off-the-shelf solution like Console by Signkick, a lot of these hard yards will be done for you. But given you’ll usually drive traffic to your homepage or landing page on your site first, you’ll want to make sure it’s optimised too.

Here are just some of the things you can do to make your website more Google-friendly.

• Speed up your site’s loading time by ensuring you’re using the correct size images
• Structure your heading tags correctly
• Make your copy clear and easy to read and break it up with images
• Give those images good ‘alt attribute’ descriptions that allow screen readers to describe them.
• Include plenty of relevant internal links to help people navigate your site.

The list of on-page SEO tactics you can employ goes on and on but even tackling a few things will amplify the work you do next.

Off-page optimisation

Once again, the off-page optimisation list is long, but here are some of the tactics we’ve seen work well when it comes to promoting an Out-of-Home ecommerce store.

It’s no secret that converting a customer who is already looking for a solution will take less work than someone who has no idea they even have a problem. That’s why creating articles or blog posts that answer the questions your customers are asking Google is so powerful. And if you answer it well, Google will reward you by ranking you highly!

Online tools can help you with keyword research however the best resource is often the experience of your sales team. What questions are they always being asked? What language do their customers use? Writing content that speaks directly to the things customers are searching for will always perform well and drive traffic to your site.

Nurture your leads

We don’t have to tell you that nurturing customer relationships is your sales team’s most important job. Just because they are now interacting with an online platform instead of calling them on the phone, doesn’t mean you should leave them to their own devices.

With an OOH ecommerce platform like Console, you can configure things to suit your business’s preference. You can choose to keep it open and allow users to browse the map anonymously. Or you can ask them to create an account before they’re able to search.

Asking for a few simple details like a name and email address can create a golden lead opportunity for your sales team. You can then connect your ecommerce store with your existing email marketing software to capture information about their behaviour on site. Armed with this information, you can amplify the work of your sales team by distilling their knowledge into a series of educational and informative automated emails. Exalt the benefits of OOH to a first time visitor, remind someone who abandoned their campaign before purchasing, reach out to someone who hasn’t been back in a while. All while your sales team concentrates on up-selling, closing bigger deals and nurturing your top clients.

Then test, test, test

Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many different ways to market your OOH inventory’s online store and what works for you depends on your audience. As any marketer will tell you, the secret is to create a plan, test what works (and what doesn’t!) for your business, then repeat. We hope some of these ideas offer up a starting point.

If you are a D/OOH media owner interested in selling your inventory online, take a look at Console, our white-label ecommerce solution. Or get in touch with the Signkick team to discuss how we can help you sell more of your space.

As lockdown restrictions ease, brands and businesses are working on their recovery plans. While it’s hard to predict when advertising budgets will flow into OOH again, one thing is for sure: advertisers will be looking to make the most of every pound they spend.

So when they turn to the trusted medium of Out of Home to rebuild we, as an industry, have a duty to use every tool in our arsenal to help them. We are experts at broad reach. Masters of impact. We can build brand awareness like no other medium. But there’s one aspect we’ve been neglecting. One research-backed weapon for increasing Out of Home’s effectiveness: Dynamic Creative.

What is Dynamic Creative?

Dynamic Creative is using data to deliver the right creative content, on the right screen at the right moment.

Using Dynamic Creative in Out of Home allows a brand to speak to its audience in the way that they want, providing consumers with more reactive and relevant content. OOH has traditionally been known as a broadcast medium that enables a brand to tell a story. But with dynamic, the story or message can be tailored to the moment, to the location and the context.

Dynamic Creative in OOH is not a new concept. Originally conceived in online display advertising, Castrol’s ‘Right Oil, Right Car’ campaign from Ogilvy Advertising, Mindshare and Clear Channel back in 2009 is credited as the first dynamic campaign. Using speed cameras to detect the make and model of cars, the campaign used that data to talk directly to drivers via the 48 Sheet digital billboard they passed further down the road. Targeted, high impact and very effective. This campaign did not go unnoticed. 

As the world becomes increasingly connected, more sophisticated data is becoming available to those advertising in the offline world. This data offers up a big effectiveness boost for DOOH.

How Dynamic Creative makes Out of Home more effective

Picture this. You’re at a crowded cocktail party (remember those?). It’s a small space and everyone is speaking loudly, competing to be heard. The result is a wall of white noise without any distinguishable meaning. Then suddenly, as clear as day above the hubbub, you hear your own name. It is not spoken any louder and the wall of sound has not subsided. So how were you able to hear it so clearly? One word. Relevance. 

This, argues behavioural scientist Richard Shotton, is the impact dynamic creative can have on an individual in advertising. People are subjected to a staggering 10,000 brand messages a day. Using data to deliver the right message, to the right audience, in the right context makes it relevant to that person. It cuts through the noise to connect directly with the intended audience.

Now, thanks to an industry first collaboration between JCDecaux, Clear Channel and Posterscope, this theory is backed by solid research. ‘Moments of Truth’ is the most comprehensive study conducted on the effect of dynamic creative on consumer brain response, ad recall and sales. 

This study found that displaying contextually relevant creative saw a whopping 32% increase in brain response compared to standard DOOH creative. These contextually relevant ads also increased the average time a person spent looking at the ad by 6% and generated an average sales uplift of 16%.

Overall, their research found that delivering dynamic DOOH advertising that is context relevant both in the timing of the delivery and the content, was 17% more effective. As Clear Channel’s Richard Bon commented “For the first time ever, we have been able to develop empirical, end-to-end insights on dynamic campaigns, that not only inform advertisers why content and context relevancy matters but also offer clear guidance on how to best harness these opportunities to maximise campaign performance.“

A compelling argument to present to advertisers as they plan where to spend their precious recovery budget.

Why we don’t see more Dynamic Campaigns

Since that first Grand Visual campaign nearly ten years ago, examples of dynamic DOOH creative in action have peppered awards ceremonies and conference presentations. But still dynamic campaigns have not become standard. Companies like Grand Visual and Flux can integrate everything from weather data to traffic, flights to football scores, news to car models to create engaging campaigns that perform at scale.

But still, despite compelling anecdotal evidence, industry heavy-weight support and now scientific research, dynamic creative only accounts for around 8% of the UK’s OOH campaigns. This figure according to Glen Wilson, Posterscope MD, who said, “The ability to deploy truly dynamic content across thousands of high quality, networked digital screens is probably the most significant step forward for OOH since the arrival of those digital screens well over a decade ago.  But its potential is still significantly under-estimated, with media spend on dynamically-enabled digital Out of Home representing only about 8% of all DOOH campaigns.”

Given the obvious effectiveness boost and potential return on investment for advertisers, that’s not high. In fact, Grand Visual’s Neil Morris suggests that “dynamic campaigns are few and far between and the DOOH channel has probably gone backwards in terms of the adoption of smarter, data driven, dynamic creative.” He, like many in the industry – including us – believe there are two main reasons for this:

Firstly, there is a perception that delivering dynamic campaigns require big budgets and technical expertise. That’s no surprise given the brands testing the dynamic creative waters have done so with novel campaigns conceived more for award ceremonies, conference rooms and social sharing than on the ground return on investment in mind. 

Secondly, as an industry we are completely preoccupied – nay, obsessed – with programmatic. That obsession is crowding out the potential of other opportunities. That’s not to say programmatic shouldn’t be discussed. It’s just not the only way to deliver dynamic creative. It’s not the only way to maximise Digital Out of Home’s effectiveness.

Unlocking Digital Out of Home’s potential

The creation of dynamic campaigns isn’t our business (though our tech can help facilitate its purchase), we are strong advocates for anything that pushes our medium forward. There is a huge amount of potential to be unlocked through the use of dynamic creative. And it doesn’t need to be complex or require programmatic trading to achieve. Companies like Talon, Posterscope, JC Decaux, Clear Channel are working hard to challenge perceptions, advocate for and build the systems required to drive adoption of dynamic campaigns. Through clever and thoughtful artwork management, creative agencies such as Grand Visual, Flux, Liveposter and Voodooh offer mass personalisation and deliver the right advert for the context, space, environment or feelings of a community. 

Advertisers will be putting every pound’s return on investment under the microscope in the coming months. Through dynamic creative, we have an opportunity to increase our medium’s effectiveness by a whopping 17% and, as an industry, we have the tools and expertise to do it.

Now is not the time to let that opportunity pass us by.

From flights to fast food, everything we could ever want or need is available online, just a few taps away.

But not D/OOH advertising.

Traditionally, purchasing digital and classic OOH has been a cumbersome process for advertisers and media owners alike. Sales teams rely on spreadsheets and advertisers make phone calls (within business hours!) every time they need price and availability. With advertising increasingly bought by the click-to-purchase generation, media owners must meet their demand to buy D/OOH from anywhere at any time. Enter, automated online purchasing and ecommerce for OOH.

A ready-built ecommerce store can get you ahead

With the big players moving slowly in the race to automate, there is a real opportunity for smaller, more nimble media owners to get ahead. Through white-label, cloud-based software, media owners can quickly power an e-commerce storefront that automates the planning and purchase of D/OOH to supercharge sales, transform long tail purchases into profitable sales, and overcome boundaries like time zones, language or currency.

While automation is sometimes met with reservation from media owners, software developers are responding better than ever with tailored solutions that allow media owners to remain in complete control.

For some, however, automation still feels like jumping off a cliff into the unknown. But it certainly doesn’t have to start with a great leap of faith. We recommend a stepped approach to transition your OOH media business to full e-commerce. Start (or even stay!) at step one or dive in where you feel comfortable.

1. Launch a private OOH ecommerce store

For media owners only interested in sharing their inventory with those they know, this option is perfect.

• A closed online platform branded to look like you.
• Only accessible privately to those you have created an account for.
• Live D/OOH price and availability on an easy to search map.
• Pick and choose which panels are listed (and for what price).
• Create secure logins for staff to quickly check price and availability and manage orders.
• Choose to create secure logins for regular clients, empowering them to self-serve from price and availability check to purchase, payment and artwork upload.
  

2. Launch an OOH ecommerce store where users must create an account to gain access

Capture valuable long tail purchases and build a list of potential leads by keeping your inventory behind a login wall. Perfect for media owners seeing success with option one who are ready to open up their inventory (but not completely!) to untapped markets.

• Online store accessible to users who create an account and log in.
• Capture the name, company and email address of valuable leads for your sales team to chase and well as opportunities to cross and upsell.
• Linked from your existing website and branded to look like you.
• Live D/OOH price and availability on an easy to search map.
• Pick and choose which panels are listed (and for what price).
• Customise the price and availability shown to certain clients.
• Create secure logins for staff to quickly check price and availability and manage customer orders.

3. Launch a fully open, e-commerce store (think Amazon for OOH!)

• Open an online store where anyone can search price and availability, but they must create an account to purchase.
• Linked from your existing website and branded to look like you.
• Live D/OOH price and availability on an easy to search map.
• Pick and choose which panels are listed (and for what price).
• Customise the price and availability shown to certain clients.
• Create secure logins for staff to quickly check price and availability and manage customer orders.
• Capture full advertiser details.

It is this scenario many media owners have in mind when staring off that cliff. But operating open ecommerce for OOH isn’t like abandoning your open ledger book at a bar on Friday night. Using software to list your inventory online allows new customers to search, find and buy, while you retain full control over which panels are displayed and for what price. You can even offer tailored pricing to certain clients, allowing them to benefit from national buying power, at the local level.

With good marketing, opening an e-commerce platform for OOH holds unlimited potential to boost your sales success. Better yet, it brings D/OOH to the click-to-purchase generation ensuring you are open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in whichever language, currency or time zone they prefer. But the best part for media owners is the flexibility of automation software that means you don’t have to go full monty to get ahead and start using the world of ecommerce to sell your OOH inventory.

If that sounds like an option worth exploring, take a look at Console, Signkick’s white-label ecommerce storefront for OOH media owners or get in touch with the team.

As our businesses grow, we update and adapt. More orders? More employees. More employees? Bigger office. In the business of Out-of-Home, the same rules apply to media owners. More panels? Bigger sales team and of course ever-growing spreadsheets.

For larger media owners, with a large number of panels, an Inventory Management System is a no brainer. Having a centralised, purpose-built system for checking live availability, placing orders and managing campaigns is well-worth the investment.

But for smaller media owners, with a steady number of sites, you’re probably just fine managing your inventory on a spreadsheet. As the old saying goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Right?

Maybe… except there’s another force set to bring complexity to your spreadsheets quicker than you can say out-of-home. The digitisation of panels and demand from advertisers for more targeted, granular purchasing.

Thanks to significant investment by OOH media owners, DOOH now makes up over 50% of all OOH in the UK and 28% in the US. This digital transformation has been a powerful driver of growth helping the UK OOH industry to rise by 7.3% in Q3 2018. Predictions are for this trend to continue and, as PWC stated in a recent report, “DOOH is bringing with it profound changes to the market as the buying, selling and displaying of the OOH industry is overhauled.”

One of these transformations is in the way DOOH allows buyers to purchase more granular campaigns. This lets them combine DOOH’s strengths as an unskippable, brand-safe, broadcast medium, with the world of online data and metrics. Buying in 8 – 10-second slots mean they can place more precise, targeted and context relevant DOOH ads than ever before.

When it comes to your sales spreadsheet, replacing a paper poster with a digital screen isn’t a one-for-one swap.

What’s the impact of granular buying on media owners?

For media owners, this shift makes for an extremely compelling sales proposition, but an increasingly complex administrative exercise.

For example, one traditional poster sold in the UK’s typical two week booking period has a maximum of 26 potential bookings a year. In the US, most posters are sold on a four-week cycle, making this adjustment even more pronounced.

A typical digital billboard, on the other hand, typically has six slots available in a loop, each 8–10 seconds long. Across one 12 hour day, that’s six potential advertisers – across a year, 2,190 potential unique advertisers. For one person to sell and process 26 bookings – easy. 2,190, not impossible, but pretty unwieldy.

This is where it gets really tricky. Start adding day parts and bookings via automated guaranteed with one-hour windows and your potential daily total is up around 2,016 different advertisers. That’s well over 700,000 bookings per year.

Add flexible bookings and the number of potential advertisers becomes, well, infinite.

An insurmountable task to request of your sales team unaided.

What’s an OOH inventory management system?

Think of an OOH Inventory Management System as a supercharged spreadsheet. It’s a piece of software that keeps a live, centralised record of all locations, availability, bookings, artwork management and campaign delivery (and sometimes accounting too).

Depending on the provider, and your needs, one system might cover the complete process or focus on one area, while connecting to purpose-built software for another.

How will that help media owners tackle this new way to sell D/OOH?

A live, centralised system brings many benefits, including greater efficiency and reduced risk of human error. But perhaps most importantly, an inventory management system is the first step towards being able to connect your inventory with automated buyers. Once you have a live, digital inventory you will (with the right tools) be able to establish connections with the different automated buying platforms such as Posterscope’s ECOS, MediaCom’s Trading Desk and Talon’s Plato.

Some providers of full-service Inventory Management Systems for OOH include:

• Fusion by Key Systems
• SmartBRICS by JC Decaux
• LiveDOOH
• Ayuda
• Aureus by Kinetic

Here at Signkick, while we don’t offer a full-service Inventory Management System, we do offer Connectivity+. This add on to Signkick Trading Bridge is ideally suited to media owners with less than 300 frames. Advancing you from spreadsheets to online visibility of your inventory through an easy-to-use platform, you’ll be able to manage automated bookings and place manual ones, to keep up with your competition.

For larger media owners, with existing inventory management systems, we’ve already pre-built the API connection between Signkick Trading Bridge and Fusion. And we’re ready and waiting to integrate with whoever you choose.

Investing in an inventory management system makes it easy for buyers of the future to choose you and frees your sales team to focus more time on what they do best – sell more space. As Primesight’s Mungo Knott puts it “In the past, media owners have been comfortable making huge investments in high-quality advertising sites rather than software development. Investment is now necessary in inventory management systems to ensure we continue forward as an industry.”