Are you a brand looking to expand their outdoor advertising presence? If so, you’re probably curious about interactive billboards, how they work and how much they generally cost. Digital billboards are a great solution for brands looking to do a little bit more with their poster style advertising and really draw in some attention to their message, new product or service. Digital billboards might not be for everyone, however it’s still good to know the ins and outs of how these powerful attention grabbers work in the advertising world. Keep in mind that not every city will allow digital billboards, so you’ll have to target your advertising appropriately according to local restrictions and regulations. If you’re curious about digital billboards, keep reading for our beginner’s guide to digital billboards!
What Are They Exactly?
Digital billboards are quite similar to regular billboards, except that instead of surface to paste a static ad, they usually have LED screens built in that allow for moving images and more interactive kinds of advertisements. Because they exist in a digital format, you can make consistent updates and changes to your billboard as needed. The good thing about using a screen aside from being able to create more kinds of content is that the LED screen will be much easier to view during the daytime and nighttime hours. Often, sun glare can cause drivers to miss billboards along the highway, and sometimes aren’t lit properly to shine through at night. Digital billboards allow for more interactive content and more visible content at the same time. Let’s talk about what these typically cost companies who purchase digital billboards.
General Price Range
The biggest consideration about digital billboards is the price. These are typically a much larger investment for businesses than traditional billboards and that’s because of the technology they use in addition to the need for working with a design company to help design and update your digital content. So, the price can vary depending on the design company you work with in addition to the location you choose. A digital billboard run in more populous areas such as New York city can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but campaigns in less visible areas will greatly reduce the price. So, depending on your specific goals, budget and location, you could be looking at quite a pricey investment, but one that will certainly bring business into your company.
Kinds of Digital Billboards
When it comes to the kind of display to run, the sky’s the limit with digital billboards. It all depends on how you want customers to engage with your content and what your goals are. Animations and gifs are great examples of digital content that can take all kinds of specific forms depending on your brands aesthetics, identity and again, goals for your marketing campaign. More engaging content allows you to strengthen your brand’s message and send it out to a lot of people, and can increase your brand awareness much more than static advertising would. Examples of digital content for billboards could include countdowns to a sale event or product launch, or a video to promote a sale. Your team’s creativity is the only thing you need to create engaging content.
Benefits of Digital Billboards
The benefits of using digital billboards are many, but it depends on the goals of your brand and the budget you have to produce high quality advertising. For some, this might be too large of an investment to make on advertising. But for other brands who want to target a large swath of audience members and want flexibility in their message, digital billboards are a fantastic option. These are especially great if your brand has a time sensitive message to get out, like a sale or product launch event. If your brand already has a presence in digital spaces like social media, then digital billboards and digital content is a great way to fortify your social media content through your billboards and other digital spaces. So, while they are certainly a more expensive option, they also offer a great deal of flexibility and cross platform syncing of content to fortify the core messages of your brand and target an extremely wide audience.
Digital billboards are a great way to target a wide range of potential customers with just a few creatively designed digital displays to reflect your social media content and images, or to advertise a time sensitive sale, promotion or product launching event. While they are pricier than their static counterparts, they serve as a great way to spread your brand’s message and bring customers to your store, website or social media page. If you think this could be right for your brand, do some research on local areas that you could display a digital billboard!