Best Practices for Running a DOOH Campaign

As programmatic DOOH continues to expand across the globe, building and running DOOH campaigns that cut through the noise and generate awareness and positive ROI is becoming increasingly challenging. By putting consideration into building and running your campaigns according to a few best practices, you’re more likely to achieve success.

Define Your Objectives and KPIs

Before beginning a DOOH campaign, it's important to define your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). What is the main goal of your campaign? Is it to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to a website, or increase foot traffic to a physical location? Once you have defined your objectives, you can then determine the KPIs that will help you measure success.

Make it Memorable

Designing a memorable creative is key. Ensure that the message is simple yet impactful enough to capture the attention of your audience on their daily journeys. This means using contrasting color schemes that stand out, straight-to-the-point calls-to-action and incorporating interactivity where possible (e.g. QR codes).

One of the most common missteps we see designers make when building creatives is that they fail to prioritize readability, especially for roadside placements. Researchers have found that the average viewing time of a billboard is four seconds. Given this, Hivestack recommends the KISS-approach to designing creative and keeping it simple. Limit word count to 8 words or fewer and make the logo and call-to-action highly visible.

Make it Relevant

In addition to keeping it simple, marketers should keep it relevant and targeted. Running targeted ads in DOOH can be achieved in a number of ways.

Relevance through Alignment

Your DOOH messaging should align with all the overall values and vision of the brand. This means using the same color scheme, font, and logos across all channels, including DOOH. Don’t cause confusion among your audience by positioning your brand as high-end on one channel and then as cost-effective on another.

Relevance through Context

Contextual targeting is a great way to make your message more pertinent. This could mean advertising on venue types that fit your brand or product. For instance, you might not advertise a mortgage product on DOOH screens found on college campuses, but you would advertise an energy drink there.

Relevance through Targeting

Leverage data to reach your audience on a more targeted scale. Through Hivestack, campaign managers can tap into audiences in a number of ways such as, but not limited to:

Custom Audience Targeting: Build custom audiences based upon the movement patterns of those you’re targeting. With Hivestack, identifying opportunities to reach audiences when and where they’re present in heightened concentrations is a breeze. Custom audience targeting is a sure-fire way to elevate your campaign’s ability to reach the right consumers.

Predefined Audience Segment Targeting: Our platform offers media buyers a range of pre-defined or pre-built audience segments categorized using demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data sets sourced from various industry-leading data partners. Gaining practical knowledge about your target audience and leveraging it accordingly amplifies the effectiveness of your DOOH advertising.

Geo-Location Targeting: Utilize in-map polygon tools to create geofences around points of interest, ensuring your ads run in the desired location. By enabling precision geo-location targeting, the intended message reaches its target, in real-time, wherever they are.  

Make it Measurable

Finally, it's important to measure and evaluate the success of your programmatic DOOH campaign. Use the KPIs you defined earlier to determine whether your campaign met your objectives. If not, use the data and insights gathered throughout the campaign to make adjustments for future campaigns.

Brand Lift Studies are a great way to measure the impact of a campaign by surveying exposed audiences and comparing their responses to those in a control group. Similarly, foot traffic attribution studies measure the impact your campaign had in driving foot traffic to a physical location.

Programmatic DOOH offers a powerful way to reach targeted audiences throughout their daily commutes or journeys outside of their home. By following these best practices, advertisers can ensure their campaigns are effective at capturing more mindshare of the right audience, thus generating a better ROI and meeting campaign objectives.