Quick tips
Understand your objective before you set out to build a campaign. This will inform all of your decisions - from the creative you use, the screens you pick, and the schedule your campaign will follow.
Your campaign object should not be as basic as “to make more sales” - that’s a given for any marketing and advertising. But your customers physically can’t make a purchase from a sign. So, once they’ve seen your message - what do you need them to do next and to what end?
E.g. A sports club's ultimate sales goals might be to sell more tickets and merchandise, because that’s how they prove market relevance. But the path to this is to generate a strong community of supporters and fans. Their campaign objective therefore is not to sell more tickets, but to sell the experience of being a fan/belonging to a club. They will track this by comparing enquiries, new member sign ups, and website activity that indicates interest in the community.
Prioritise creative and strategy. CAASie is a fantastic tool for placing your ads, but if those don’t resonate with the people who see them, the impact just won’t be there. Your creativity is your greatest asset.
What makes a good campaign?
There are no rules to what makes a good campaign. It’s always nice to think that one might go viral, or at least be remembered for a long time. But that’s not how most campaigns go, and if you don’t have a lot of cash to throw at it, it probably won’t happen.
Therefore, a good campaign is one that’s tailored to your objectives/goals. Even those famous publicity stunts by Ikea, Koala and similar, had a very specific purpose and method to reach the end goal.
A good campaign on a budget, is tailored to your goals, and very closely to your preferred/target audience. But remember that the audience could be the buyer of your product/service, not necessarily the end user.
E.g. A retirement village has two audiences; 1) The retiree, and 2) their children. Whilst advertising retirement living in a women’s gym might seem counterintuitive to reaching the retiree audience - a message targeted at daughters who are helping their parent/s might be perfectly positioned. But you’d have to get that message right in order for it to resonate.
Creative and strategy. Your creativity is your greatest asset.
Ad/artwork optimisation
Your ad is by far the most important piece of your campaign. It’s a strange concept to think of, but ads themselves can be “optimised” to maximise your return on investment.
There are no hard and fast rules about what makes a good artwork, but there are some guidelines you can follow. In general, it helps to do the following:
- Clear message
- Eye-catching visuals
- Consider the format
- A compelling call-to-action
It can also help improve engagement if the content is contextually relevant. A really obvious example could be promoting hot cocoa when it’s cold, and iced drinks when it’s hot. But it can also come down to the subtleties of the locations/venue types that you’re targeting. Are people in a rush, stuck in traffic, bored/waiting, being active? This all changes their appetite for, or reception to, certain content.
This also applies to the use of static, animated or video creatives. We all know that video is the most engaging, but it’s not always the most appropriate option.
E.g., If your audience is in a rush or busy place, like a shopping centre - the use of animated components can grab attention, but everything is already on screen. Viewers don’t have to wait for the next few frames to take it all in.
Date & Schedule Targeting
There are a lot of controls within the CAASie platform that enable you to better target your campaigns. Your dates (and campaign durations) are important to keep in mind for the objective of your campaign, and your schedule is important for reaching the right people and/or reducing wastage.
Dates/Durations
Before selecting your campaign dates, consider how long your campaign or promotion will run for, and whether you need to build up to a certain date. This usually comes down to the objective or the purpose behind your campaign.
As a general rule, short term campaigns (up to 2-3 months) are great for announcements and short-term promotions. Such as;
- Sales/limited time offers
- Event tickets or registrations
- Event/community announcements
- Product launches
- Competitions
- Recruiting announcements
Whereas longer term (3+ months) or monthly-ongoing campaigns are great for long-term objectives, such as;
- Being top of mind/the go-to of your industry
- Becoming a house-hold name (even if it’s only within your immediate catchment zone)
- Building brand/product loyalty
- General awareness of products/services
If you’re new to CAASie, we do recommend the monthly-ongoing campaigns, rather than a continuous one, since it provides an easier way to control and compare different month’s activities.
Schedule
Remember that your schedule is like an on/off switch - it’s not a guarantee that ads will show at that time, simply a way to control when they’re allowed to. You want your campaigns to be on at times that are relevant to a) your audience and b) the venue types within the campaign.
There are very few campaign’s that we recommend stay “always on”, because there are times where there may be very few or even no people present. Not to mention that even though some gyms and petrol stations are open/trading 24 hours - it doesn’t mean that your ideal audience will be there at all times of the day.
E.g. Majority of new mothers probably don’t frequent the gym at 1am.
It’s also much easier to set a highly specific schedule when your campaign only has one venue type, or multiple that have the same movement in traffic.
E.g., Both gyms and petrol stations might be appropriate after working hours, but a GP generally will not be open.
Read more about schedule optimising here
Budget tweaking
When we talk about tweaking budgets, there's actually two things to consider. The first is your campaign budget - i.e. how much credit you want to spend on the whole campaign. The second is how quickly that budget is being spent (pacing/hourly available budgets).
Up until your campaign goes live, you can tweak both of those things endlessly and without limit. But once that campaign has started, you’ll want to be a bit more cautious. You can still do it, but it might have unwanted effects on your campaign performance.
Budget
As a general guide, try your best not to adjust your campaign budget mid-campaign. Increasing your budget is generally ok, because you’ll just serve more ads if possible, but decreasing it can cause some interruptions to your ads.
If you do decrease your budget (without also decreasing the overall hours in your campaign), be aware that CAASie is going to restrict ad plays, usually quite heavily - and possibly stop them entirely for some time. That’s because she’s calculated that your ‘new’ budget won’t last until the end date at the current spend rate, and she needs to re-calibrate.
This effect might be mitigated if you have set your own spend rate, rather than letting CAASie auto-calculate it for you. However, if this rate would also normally last the entire campaign duration, you will likely run out of budget before the end date if you don’t tweak this setting at the same time.
Pacing
Tweaking pacing settings is one of our favourite controls on CAASie. But it is somewhat advanced, in that there are a few steps to take and it can be “hands on'' for the duration of your campaign.
When you tell your campaign to pace at e.g. $10 per hour, you have to know that $10 is sufficient to use all of the campaign budget, but not so high that you run out before the end date.
It’s really straight forward to calculate - simply divide your total remaining budget by your total remaining hours. These two figures are pre-calculated for you in the dashboard.
E.g. If you’d already spent $100 out of $1000 - you have $900 left. That was one day (5 hours scheduled) out of 10 days (50 hours scheduled) - so you have 45 hours remaining.
$900/45hours = $20/hour.
You can safely set your pacing to $20 per hour. But keep in mind that you will likely need to adjust the spend rate regularly to ensure that you won’t have any unspent budget at the end of your campaign.
Just like the campaign budget, try not to slow the pacing down, or do it gradually so that your campaign is not interrupted.
It’s also a useful tool for troubleshooting. If your campaign is struggling to play/spend, adjusting your pacing is a good way to see if it’s a budget limitation or not. If ads started to play after increasing your spend rate, you know that your campaign had been restricted by your available budget.
Read about budgeting and pacing
Board Selection
There are two parts for selecting boards 1) which screens/venue types to use, and 2) how to use the app to select screens.
Selecting your screens can depend on a multitude of things. How your target audience travels throughout the day (or where they live), whether you require video enabled screens, proximity to stores or points of interest, the kind of impact you want to make, and so on. Each venue or screen type has its own benefits.
E.g. 1 Billboards are high impact, and reach lots of people at once. However those people are driving past, so there’s not a lot you can convey in that time. Whereas in a waiting room, there may be fewer viewers but they have nothing better to do - so videos can be very engaging and the ads can tell a deeper narrative.
E.g. 2 Doctors, gyms, petrol stations, local grocery stores, etc, are all great ways to reach out to communities of people within the suburbs, where billboards and bus shelters along highways and arterial roads are great for commuters.
Remember, it’s not always about how many people you can reach, sometimes it’s about the kind of people and/or the impact that you can make on them. But here are a few quick tips:
- Avoid adding boards/screens from different time zones into the same campaign. Otherwise the campaign’s schedule will have to accommodate multiple time zones, which can sometimes be tricky.
- Try to create a separate campaign for the different screen/board types. Particularly if they are very different in price point, or require a different schedule.
- Sometimes it is easier/faster to create a planning campaign with all desired screens, and clone it. Then edit the clones to suit specific venues/screens.
- Filter the map to show relevant screens before you start bulk selecting with the polygon or radius tools.
- Sometimes it’s faster to select a big region, then remove unwanted screens from your selection cart (or even campaign dashboard), than to hand pick them all.
- Familiarise yourself with map filters and use all the ones that make sense for your style of campaign. Particularly if it's about proximity to multiple points of interest.
Attribution strategies
Attribution of outdoor campaigns is notoriously difficult, but not impossible!
Once again, it really comes down to your strategy and creative, and placement choices. But it also depends on what existing frameworks you have for tracking your marketing (or can otherwise easily set up).
But if you want our number one pet-peeve, it’s long or obscure web addresses. They only work if they’re short and easy to remember. If you don’t have that - try a search term that leads them to the right place from google.
In fact, the best thing that we can advise here is; don’t use out-of-home in isolation. Remember what we said at the beginning? People can’t physically buy from a sign. Lead them down a path of crumbs.
Oh and of course, your creativity is your greatest asset.
Learn about attribution approaches here
