This is a lesson that even the most innovative and disruptive businesses are finally beginning to heed, with streaming giants Netflix having recently invested a staggering $300 million in billboard advertising.

Billboards are a particularly effective medium, particularly when looking to assist conversions and sell products to customers. But if you were looking to sell tickets, how could you look to leverage billboard advertising to achieve this objective?

Start at the Beginning – Who is your Target Audience?

Before you look to exploit any marketing channel, it’s imperative that you identify and understand your target audience. This will require you to gather accurate data about your individual consumers and customer groups, including their age, location and annual earnings.

This is particularly important when leveraging billboards, however, as you’ll identify strategic locations that enable you to target your audience geographically.

Increasingly, we’ve also seen marketers move beyond these basic demographics when identifying their target audience, as they look to capitalise on new innovations in big data and analytics.

This is crucial, as it delivers real-time insights into individual consumer behaviour while accounting for the nuances that exist between members of the same traditional demographic.

So, by combining traditional demographics with more personalised insights, you can build accurate customer profiles across alternative segments. This not only defines your audience, but it also ensures that you can be strategic when placing ads in the best locations.

Be Unique and Make Sure that you Really Stand Out

This may sound obvious, but understanding the benefits of creating standout content and how to achieve this is central to driving successful sales through offline marketing channels.

As a general rule, the most memorable billboards tend to have an emotive hook, as content that elicits feelings of sadness, joy or mirth has a far greater impact on a customer’s intent to buy than factual or intelligence-led messages.

This is reflected by the prevalence of impulse buys across various marketplaces, with Brits spending a whopping £21.7 billion on impulse purchases each year. Emotive messaging is a key driver of this spend, as this empowers customers to

If we follow this customer journey to the letter, we see that the development of emotive adverts and messaging truly resonates with customers, creating memorable content that often converts directly into a higher volume of sales.

So how do you go about creating such an advert? In the case of ticket selling brand, you should exploit the creative opportunities available with outdoor advertising, with the use of eye-catching imagery and playful messaging capable of engaging customers.

When selling tickets for an event at a specific time of year, you can also look to play on external weather conditions to enhance your creative.

After all, one of the core advantages of billboards is that their un-intrusive and can interact with the natural environment, so why not evolve this idea further in a bid to capture the attention of customers?

Colour is also an important consideration and one that will have a significant bearing on the way in which customers respond to your message. This is a universal rule of advertising psychology, as different colours can elicit alternative emotions and responses from customers depending on your objectives.

The colour red creates feelings of passion and urgency, for example, which will prove effective when selling tickets to sporting events or on a limited basis. Conversely, the colour blue inspires trust and creates a sense of authority behind your brand, which in turn make it easier to sell more expensive, higher-end tickets.

Get Close and Partner with Big Brands

According to Business Insider, brands only have around seven seconds to make a first impression on consumers and clients alike. This may be even shorter in competitive markets and advertising spaces, so it’s imperative that your advert is capable of engaging customers in a quick and efficient manner.

In the case of your billboard, this may represent the first time that a customer interacts with your brand. As a result, you’ll need to ensure that your content and messaging has the desired response, whether you’re looking to build awareness, drive recognition or sell tickets directly to customers.

Regardless of your precise objective, you’ll need to build trust among your audience. This is particularly true in the modern age, with just 36% of shoppers claiming that they currently trust large companies or brands to do what’s right in any given scenario.

One way in which you can do this is by leveraging large format classic billboards. By advertising nearby busy towns and cities, your brand could be made prominent alongside well-known entertainment brands.

By doing this, you’re effectively endorsing your proposition through indirect association with blue-chip firms. This will reflect well on your brand, establishing it as a professional and trustworthy service provider that boasts considerable standing within its marketplace.

The key is to align yourself with relevant, affiliated brands, while you can also use creative messaging and visuals to tie your proposition to more substantial businesses, events and entities.

The Last Word

When you’re selling tickets (or indeed any kind of product), billboards are an extremely effective advertising medium.

Not only does this channel boast relatively high engagement rates and considerable creative license, for example, but it’s also capable of driving assisted conversions both on and offline.

Execution is key and hopefully, this post will help you to leverage the billboard to its full potential when selling tickets. If you have any thoughts of your own or would like to ask us a question, feel free to contact us below.