Learn everything you need to know about Out-of-Home Advertising for Pay Per Call with real-world examples of ad creatives on billboards, benches, bus shelters, taxis and more.
Lesson Transcript
Hey, Pay Per Callers, let's talk about Out of Home Advertising.
About OOH Advertising
Now, Out-of-Home Advertising (OOH) is any type of advertising that reaches people when they're outside of their house. $7.7 billion was spent in 2017 on out-of-home advertising and that number is growing at a very rapid rate. Different places feel differently about this type of advertising and there's a lot of local rules and regulations depending on the placement type, so you need to be aware of that and do your research when you're thinking about out-of-home campaigns. For instance, Vermont, Hawaii, Maine, and Alaska actually prohibit all types of public billboards and billboards in public spaces, so you really need to take a look at what it is allowed and what isn't allowed when it comes to this type of advertising.
Now, most billboards are regulated and require permitting, so you can't just construct a billboard somewhere or throw up and ad somewhere. That's why you usually are going to go through a consolidator or an advertising company that actually owns the regulated and licensed placements. You just have to worry about paying their fee, negotiating, and what your creative ads are going to look like. Interestingly, 24% of out-of-home advertising is purchased by technology companies and that's due to where out-of-home advertising is typically located, like airports and other places where there are a lot of business travelers, but that doesn't mean that it's not used for Pay Per Call or by companies that have the same type of consumer that Pay Per Call reaches.
The average person in the United States spends 18 hours a week on the road, they're going to see a ton of billboard advertisements, they're going to be stuck in traffic jams, they're going to be traveling and parking and seeing all types of advertising. The reason that I'm a big fan of out-of-home is because it's kind of hard to do. It's not as simple as going on the internet and simply buying ads on a Facebook or a Google. There's a lot less competition for performance marketers in this space and conversely, there's also a lot less information about it on the internet, so you're going to have to figure out a lot of these things by trial and error, but when you win with out-of-home, you're going to have essentially no other performance marketers that you're going to be competing with.
Now, thankfully, most of out-of-home advertising is already consolidated by companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, OUTFRONT Media, JCDecaux, and iHeartMedia, so you really only need to know these five companies if you really want to get started in the space. Now, the downside to it already being consolidated is that it's very corporate, it's going to be a corporate sales cycle, and you're going to have to work harder to negotiate with these people. They're not very flexible in some regards to how they negotiate or giving discounted rates and things like that. You're going to have to use different tactics to secure competitive advantage in this space.
Some of the biggest advertisers in out-of-home include Barclays, General Motors, Google, Hilton, Hyundai, Mattress Firm, Nissan, Progressive, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Zoom Communications, so you can see some major automotive manufacturers in there, a few really big tech firms, banks, financial institutions, travel companies, Mattress Firm, it's an actual product company, and then things like Progressive, so insurance. A lot of Pay Per Call campaigns exist. Some of these advertisers actually have Pay Per Call campaigns, so that should be proof enough that this is a really big opportunity for Pay Per Callers.
Pros and Cons of OOH Advertising
Now, there's some pros and cons to advertising in this regard for Pay Per Call and some of the pros are thousands of placement types. There's literally an endless amount of different placements, geographic locations, and options, which can also be a disadvantage because you're going to have to sift through that to create a plan. One of the cool things about out-of-home is you can hyper target geographic regions. I mean, you literally can do research and find billboards across the street from courthouses or billboards that are right next to auto dealerships for financing or insurance, for instance. You can really think about where the shoppers are going to be at the very moment they need to pick up the phone and make a phone call. That's a really cool thing about this.
It also requires a lot more research, don't get me wrong, but man, if you find some really cool placements for billboards and then you buy that placement, you can contractually buy it for a period of time, which essentially gives you a monopoly on that placement once you figure out whether it works or not. It's not like a competitor can come in and just take over your billboard. You're going to have contractual rights to that billboard, which means no one else can encroach upon you when you win.
There's an extremely low likelihood that competitors will copy this simply because there's an extremely low likelihood that your competitors are actually going to see this campaign. If you find a campaign that works really well in rural areas or metropolitan areas, the likelihood that an internet marketer that's involved in Pay Per Call is going to be able to see your billboard and then do research to figure out where the other billboards are that you're buying is essentially zero. You own the space when you find a win like this. For me, that's worth the risk.
Now, some of the cons associated with out-of-home advertisement is each placement has to be modified to track correctly. If you're going to advertise on a thousand different benches, to track it appropriately, you're going to need a thousand different phone numbers. Otherwise, you're never going to be able to truly quantify your return on investment. That means you're going to need a thousand different Adobe Illustrator files, or whatever it is, to actually get all the correct phone numbers on all the correct placements. It's not that hard to do, but you're probably going to need some help doing it. The good news is, virtual assistants can solve that problem.
Now, another con is contract length is going to be directly in relation with your placement price, so the longer the contract you're willing to commit to, the significantly lower your price can become. That also applies to buying multiple placements at the same company for different contractual terms to get your rates down. There's going to be more risk associated with that. Also, whenever working with a billboard, you're going to have to have different art for each size, so if one billboard's a little bit bigger or if you're doing bus stations and billboards, you're going to have different creative sizes and requirements to have them printed appropriately.
Testing is also going to be much more expensive because every time you re-do your billboard or you get a new billboard, you're going to have an upfront cost for the printing and placement and hanging of that billboard. If you want to try 10 different creatives on a static billboard, which isn't digital and requires printing, it's going to get expensive because a human has to actually climb up there and pull down the old art, put up your new art, and so on. That's why for billboards and other physical placements like that, it's much more expensive for you to buy just a single month's worth of placement. You're going to need to engage in three-month, six-month, annual, 24 or 36-month contracts to appropriately negotiate the right cost. That cost is going to directly affect your return on investment, so you really need to think about out-of-home as a long-term investment and commitment and you can start with a few placements and then figure out your return on investment and then expand in a similar placement.
You're going to need to be extremely creative about your messaging when it comes to out-of-home, too. It has to be memorable or it has to be in a spot where people can take a picture of it with their phone if they even want to or the phone number has to be extremely memorable, otherwise, they won't be able to call it. If they're driving on the expressway and your phone number is 833-431-2687, the likelihood that someone's going to remember that phone number is almost zero, but if it's a legal billboard and your phone number is 800-SplitNow, that is a really easy to remember phone number and you're going to need something like that depending on your placement. Now, if you have like a bus station placement or a bench placement, someone's going to see that, be sitting on it, spend more time with it. The phone number is a little less important, so you want to think about these things.
Lastly, one of the cons of this, which I also think is a pro, is out-of-home advertising requires a lot of thought, a lot of planning, a lot of talking to people, and a lot of thinking about how you're going to approach each placement and each campaign because they're longer term and it requires actual labor to put these things in motion, but that's a pro for me because, again, most people are not going to be super motivated to do this. If they're online advertisers, they're not really thinking about how to do this, so if you actually do it, you're going to have competitive advantage built in from the get-go. The likelihood someone's going to copy it or even get involved in this is significantly lower than any type of online marketing, so you can actually own a space or own a campaign in a geographic region and that, to me, is really cool.
How OOH Advertising Works
How does out-of-home advertising work in theory? The first thing you're going to want to do is research and choose a metropolitan area. If you're going to get into this space, I highly recommend that you choose one metropolitan area and hopefully one that you live in because then you can actually go view all the placements and see how traffic interacts with them, see how people interact with them, and get a better understanding for how to actually implement this type of campaign. Next, you're going to want to contact all the vendors, get placement maps, and rate cards. Every single one of these vendors, regardless of all the placements they have, have a map that shows where all their placements are and rate cards that have different contractual rates and street rates on those specific placements.
Now, you never want to accept their rate card rate, their rack rate, you want to negotiate and the more commitment you're willing to do with time and with multiple placements, the lower the rate that you're actually going to get. Now, you're also going to want to ask your vendors for traffic statistics at the specific location, how many impressions per day or how many cars per day pass the billboard or the specific type of sign or whatever it is, so that you have a general understanding of the viewership of the placement. Now, if you're just getting into this, that doesn't mean a whole lot to you and it's probably not going to until you actually run your campaign, but if you know the traffic or the viewership of a specific placement in a specific area and it works, then you can go look for similar placements in similar areas that have similar viewership and buy those placements at theoretically a lower risk because you already understand how the statistics work.
Now, if you're local, I highly encourage you to hop in your car, call an Uber, and visit the specific location and watch the traffic. See how that billboard looks if you're driving down the street because some billboards are obstructed, some billboards you can't really see, and you need to actually understand what it's going to look like to the drivers or people that are passing by the location. If you visit the location, you'll also be able to see other billboards that lead up to that location or other placements that are also in the same general vicinity and, if you can get both of them, then people are going to see your message in a short period of time concurrently and you're going to have a higher likelihood that they're going to remember the message that you showed them. Okay?
Once you actually decide on the specific placements you want to do, you're going to produce each placement with a unique tracking number unless they're like in the same vicinity. Right? Like, if they're across the street from each other, you'd want to use the same one, so that people remember it. The purpose of using unique tracking numbers allows you to understand how many phone calls that specific placement generates. Now, if you use a blanket phone number across all your placements in different cities, in different medium types, you're never going to know which placement actually yields results for you, so having a different tracking number is what you want to do. You're also going to want to think about if a local or a toll-free number works better for you or a vanity number, these are things you're all going to have to consider when creating your campaign.
Now, once you create that campaign, you're absolutely going to use tracking, otherwise, you have no idea how many phone calls you're getting an if you're buying all these placements, it's not like a network is going to give you numbers for that. You definitely don't want a network to give you numbers for that because the network can take the numbers away from you and the last thing you want is your phone number gone while it's printed on a billboard. Then that campaign doesn't actually belong to you anymore. With out-of-home advertising, there is no other option but to have your own tracking or you're putting yourself in a situation where someone else can cripple your business and you have no recourse. Okay?
Now, once the campaign's running, you're going to review the results on a weekly and monthly basis. What you'll notice is over time those results should increase, like a snowball, because if it's on a commuter route or the same people are driving down that same street on a regular basis, either going to lunch or going to work or going home from work or doing whatever they do, people are creatures of habit and they're going to take the same routes, if they're local, to that placement and they're going to see it over time. Now, not everyone needs a divorce ever day or insurance every day or whatever, but if someone drives past your billboard 300 times over the period of a year and they see it every time, 800-SplitNow, 800-SplitNow, and one day they decide they want that divorce, your number's going to be at the top of their consciousness.
The longer the placements sit, the more effective, theoretically, they should be because the probability that the repeat viewers that see it on a regular basis need your product or service goes up with time because, for instance, auto insurance, you renew it once a year or health insurance, open enrollment at the end of the year, or legal stuff, you don't always need it, but when you do, you really need it. Again, the longer time goes by, the more likely the people that see your billboard are to call. I don't recommend renting billboards for a one-month period. You really need more time to build up an audience, just like anything else. Okay?
Then, what you're going to do is you're going to renew the placements that work and you remove the placements that don't, it's that simple. If you're buying hundreds of placements with these companies and some of them are just failing, go back to the company and renegotiate and offer to buy different placements if they'll let you out of the contract on the ones that aren't working for you. The more you buy, the more likely they are to give you special pricing and preferential treatment and change your placements and all that good stuff.
Now, if you have some placements that are close to break even after three months or six months, you shouldn't get rid of those placements because over time, you should see improved results. What you should do is increase the contract length and renegotiate rates, so that it's at or just under break even if you can and then, maybe try and improve the advertisement or copy to get a better response rate in there or just get it under your cost, under break even, and then increase your length. Then, over time, it should become profitable for you.
You also need to look at the quality of these calls and the quality of these calls may be significantly better than online advertising because it gets in people's heads over and over and over again. You also need to renegotiate your rates from your buyers once you prove that the out-of-home advertising, physical, real-world calls are worth more money than the standard online call because if they're worth more, you should be paid more for it. That will help you better negotiate and increase your margin on both sides.
OOH Advertising ROI by Sector
Now, out-of-home advertising return on investment by sector, there is some statistics about that. Product sales or any type of product sales theoretically you should see almost a 600% return on investment. If you spend a hundred bucks, you should get $600 back. That may not be immediate. Like I said, over time these placements get in people's heads and they become better as people see them over and over and over again, so you may not see that type of return on investment up front, but over a 12-month contract or a 24-month contract, it may average out to something like this. Now, if it's telecommunications related, they're seeing a 472% return on ad spend. Retail companies are seeing 379%, so a 3.79 ROAS return on their ad spend. When done properly, out-of-home can yield spectacular returns compared to online advertising, but it is higher risk and it requires a hell of a lot more work.
Producing OOH Ad Placements
How do you produce a placement? How do you actually produce a billboard? That's a complicated thing if you've never done it before, but the good news is when you work with a national agency like that, they're going to be able to refer you to people or they'll even take care of all the printing and do all that stuff for you. A lot of them will, so all you have to do is ask. Also, there's digital billboards out there and you can start with digital billboards. There's some really cool companies that are coming out now with the ability to buy any amount of digital billboards you want to actually test it and see if it works. That's a really cool way to do it, too.
Let's assume for a minute that they'll print it for you, but they won't design it for you. Frankly, you probably do not want these companies to design your billboard. You want to be able to create a billboard or a placement that really fits what you're trying to advertise and the company that owns the billboard, even if they have an agency or something, are probably not going to do a great job with it or they're going to charge you a fortune for it. Again, probably not going to be that great.
First, you need to find a designer and there's a lot of amazing designers out there that are super cheap, but you want to find one that specializes in print, so they know how to do EPS or Adobe Illustrator files, they understand CMYK versus RGB, and this is something that's very important because if you just hire a cheap Upwork designer and they do your billboard in RGB and then you submit it to the company to print the billboard, it comes out with all sorts of incorrect colors. That's because no one prints high resolution in RGB. They do it in CMYK coloring. You need to understand that from the get-go and you need to make sure that your printing comes out in CMYK natively and it's not someone that did it in Photoshop and RGB. Otherwise, it's going to just convert and it's going to look horrible.
I highly recommend that you double check all the printing specifications of the company that you're buying the placement from because they're going to have a standard, set document for you of all the acceptable requirements and file types and resolutions for your placement printing, so that you don't have any mistakes. Get that first, give it directly to your designer, so they can follow it, and then, you're going to probably want to double check that your designer did it correctly. You can ask your account manager at the billboard company or the placement company if it was done correctly, ask them for a proof before they actually print it, they'll probably give you one anyways, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Just make sure all this stuff is correct because the last thing you want is to go through all this work and then have it printed incorrectly. You see the billboard and it looks like crap and you know it's not going to work very well now because it wasn't done correctly, you're going to have no recourse and if you want a change, you're going to have to pay to have it reprinted and then rehung or replaced on the placement medium. You definitely don't want that.
You can find designers anywhere. You can find them on Upwork, Craigslist, Facebook groups for design or even LinkedIn. It's super easy to find designers. They're typically not that expensive. You just want to look at their portfolio to see if their style is what you want. When you talk to the designer, you should know exactly what you want your billboard to look like. You should understand the colors you want, you should understand the copy that's going to be on there, you should maybe even take a sheet of printer paper and draw out kind of how you want the billboard to look, and then your designer can get it much more close to your vision that way.
You also want to make sure that your phone number is printed nice and big, so that people can actually see it and read it. You want to use as few words as possible on the billboard to get your message across. You don't want to write four sentences, you want to write six words and a phone number. You want it super short, so that people can glance at it, understand it, and decide if they're interested. If they have to read it, it's probably not going to work well.
Now, again, you want to use a unique phone number for each placement or region for optimization. If you're getting vanity numbers, it's much harder to get a vanity number for every single billboard, so what you can do is cluster them together to try and optimize if they're in similar geographic or regional locations. If you're okay with local phone numbers, it's much easier to get vanity phone numbers for local because there's less demand for them and then you can get similar phone numbers across all sorts of different geographic regions. If you need help with this, talk to your Ringba representative. They can help you acquire true 800 numbers, patterned 800 numbers, vanity numbers, local or toll-free, we can help you get all of it. We actually keep a portfolio of high value phone numbers that are hidden that we lease out to clients that do this on a regular basis. If you want some really strong phone numbers, we can help provide those for you and you're going to have a much better response rate from those vanity or high value phone numbers.
Negotiating with Sellers for OOH Advertising
Now, when you're negotiating with sellers space for out-of-home advertising, typically they're going to be consolidators, they're going to have a standard rate card, but each placement type or each placement location is going to have a different rate and it's going to be based on how much viewership they get or how prominent that location is, like Times Square advertising is extremely expensive because it's super prominent and then what a lot of people do is they take a picture of their ad in Times Square and use it for other marketing campaigns. They're not actually concerned about the fact that the ad was shown to people in Times Square. They're more concerned about the prominence of that ad, so they can show it off elsewhere.
All these things are going to determine the different rates for each individual placement. Now, if you can further away from central metropolitan areas, you're going to be able to get much cheaper advertising and probably better return on investment. As you get into more dense areas like the expressway from San Francisco airport to downtown San Francisco, those advertisements are just eaten up by technology companies with other people's money and they're overpaying for the branding essentially. They're not looking for a direct response type action, so they don't care about the actual price. They're looking for branding. You want to avoid that. That's why suburbs and less-populated, downtown areas of maybe not the top 10 cities in the country are going to be much easier for you to get started in this space.
Now, when you're looking at the placements you want, you're going to want to ask for demographic and impression data on every placement. You want as much information as these people have on those placements. Then, you want to take a look at what's surrounding that placement in the zip code. What are the general demographics of the people that live in that zip code, what are the types of restaurants that are around that placement, do older people frequent those restaurants, do younger people frequent those restaurants, is it in a commercial area, an industrial area, is it near a mall, what type of businesses are in that placement? If you get a billboard that's on an auto mall, so it's all auto dealerships, that's a great place for an auto insurance campaign, for instance. Or, if you get a billboard that's next to a restaurant that old people frequent, that's a perfect placement for medical supplement insurance. You want to think about the information that they give you and then look around on Google and Google Street View and what's all around those placements to figure out if they're going to be really successful in your campaign or not.
Now, what you also want to consider, and you can ask your ad rep about this, is are there consecutive placements and what that means is, as you're driving, is there a billboard and then a couple hundred yards, or a half mile, another billboard? Are they on both sides of the street and are those available for purchase at the same time? You may be doubling up the impressions on the people that are going down that street, which may seem counterintuitive, but you're going to get into their heads much easier, they're going to remember those ads much easier if they see them more often. What you're really targeting here is people that repeatedly come down these roads, not the random person that goes down the street the one time, sees your billboard, and never travels down that street again. Chances are they're not going to be the people who are going to call.
Now, when you think about consecutive placements as well, you want to think about are people driving past them, are people walking past them, is this bus stop to bus stop, which is an interesting way to think about this? Are there a lot of people that commute from one bus stop to the other side of town because there's some really big companies over there or maybe a government agency is near that bus stop? How can you create roots, so that people see your advertisements multiple times? Maybe you want to market to people who need to go to the Social Security Office. Well, you can get bus stop placements all around town and then put a different one at the Social Security Office and then, create this story that people see over and over and over again that go to that specific location. Then, maybe eventually they'll pick up the phone and call.
You do not want to necessarily discuss valuable routes and valuable consecutive placements with the account rep as something that you're super interested in and it's super valuable to you because they may be less flexible about giving you discounts for buying multiple placements if they know you want to do it because they're consecutive or you think it's going to be a higher return on investment for you. You want to be aware of that and then maybe limit the information you actually give the account representative unless they seem cool. I mean, this is a judgment call. Sometimes being super transparent with account reps means that you'll get a better result, but you just want to think about the attitude of the account rep and how helpful they're willing to be to actually figure out what you want to share with them.
Now, to get lower rates, you're going to have to negotiate. First and foremost, I recommend just asking. Asking works sometimes. Just say, "Hey, this is my first billboard campaign. I'll buy one of these billboards. Can you give me a discount, so I can run a couple tests and if it works really well, I have $100,000 a month budget to spend," or whatever and maybe they'll just give you a discount. You typically can get discounts for mixed media and multiple placement types or multiple placement locations, so mixed media means they also have their website and other advertising properties that they can include you in. Sometimes they won't give you a lower price, but they'll throw in mixed media promotion and other placement types to try and sweeten the deal. You want to be careful with that because a lot of mixed media and placement types that they may throw in for free may be useless to you and if they are, you can decline them and just ask for the discount.
You're going to want to consider contractual terms and ask for discounts for length. Say, "All right, well, if I buy this for one month, three months, six months, 12 months, 24, or 36 months, what are the different rates I can get?" They'll have those available for you and you can negotiate them. If you buy multiple placements, you can get package deals and they can build a package for you. If you don't ask for deals or package deals or discounts, they're not going to offer them, so make sure you ask. Then, you're going to want to comparison shop because these consolidators are the big companies that own all the placements, they have them all over the place, so you can easily get a comparison quote. Take that quote, show it to the other party, tell them you got a better deal, whatever you want to do, use it to get your price down.
Then, you want to ask them for remnant inventory. What placements and what inventory do you guys have a really hard time selling? Then, take a look at it. Maybe it doesn't work well because it's in a remote location or the population's too old or it doesn't meet the demographic of the average billboard advertiser. Well, see, the thing is, you are not the average billboard advertiser. You are a performance marketer, so it's your job to take a look at hard-to-sell inventory like that and turn it into gold. If you can get it super cheap and then figure out what the demographics are and how to monetize it, you may be able to find a really high return on investment for remnant inventory and then the ad rep loves you because you're filling the hard-to-fill placements. You're going to get spectacular deals on physical remnant inventory. Ask them what they have, use the word "remnant" specifically, and take a look at it.
Now, whenever you're doing this, again, after your negotiation, you always want to double check print specifications, get proofs, and have two people review it. Okay? By two people, I mean give it to two people and ask them to confirm it's correct, so that you don't have mistakes, especially your phone number and your website because if it's wrong and it goes up in print, you're screwed.
Types of OOH Advertising for Pay Per Call
Now, there's tons of out-of-home placements, so I'm going to cover some examples for you, so you can get an idea of how exactly to do this. We have airport placements, those are going to be higher-value, business travelers, people on vacation, that type of thing. You have bathroom stall and urinals, which are a really cool way to advertise. You have to get super creative with it. You want to try and get funny. I'll show you some example for that. Buses, sides of buses, entire bus wraps. Billboards, you have static and digital of all different sizes and placements. Benches, there's benches all over the country that are available for rent in every major, metropolitan area. Door hangers, which is literally someone putting paper or thin cardboard hangers on doorknobs in neighborhoods to get people to call.
You can do flyers on cars, gas stations have video ads and static advertisements on top of pumps. People are standing there for a period of a few minutes pumping their gas. Clearly, they own and automobile, so it's a great place to advertise auto related campaigns. You've got malls and supermarkets, people who are ready to shop. Pizza delivery, which I think is a really cool way to do it. I've seen a few different ad campaigns that way. Your signs, free-standing and yard signs, inside and outside of taxis, and transportation shelters, which are essentially bus stops, train stops, taxi stops, pickup locations that have lots of pedestrian activity.
Airport Ad Examples
Let's think about airports for a moment. There are a couple different places you can advertise in airports and my favorite ones are the ones that you can buy repeat or advertising in where people have to stand there for a long period of time. If you look at this picture on the left, you can see that it's one of the big consolidators. I believe this is actually at LAX International Airport. I took this one myself. Now, they have these signs down the rows of where everyone was just sitting and waiting for their flights. There's a lot of delayed flights, there's a lot of connecting flights, people are just sitting here for long periods of time. I didn't see a single phone number on any of these signs, which is amazing to me because they're digital, so you can very easily test in these locations. If you look in the upper-right, you can even see more of these. I took this also at LAX. They're like continuous down the line, so people see your ad over and over again while they're on the moving walkways and walking to their gate.
Then, when they sit down at the gate, your ad just keeps rotating and rotating and rotating. They see it over and over and over and over again. You can very easily do a Pay Per Call campaign at LAX International. I didn't see a single company doing it, but there are a lot of companies doing branding for insurance or Google, for instance. There's cell phone providers. You can see this one right here is G Suites, which is Google apps for business, but there was no one doing any performance on this and I don't think it's because performance wouldn't work. I think it's because performance marketers aren't thinking outside the box.
Now, this other one I really liked was this four free phones and Metro PCS, so it's a branding campaign, it's telling people they can get free stuff, and they just have it plastered over and over and over and over again in this specific location. When people are coming down the escalator, they're seeing the same ad, I think it was seven times they actually saw the same ad with it on the floor and then on the wall as they turn around. When they see the ad seven times, people just get familiar with it, they remember it, it gets in their heads, so you could very easily do a Pay Per Call campaign very similar to this at specific airports. I think it could be extremely successful, depending on the type of campaign.
Now, another one I really liked is the baggage claim advertising. That one, it's probably my favorite because people are literally just standing there after a long flight, looking around, they're playing on their phone, they don't have anything to do. You can see this one ad right here actually has a phone number in it. People can call it, but they're not focused on getting the phone number out there. They're focused on getting their message across and the interested people see the phone number and call it. You can also see on the other one, there's a phone number on it and you can do really well with these campaigns because every single time someone comes to get their bag, they're going to be standing there. You basically get a guaranteed impression on your ad if it's done well and if it's something general and performance-based, they have the time to make the phone call right then and there. You could actually put on the advertisement it only takes a couple seconds, call now, three minutes, you have time. Right? People will pick up the phone and call.
Now, this one in the airport, though specifically is unlike digital billboards or billboards that we talked about earlier because people are going to see this as a one-time shot essentially. They're going to stand there, they're going to see it, they're either going to be into it or they're not going to be into it. The cool thing about the airport advertising is, if it's failing, you know you don't have to renew. You can run tests much quicker than a traditional billboard with this because people either call or they don't.
Bathroom Ad Examples
Bathroom stalls are some really cool places to advertise and we actually did a bathroom stall advertisement. It went really, really well at a trade show and the key here is making something funny. You can see here, "You can't control the size of everything, but you can control your ROI," so we got a great response for that at the trade show. People came up to our booth and realistically speaking, it was about getting them to our booth. It wasn't about getting them to call or register or anything like that. We were able to funnel people in with that. Now, that doesn't mean you can't use it for Pay Per Call, though.
Urinal advertisements in bars, to me, are the perfect location for legal type phone calls and Pay Per Call campaigns, especially DUI. You can just tell them to take a picture of this sign, you may need it in an emergency. Just have a phone number on there for an attorney that can bail you out of jail or help you with a DUI or whatever. Then, the regulars at that bar are going to take a picture of it and if they run into an issue, they know who to call because they have it in their phone, they see it a lot of different times, they get used to it. It becomes a reference for them. If someone's a regular of a bar and they go there for few hours on a weekend, every weekend, you're going to get hundreds of impressions over time for each of those people. Over time, you're going to see the ads perform better.
Now, you can see that all these urinal ads have one thing in common and that is they're trying to be funny or they are funny, so if you're going to do a urinal advertisement, I recommend that you make it funny, especially if it's in a bar because those people are going to be a little bit tipsy and they're going to appreciate the humor. The humor is going to be memorable for them. They're also going to be more willing to take a picture of it and send it to a friend. Then, they have a picture of it when they do something stupid. If it's a legal campaign, they have your phone number and they know where to find it.
Bus Ad Examples
Buses, you can see here that some of these buses actually have phone number on them, so people are already running Pay Per Call campaigns or call campaigns on the side of buses. These are great because the same people ride the bus every single day typically and then, you're just getting lots of impressions over and over and over and over again on those people, so if they need what you're advertising, you can do very well. Now, you can see here that one of them is for Floors Plus, so a flooring company. Another one is for a law firm and they're very specific and local, but they don't have to be. You could run this same exact campaign by changing the name with the cartoon builder on it and using one of your tracking numbers or the same thing for the law firm on the side of the bus and using a tracking number on it and it will work just as well.
I think what's most important about this is thinking about the people who ride the bus, the people who see these buses, and who's going to remember those phone numbers and who's going to actually need the services before you create a campaign and invest in something like this. Over time, I think you will see an improvement by having the ad on these buses for longer periods of time, but I think depending on the campaign, it's a little different since the human is boarding the bus, they're standing there, they watch the bus come up, they're going to have a much longer impression time than a car driving and seeing a billboard, for instance, so you're going to know what your results are much faster. Then, you're going to be able to decide whether you want to continue the campaign, grow it, or do whatever you want to do.
Billboard Ad Examples
Billboards, like we talked about, you want to create memorable billboards. Here are some that I like that I found on the internet. Some people are doing plays on movies, some of them are doing really unique legal campaigns. I like the one where the billboard here is actually tilted. You can see that's a call campaign. A realtor is up here, licensed to sell. It's cheesy, but it's memorable. I think the issue they have with this billboard is they did not make the phone number big enough and they don't really have that great of a memorable phone number. I think that's a bit of a mistake. I think, also, that the phone number on this tilted billboard could have been much bigger. They have plenty of room to make it much easier for people to read and they can see it from farther away. Same thing with the other one, the billboard is not really focused on the phone number there and the business name is small, so it's a cute billboard, but they could do a better job by improving the phone number size.
The attorney one, he's got his name nice and big, though the font he chose is kind of hard to read, so I wouldn't recommend a font like that. It takes a second to understand the guy's name; it may not be the best. The phone number's bigger on there, it stands out a little bit more, which I think is pretty good, so it's probably a successful campaign. Same with the, "Your wife is hot," it's funny, "It's time to get your AC fixed," and I like they have a vanity number there that's really big. They did the best job with their phone number. It's 866-4Seasons. Their company name is Four Seasons. It's a great billboard with a great vanity number on it. People are going to remember it. It's also funny. Probably a very successful campaign for them.
Here are some more. I love this one in the upper left. This is the epitome of a great campaign. It's an oddly shaped billboard and the text is super short, "Health Insurance Giant." Right? That's it. The phone number is 1-800-TheGiant. They nailed the phone number, they nailed the language, they nailed the visuals. This was probably and ultra-successful campaign. Same with the car accident one. Car accident, it's a call, it's a 911 call, 800-Hurt911. Super memorable, super simple, super visible and bright. Gets into people's heads, they remember it. Same with this lawyer one here, Half-Price Lawyers. They have the dot com on there. I think that's a mistake simply because most people aren't going to see it. Then, they have an amazing phone number, which is the focus of the entire billboard and if you're going to do Pay Per Call, these three outline how you should do it if the phone calls are the hook. Super bright, super colorful, they did a really nice job with that. Okay?
This one right here, this is actually a Pay Per Call campaign for a prayer line, which is unique. "Who is Jesus? Read Matthew's Gospel, 855-4Truth." They nailed it. They nailed it. Big phone number, simple text, easy to remember, it's great. Same with this one, which is Islamic. "Muhammad and mercy to mankind, free literature, 877-WhyIslam." Super easy to remember, so they did a really nice job with this billboard. All these campaigns were most likely super successful for the people that ran them.
Digital Billboard Ad Examples
Then, we have digital billboards. These are really cool. There's one company out there that calls each impression of a digital billboard a blip and they allow you to buy it on a blip basis. You can literally buy digital billboards now no risk. You can spend $10, $100, $1000, whatever you want and you can test them just like online advertising. That's super exciting and companies are starting to do that more and I see it as the future of this and I see it as a massive opportunity for Pay Per Callers because you can test without investing in the physical billboard location. One tactic you could use is to buy blips on billboards and see if those campaigns work over a period of time. If you can make digital billboard campaigns work, then you can very easily go buy physical billboard campaigns for the same result.
Bench Ad Examples
Benches, I think benches are a really interesting way to advertise, so there's a company called Bench Ad. I believe they're the biggest. They own benches everywhere and they come massively discounted when you buy a bunch of them on a contractual period of time. You just basically use it like a billboard and your goal here is the people walking by the bench or the people that sit on the bench are your potential customers. People that walk by it more regularly are more likely to call, so the best benches you can probably buy are going to be the ones in downtown, highly populated areas and you're going to want to look for benches near government offices that guarantee a certain type of traffic to them.
For instance, benches near the DMV, people who are thinking about their cars, either are registering their cars or getting their first driver's license, maybe they need insurance, it's a great location for that, or near the Social Security Office or other government agencies that give you an idea of the demographic or type of person that's going to be going in there and what their mindset is going to be at that moment. Outside of courthouses are another great one. If you're going to do legal campaigns, you can see this one here, "Butt Hurt, 469-1313, Personal Injury Lawyers." I mean, I think that's a decent one. It's not that funny, but it works. The focus is the phone number and it probably was a successful campaign for them.
I think the key when it comes to benches is figuring out a couple placements that work for you and then massively scaling to get your cost down. I think the difference on a bench placement between a one month and a 12-month agreement is going to be like a 60% reduction in cost or something. If you buy 20 or 30 benches for a period of a year, you can get your cost down by 80% or 90%, something ridiculous. Then, you can create some really highly profitable campaigns.
Now, if you want to be conservative when you test this, pay more for the one month in a few locations and see how it works for you. You're going to be able to look at your tracking, see your results, and then go, "Okay, I lost money on this campaign, but if I increase the contract length to 12 months and I buy a bunch of other placements that are similar, my cost goes down 80%. Now I make 800% return on investment, this is a great campaign." Maybe plan on losing money during the testing period and then go renegotiate based on the statistics to make it work for you. If you're transparent with the companies that own these placements, they'll most likely work with you. If you're like, "Yeah, I need a specific cost reduction on this package to make it a return for me, but I'll sign a 12-month or 24-month agreement," they're probably going to be flexible with you because it guarantees that inventory is sold for them for a long period of time.
Door Hanger Ad Examples
Door hangers, I think these are a really cool way to penetrate a certain area. You have to be careful with this because if you just hire random people to put your door hangers out, they'll just maybe throw them in the trash and you'll never know, but there are reputable companies that do door hangers and you want to canvas large areas with specific types of offerings and you can do well. These right here are all call campaigns, they're branded, you don't have to brand them. You can create your own non-branded campaigns and I highly recommend you do. It's not terribly expensive to do this and test it and you'll get your results pretty quickly.
If you do door hangers during open enrollment maybe or a period of time where you know people are going to have issues, then it will probably be a successful campaign. For instance, New Year's Eve, highest number of DUIs any time. Do a door hanger campaign on New Year's Day and you'll probably get a lot of phone calls. For home services, you do it the summer, the spring when people are thinking about doing their homes. Maybe you can figure out some year-long campaigns, but this is a great way to do it and most Pay Per Callers aren't even considering this at all. If you can make this work, you have competitive advantage and no one's going to copy your campaign.
Flyers on Corkboard Ad Examples
If you want to get really hyper targeted, you can do flyers on cork boards. I know this is a silly idea and I kind of laughed when we put it in here, but the purpose is to just show you that you can literally do call campaigns anywhere and you have to be really creative about how you do it to find success. That's why we have it in here. You can make things like this work. People do call off of billboards like this, or cork boards like this. I mean, there's a guy in my building who wanted an additional parking spot. Called him, sold him a parking spot and it was on a corkboard. Kind of a Pay Per Call campaign, obviously not scalable, but you should think about these things.
Gas Station Ad Examples
I think gas stations are an excellent place to do a Pay Per Call campaign. I see attorneys doing it. I see auto insurance companies doing it, other types of insurance companies doing it. For this one in the lower right, it's health insurance. Some of them have static ads that are printed and some of them are video, but either way, I don't think that many performance marketers at all are even considering this as an option, but you effectively have someone that's staring at your ad for a period of, I don't know, three to five minutes while they fill up their car and you can definitely get in their head with a campaign. They have five minutes to pick up the phone or tell them to take a picture and call later.
Then, most people frequent the same gas stations because most people that are filling up their cars are doing it because of a commute. You'll get someone off, but if you target a geographic area, you're going to get the same people over and over and over again. Then, they're going to come to understand your offering. Then, when they need it, they call you. This is similar to a billboard, you're getting people on their commutes, you're going to want to do it over time and you should see improved results over time as these campaigns run.
Mall and Supermarket Ad Examples
Now, malls and supermarkets, I don't think I've ever seen a Pay Per Call campaign on one of these, but you can absolutely do them. Right? There are people that are interested in buying things and they're looking at the ads because they're in a shopping mindset. Shoppers at the mall are at the mall because they want to shop, so it's the perfect time to show them an ad because they're actually interested in seeing it. They're like, "Oh, I'm interested in buying stuff. What does this ad say?" Now, a lot of these are digital, some of them are printed, but a lot of them are digital, so it should be cheap to test. You can test different locations, different campaigns relatively inexpensively. You have the cost of producing the ad and then you have to buy the placement, but it's not printed, so it's very easy on the company to rotate in different ads. You can split test different ads in different locations. I think this could be an amazing way to do Pay Per Call if you want to put the work in.
Pizza Delivery Ad Examples
Now, pizza delivery I thought is an amazing idea and I actually had a guy post in our Skype group and ask about a campaign like this. People laughed at him, which I thought was crazy. I did a bunch of research into this type of advertising and what I found is that there are hundreds of thousands of independent pizza delivery companies all around the country and a lot of them are just small business owners with one to five locations. What you can is go to these business owners and offer to pay for their boxes, we'll just give you the boxes if you use them to deliver your pizzas. Now, that reduces the pizza shop's cost significantly, so they're okay with it. Look at this, you've got a bowling alley and you have a DVD rental place. I didn't realize that was a still a thing, but apparently it is. You could very easily do a Pay Per Call campaign with this. A couple words, like the bowling alley one, and a phone number on the box. That's it. Super simple. You guarantee that someone's going to read it and if they're interested, they pick up the phone and call.
Now, you should also consider the fact that when people do pizza, it's typically an evening thing. Most families do pizza delivery in the evenings, so you're going to want to make sure that your call centers can accommodate the later hours for a campaign like this. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of bounced phone calls. You can also talk to the independent pizza owners and see if they'll put a flyer in with their pizzas. That's another way you can do it, but either way, you can corner the market on something like this and have hundreds of pizza shop owners delivering your message to individual people in their area and the people who do pizza in these local areas usually do it once a week or twice a month or something. They're going to see your ad over and over again and then when they need something, they're going to pick up the phone and call.
Freestanding Signs Ad Examples
Now freestanding signs, these require a lot of work, but I've got to tell you, I have seen a lot of amazing campaigns based on free standing signs. Now, I used to live in Michigan over a decade ago when I got into performance marketing and one of my favorite campaigns that I've ever seen is a guy that went around the area with white signs and simply one word that said, "Single?" Then, they used the city name or the township name and dating or relationships dot com or net or something like that, so it was super easy to remember. Then he drove it to a Match.com campaign. I thought that was really awesome and the crazy part about that is he put those on exit to expressways for years. In fact, I still think near my parents' house, they haven't moved, the guy still runs those campaigns every summer and probably does very well with them because he has no competition.
If you think about that, you can put signs like ... almost like political advertising yard signs outside of neighborhoods or near expressways, the on ramps and the off ramps, and you can run a successful Pay Per Call campaign that way and it's pretty cheap to do. Now, you're going to have to refresh the ads regularly because those signs are going to get taken down every time the city mows the lawn or the homeowner's association mows the lawn, but a really great way to do it. Now, you can see these signs here, a lot of them have phone numbers on them and they're really simple. There's nothing to this. The plastic ones and reusable ones, you have to be more specific about those placements, but the yard signs are just really cheap, weather coated cardboard and they last for a month or two. You just get them placed all over the place. You will generate phone calls.
Now, that requires a lot of work and I think that most internet marketers like internet marketing because it doesn't require a lot of work, but if you can spend $500 on signs, place those signs around, and then get a couple of hundred phone calls that pay $25 a piece, your return on investment can be pretty good. Maybe you do the testing by yourself, but once you figure out how to do it, you just pay people to do it for you and reap the benefits.
Taxi Ad Examples
Taxi sign advertising, this is really interesting. You can do sides of taxis, some taxis have flyers inside them, people have nothing to do, so they'll look at the flyers. You can do wraps on the taxis, the top of the taxis, some of them have advertisements on the back of the taxis. You can even see here that they're running a call campaign on a glazing company for glass in the United Kingdom. If a glazing company in the United Kingdom can do this campaign, you probably can, too. You can also see here that in Singapore they have campaigns on the side of taxis, New York City, Las Vegas, they do it all over the world. You can test campaigns in this fashion all over the world depending on what markets you can operate in, and it works just like anything else. If it works, you keep buying it, if it doesn't, it doesn't. The cost of entry is a little bit higher. You should comfortable with that, but if you can make it work, then you have a contract and competitive advantage.
Transportation Shelter Ad Examples
Transportation shelters, I like these a lot. You have to think about the demographics of people that are going to be sitting and waiting for the bus, so debt consolidation offers are probably really good here, low income type offers are probably really good here, payday loan offers. Probably not home services offers, but clearly, this dentist right here is making it work. They have a phone number on it. You can do a dental campaign here. Instead of branded one, do a non-branded one. Do a debt consolidation one. I mean, this one right here is talking about the learning of children and it's a call campaign, so if they can make that work, you can essentially make everything work.
Now, if you're going to do a bus stop, I wouldn't recommend doing an auto insurance campaign. These people clearly don't have their own car, but lots of other campaigns will work here. Not only that, they're going to be sitting there for a long period of time, so if they're sitting there waiting for the bus for a half an hour and all they have to look at is your advertisement, well if they're even remotely close to interested, they can pick up the phone and call right then and there and you can get a phone call.
Business Card Ad Examples
Business cards, we put these in here because you can do a lot with business cards. A lot of these multi-level marketing guys take business cards and place them on urinals or in toilets or at conventions and all over the place, so if you can figure out great ways to distribute these business cards in places where people will see them, you can create a Pay Per Call campaign with simply using business cards. That's how simple this actually is.
----
Previous Lesson | Next Lesson: Radio Advertising for Pay Per Call
Lesson Transcript
Hey, Pay Per Callers, let's talk about Out of Home Advertising.
About OOH Advertising
Now, Out-of-Home Advertising (OOH) is any type of advertising that reaches people when they're outside of their house. $7.7 billion was spent in 2017 on out-of-home advertising and that number is growing at a very rapid rate. Different places feel differently about this type of advertising and there's a lot of local rules and regulations depending on the placement type, so you need to be aware of that and do your research when you're thinking about out-of-home campaigns. For instance, Vermont, Hawaii, Maine, and Alaska actually prohibit all types of public billboards and billboards in public spaces, so you really need to take a look at what it is allowed and what isn't allowed when it comes to this type of advertising.
Now, most billboards are regulated and require permitting, so you can't just construct a billboard somewhere or throw up and ad somewhere. That's why you usually are going to go through a consolidator or an advertising company that actually owns the regulated and licensed placements. You just have to worry about paying their fee, negotiating, and what your creative ads are going to look like. Interestingly, 24% of out-of-home advertising is purchased by technology companies and that's due to where out-of-home advertising is typically located, like airports and other places where there are a lot of business travelers, but that doesn't mean that it's not used for Pay Per Call or by companies that have the same type of consumer that Pay Per Call reaches.
The average person in the United States spends 18 hours a week on the road, they're going to see a ton of billboard advertisements, they're going to be stuck in traffic jams, they're going to be traveling and parking and seeing all types of advertising. The reason that I'm a big fan of out-of-home is because it's kind of hard to do. It's not as simple as going on the internet and simply buying ads on a Facebook or a Google. There's a lot less competition for performance marketers in this space and conversely, there's also a lot less information about it on the internet, so you're going to have to figure out a lot of these things by trial and error, but when you win with out-of-home, you're going to have essentially no other performance marketers that you're going to be competing with.
Now, thankfully, most of out-of-home advertising is already consolidated by companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, OUTFRONT Media, JCDecaux, and iHeartMedia, so you really only need to know these five companies if you really want to get started in the space. Now, the downside to it already being consolidated is that it's very corporate, it's going to be a corporate sales cycle, and you're going to have to work harder to negotiate with these people. They're not very flexible in some regards to how they negotiate or giving discounted rates and things like that. You're going to have to use different tactics to secure competitive advantage in this space.
Some of the biggest advertisers in out-of-home include Barclays, General Motors, Google, Hilton, Hyundai, Mattress Firm, Nissan, Progressive, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Zoom Communications, so you can see some major automotive manufacturers in there, a few really big tech firms, banks, financial institutions, travel companies, Mattress Firm, it's an actual product company, and then things like Progressive, so insurance. A lot of Pay Per Call campaigns exist. Some of these advertisers actually have Pay Per Call campaigns, so that should be proof enough that this is a really big opportunity for Pay Per Callers.
Pros and Cons of OOH Advertising
Now, there's some pros and cons to advertising in this regard for Pay Per Call and some of the pros are thousands of placement types. There's literally an endless amount of different placements, geographic locations, and options, which can also be a disadvantage because you're going to have to sift through that to create a plan. One of the cool things about out-of-home is you can hyper target geographic regions. I mean, you literally can do research and find billboards across the street from courthouses or billboards that are right next to auto dealerships for financing or insurance, for instance. You can really think about where the shoppers are going to be at the very moment they need to pick up the phone and make a phone call. That's a really cool thing about this.
It also requires a lot more research, don't get me wrong, but man, if you find some really cool placements for billboards and then you buy that placement, you can contractually buy it for a period of time, which essentially gives you a monopoly on that placement once you figure out whether it works or not. It's not like a competitor can come in and just take over your billboard. You're going to have contractual rights to that billboard, which means no one else can encroach upon you when you win.
There's an extremely low likelihood that competitors will copy this simply because there's an extremely low likelihood that your competitors are actually going to see this campaign. If you find a campaign that works really well in rural areas or metropolitan areas, the likelihood that an internet marketer that's involved in Pay Per Call is going to be able to see your billboard and then do research to figure out where the other billboards are that you're buying is essentially zero. You own the space when you find a win like this. For me, that's worth the risk.
Now, some of the cons associated with out-of-home advertisement is each placement has to be modified to track correctly. If you're going to advertise on a thousand different benches, to track it appropriately, you're going to need a thousand different phone numbers. Otherwise, you're never going to be able to truly quantify your return on investment. That means you're going to need a thousand different Adobe Illustrator files, or whatever it is, to actually get all the correct phone numbers on all the correct placements. It's not that hard to do, but you're probably going to need some help doing it. The good news is, virtual assistants can solve that problem.
Now, another con is contract length is going to be directly in relation with your placement price, so the longer the contract you're willing to commit to, the significantly lower your price can become. That also applies to buying multiple placements at the same company for different contractual terms to get your rates down. There's going to be more risk associated with that. Also, whenever working with a billboard, you're going to have to have different art for each size, so if one billboard's a little bit bigger or if you're doing bus stations and billboards, you're going to have different creative sizes and requirements to have them printed appropriately.
Testing is also going to be much more expensive because every time you re-do your billboard or you get a new billboard, you're going to have an upfront cost for the printing and placement and hanging of that billboard. If you want to try 10 different creatives on a static billboard, which isn't digital and requires printing, it's going to get expensive because a human has to actually climb up there and pull down the old art, put up your new art, and so on. That's why for billboards and other physical placements like that, it's much more expensive for you to buy just a single month's worth of placement. You're going to need to engage in three-month, six-month, annual, 24 or 36-month contracts to appropriately negotiate the right cost. That cost is going to directly affect your return on investment, so you really need to think about out-of-home as a long-term investment and commitment and you can start with a few placements and then figure out your return on investment and then expand in a similar placement.
You're going to need to be extremely creative about your messaging when it comes to out-of-home, too. It has to be memorable or it has to be in a spot where people can take a picture of it with their phone if they even want to or the phone number has to be extremely memorable, otherwise, they won't be able to call it. If they're driving on the expressway and your phone number is 833-431-2687, the likelihood that someone's going to remember that phone number is almost zero, but if it's a legal billboard and your phone number is 800-SplitNow, that is a really easy to remember phone number and you're going to need something like that depending on your placement. Now, if you have like a bus station placement or a bench placement, someone's going to see that, be sitting on it, spend more time with it. The phone number is a little less important, so you want to think about these things.
Lastly, one of the cons of this, which I also think is a pro, is out-of-home advertising requires a lot of thought, a lot of planning, a lot of talking to people, and a lot of thinking about how you're going to approach each placement and each campaign because they're longer term and it requires actual labor to put these things in motion, but that's a pro for me because, again, most people are not going to be super motivated to do this. If they're online advertisers, they're not really thinking about how to do this, so if you actually do it, you're going to have competitive advantage built in from the get-go. The likelihood someone's going to copy it or even get involved in this is significantly lower than any type of online marketing, so you can actually own a space or own a campaign in a geographic region and that, to me, is really cool.
How OOH Advertising Works
How does out-of-home advertising work in theory? The first thing you're going to want to do is research and choose a metropolitan area. If you're going to get into this space, I highly recommend that you choose one metropolitan area and hopefully one that you live in because then you can actually go view all the placements and see how traffic interacts with them, see how people interact with them, and get a better understanding for how to actually implement this type of campaign. Next, you're going to want to contact all the vendors, get placement maps, and rate cards. Every single one of these vendors, regardless of all the placements they have, have a map that shows where all their placements are and rate cards that have different contractual rates and street rates on those specific placements.
Now, you never want to accept their rate card rate, their rack rate, you want to negotiate and the more commitment you're willing to do with time and with multiple placements, the lower the rate that you're actually going to get. Now, you're also going to want to ask your vendors for traffic statistics at the specific location, how many impressions per day or how many cars per day pass the billboard or the specific type of sign or whatever it is, so that you have a general understanding of the viewership of the placement. Now, if you're just getting into this, that doesn't mean a whole lot to you and it's probably not going to until you actually run your campaign, but if you know the traffic or the viewership of a specific placement in a specific area and it works, then you can go look for similar placements in similar areas that have similar viewership and buy those placements at theoretically a lower risk because you already understand how the statistics work.
Now, if you're local, I highly encourage you to hop in your car, call an Uber, and visit the specific location and watch the traffic. See how that billboard looks if you're driving down the street because some billboards are obstructed, some billboards you can't really see, and you need to actually understand what it's going to look like to the drivers or people that are passing by the location. If you visit the location, you'll also be able to see other billboards that lead up to that location or other placements that are also in the same general vicinity and, if you can get both of them, then people are going to see your message in a short period of time concurrently and you're going to have a higher likelihood that they're going to remember the message that you showed them. Okay?
Once you actually decide on the specific placements you want to do, you're going to produce each placement with a unique tracking number unless they're like in the same vicinity. Right? Like, if they're across the street from each other, you'd want to use the same one, so that people remember it. The purpose of using unique tracking numbers allows you to understand how many phone calls that specific placement generates. Now, if you use a blanket phone number across all your placements in different cities, in different medium types, you're never going to know which placement actually yields results for you, so having a different tracking number is what you want to do. You're also going to want to think about if a local or a toll-free number works better for you or a vanity number, these are things you're all going to have to consider when creating your campaign.
Now, once you create that campaign, you're absolutely going to use tracking, otherwise, you have no idea how many phone calls you're getting an if you're buying all these placements, it's not like a network is going to give you numbers for that. You definitely don't want a network to give you numbers for that because the network can take the numbers away from you and the last thing you want is your phone number gone while it's printed on a billboard. Then that campaign doesn't actually belong to you anymore. With out-of-home advertising, there is no other option but to have your own tracking or you're putting yourself in a situation where someone else can cripple your business and you have no recourse. Okay?
Now, once the campaign's running, you're going to review the results on a weekly and monthly basis. What you'll notice is over time those results should increase, like a snowball, because if it's on a commuter route or the same people are driving down that same street on a regular basis, either going to lunch or going to work or going home from work or doing whatever they do, people are creatures of habit and they're going to take the same routes, if they're local, to that placement and they're going to see it over time. Now, not everyone needs a divorce ever day or insurance every day or whatever, but if someone drives past your billboard 300 times over the period of a year and they see it every time, 800-SplitNow, 800-SplitNow, and one day they decide they want that divorce, your number's going to be at the top of their consciousness.
The longer the placements sit, the more effective, theoretically, they should be because the probability that the repeat viewers that see it on a regular basis need your product or service goes up with time because, for instance, auto insurance, you renew it once a year or health insurance, open enrollment at the end of the year, or legal stuff, you don't always need it, but when you do, you really need it. Again, the longer time goes by, the more likely the people that see your billboard are to call. I don't recommend renting billboards for a one-month period. You really need more time to build up an audience, just like anything else. Okay?
Then, what you're going to do is you're going to renew the placements that work and you remove the placements that don't, it's that simple. If you're buying hundreds of placements with these companies and some of them are just failing, go back to the company and renegotiate and offer to buy different placements if they'll let you out of the contract on the ones that aren't working for you. The more you buy, the more likely they are to give you special pricing and preferential treatment and change your placements and all that good stuff.
Now, if you have some placements that are close to break even after three months or six months, you shouldn't get rid of those placements because over time, you should see improved results. What you should do is increase the contract length and renegotiate rates, so that it's at or just under break even if you can and then, maybe try and improve the advertisement or copy to get a better response rate in there or just get it under your cost, under break even, and then increase your length. Then, over time, it should become profitable for you.
You also need to look at the quality of these calls and the quality of these calls may be significantly better than online advertising because it gets in people's heads over and over and over again. You also need to renegotiate your rates from your buyers once you prove that the out-of-home advertising, physical, real-world calls are worth more money than the standard online call because if they're worth more, you should be paid more for it. That will help you better negotiate and increase your margin on both sides.
OOH Advertising ROI by Sector
Now, out-of-home advertising return on investment by sector, there is some statistics about that. Product sales or any type of product sales theoretically you should see almost a 600% return on investment. If you spend a hundred bucks, you should get $600 back. That may not be immediate. Like I said, over time these placements get in people's heads and they become better as people see them over and over and over again, so you may not see that type of return on investment up front, but over a 12-month contract or a 24-month contract, it may average out to something like this. Now, if it's telecommunications related, they're seeing a 472% return on ad spend. Retail companies are seeing 379%, so a 3.79 ROAS return on their ad spend. When done properly, out-of-home can yield spectacular returns compared to online advertising, but it is higher risk and it requires a hell of a lot more work.
Producing OOH Ad Placements
How do you produce a placement? How do you actually produce a billboard? That's a complicated thing if you've never done it before, but the good news is when you work with a national agency like that, they're going to be able to refer you to people or they'll even take care of all the printing and do all that stuff for you. A lot of them will, so all you have to do is ask. Also, there's digital billboards out there and you can start with digital billboards. There's some really cool companies that are coming out now with the ability to buy any amount of digital billboards you want to actually test it and see if it works. That's a really cool way to do it, too.
Let's assume for a minute that they'll print it for you, but they won't design it for you. Frankly, you probably do not want these companies to design your billboard. You want to be able to create a billboard or a placement that really fits what you're trying to advertise and the company that owns the billboard, even if they have an agency or something, are probably not going to do a great job with it or they're going to charge you a fortune for it. Again, probably not going to be that great.
First, you need to find a designer and there's a lot of amazing designers out there that are super cheap, but you want to find one that specializes in print, so they know how to do EPS or Adobe Illustrator files, they understand CMYK versus RGB, and this is something that's very important because if you just hire a cheap Upwork designer and they do your billboard in RGB and then you submit it to the company to print the billboard, it comes out with all sorts of incorrect colors. That's because no one prints high resolution in RGB. They do it in CMYK coloring. You need to understand that from the get-go and you need to make sure that your printing comes out in CMYK natively and it's not someone that did it in Photoshop and RGB. Otherwise, it's going to just convert and it's going to look horrible.
I highly recommend that you double check all the printing specifications of the company that you're buying the placement from because they're going to have a standard, set document for you of all the acceptable requirements and file types and resolutions for your placement printing, so that you don't have any mistakes. Get that first, give it directly to your designer, so they can follow it, and then, you're going to probably want to double check that your designer did it correctly. You can ask your account manager at the billboard company or the placement company if it was done correctly, ask them for a proof before they actually print it, they'll probably give you one anyways, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Just make sure all this stuff is correct because the last thing you want is to go through all this work and then have it printed incorrectly. You see the billboard and it looks like crap and you know it's not going to work very well now because it wasn't done correctly, you're going to have no recourse and if you want a change, you're going to have to pay to have it reprinted and then rehung or replaced on the placement medium. You definitely don't want that.
You can find designers anywhere. You can find them on Upwork, Craigslist, Facebook groups for design or even LinkedIn. It's super easy to find designers. They're typically not that expensive. You just want to look at their portfolio to see if their style is what you want. When you talk to the designer, you should know exactly what you want your billboard to look like. You should understand the colors you want, you should understand the copy that's going to be on there, you should maybe even take a sheet of printer paper and draw out kind of how you want the billboard to look, and then your designer can get it much more close to your vision that way.
You also want to make sure that your phone number is printed nice and big, so that people can actually see it and read it. You want to use as few words as possible on the billboard to get your message across. You don't want to write four sentences, you want to write six words and a phone number. You want it super short, so that people can glance at it, understand it, and decide if they're interested. If they have to read it, it's probably not going to work well.
Now, again, you want to use a unique phone number for each placement or region for optimization. If you're getting vanity numbers, it's much harder to get a vanity number for every single billboard, so what you can do is cluster them together to try and optimize if they're in similar geographic or regional locations. If you're okay with local phone numbers, it's much easier to get vanity phone numbers for local because there's less demand for them and then you can get similar phone numbers across all sorts of different geographic regions. If you need help with this, talk to your Ringba representative. They can help you acquire true 800 numbers, patterned 800 numbers, vanity numbers, local or toll-free, we can help you get all of it. We actually keep a portfolio of high value phone numbers that are hidden that we lease out to clients that do this on a regular basis. If you want some really strong phone numbers, we can help provide those for you and you're going to have a much better response rate from those vanity or high value phone numbers.
Negotiating with Sellers for OOH Advertising
Now, when you're negotiating with sellers space for out-of-home advertising, typically they're going to be consolidators, they're going to have a standard rate card, but each placement type or each placement location is going to have a different rate and it's going to be based on how much viewership they get or how prominent that location is, like Times Square advertising is extremely expensive because it's super prominent and then what a lot of people do is they take a picture of their ad in Times Square and use it for other marketing campaigns. They're not actually concerned about the fact that the ad was shown to people in Times Square. They're more concerned about the prominence of that ad, so they can show it off elsewhere.
All these things are going to determine the different rates for each individual placement. Now, if you can further away from central metropolitan areas, you're going to be able to get much cheaper advertising and probably better return on investment. As you get into more dense areas like the expressway from San Francisco airport to downtown San Francisco, those advertisements are just eaten up by technology companies with other people's money and they're overpaying for the branding essentially. They're not looking for a direct response type action, so they don't care about the actual price. They're looking for branding. You want to avoid that. That's why suburbs and less-populated, downtown areas of maybe not the top 10 cities in the country are going to be much easier for you to get started in this space.
Now, when you're looking at the placements you want, you're going to want to ask for demographic and impression data on every placement. You want as much information as these people have on those placements. Then, you want to take a look at what's surrounding that placement in the zip code. What are the general demographics of the people that live in that zip code, what are the types of restaurants that are around that placement, do older people frequent those restaurants, do younger people frequent those restaurants, is it in a commercial area, an industrial area, is it near a mall, what type of businesses are in that placement? If you get a billboard that's on an auto mall, so it's all auto dealerships, that's a great place for an auto insurance campaign, for instance. Or, if you get a billboard that's next to a restaurant that old people frequent, that's a perfect placement for medical supplement insurance. You want to think about the information that they give you and then look around on Google and Google Street View and what's all around those placements to figure out if they're going to be really successful in your campaign or not.
Now, what you also want to consider, and you can ask your ad rep about this, is are there consecutive placements and what that means is, as you're driving, is there a billboard and then a couple hundred yards, or a half mile, another billboard? Are they on both sides of the street and are those available for purchase at the same time? You may be doubling up the impressions on the people that are going down that street, which may seem counterintuitive, but you're going to get into their heads much easier, they're going to remember those ads much easier if they see them more often. What you're really targeting here is people that repeatedly come down these roads, not the random person that goes down the street the one time, sees your billboard, and never travels down that street again. Chances are they're not going to be the people who are going to call.
Now, when you think about consecutive placements as well, you want to think about are people driving past them, are people walking past them, is this bus stop to bus stop, which is an interesting way to think about this? Are there a lot of people that commute from one bus stop to the other side of town because there's some really big companies over there or maybe a government agency is near that bus stop? How can you create roots, so that people see your advertisements multiple times? Maybe you want to market to people who need to go to the Social Security Office. Well, you can get bus stop placements all around town and then put a different one at the Social Security Office and then, create this story that people see over and over and over again that go to that specific location. Then, maybe eventually they'll pick up the phone and call.
You do not want to necessarily discuss valuable routes and valuable consecutive placements with the account rep as something that you're super interested in and it's super valuable to you because they may be less flexible about giving you discounts for buying multiple placements if they know you want to do it because they're consecutive or you think it's going to be a higher return on investment for you. You want to be aware of that and then maybe limit the information you actually give the account representative unless they seem cool. I mean, this is a judgment call. Sometimes being super transparent with account reps means that you'll get a better result, but you just want to think about the attitude of the account rep and how helpful they're willing to be to actually figure out what you want to share with them.
Now, to get lower rates, you're going to have to negotiate. First and foremost, I recommend just asking. Asking works sometimes. Just say, "Hey, this is my first billboard campaign. I'll buy one of these billboards. Can you give me a discount, so I can run a couple tests and if it works really well, I have $100,000 a month budget to spend," or whatever and maybe they'll just give you a discount. You typically can get discounts for mixed media and multiple placement types or multiple placement locations, so mixed media means they also have their website and other advertising properties that they can include you in. Sometimes they won't give you a lower price, but they'll throw in mixed media promotion and other placement types to try and sweeten the deal. You want to be careful with that because a lot of mixed media and placement types that they may throw in for free may be useless to you and if they are, you can decline them and just ask for the discount.
You're going to want to consider contractual terms and ask for discounts for length. Say, "All right, well, if I buy this for one month, three months, six months, 12 months, 24, or 36 months, what are the different rates I can get?" They'll have those available for you and you can negotiate them. If you buy multiple placements, you can get package deals and they can build a package for you. If you don't ask for deals or package deals or discounts, they're not going to offer them, so make sure you ask. Then, you're going to want to comparison shop because these consolidators are the big companies that own all the placements, they have them all over the place, so you can easily get a comparison quote. Take that quote, show it to the other party, tell them you got a better deal, whatever you want to do, use it to get your price down.
Then, you want to ask them for remnant inventory. What placements and what inventory do you guys have a really hard time selling? Then, take a look at it. Maybe it doesn't work well because it's in a remote location or the population's too old or it doesn't meet the demographic of the average billboard advertiser. Well, see, the thing is, you are not the average billboard advertiser. You are a performance marketer, so it's your job to take a look at hard-to-sell inventory like that and turn it into gold. If you can get it super cheap and then figure out what the demographics are and how to monetize it, you may be able to find a really high return on investment for remnant inventory and then the ad rep loves you because you're filling the hard-to-fill placements. You're going to get spectacular deals on physical remnant inventory. Ask them what they have, use the word "remnant" specifically, and take a look at it.
Now, whenever you're doing this, again, after your negotiation, you always want to double check print specifications, get proofs, and have two people review it. Okay? By two people, I mean give it to two people and ask them to confirm it's correct, so that you don't have mistakes, especially your phone number and your website because if it's wrong and it goes up in print, you're screwed.
Types of OOH Advertising for Pay Per Call
Now, there's tons of out-of-home placements, so I'm going to cover some examples for you, so you can get an idea of how exactly to do this. We have airport placements, those are going to be higher-value, business travelers, people on vacation, that type of thing. You have bathroom stall and urinals, which are a really cool way to advertise. You have to get super creative with it. You want to try and get funny. I'll show you some example for that. Buses, sides of buses, entire bus wraps. Billboards, you have static and digital of all different sizes and placements. Benches, there's benches all over the country that are available for rent in every major, metropolitan area. Door hangers, which is literally someone putting paper or thin cardboard hangers on doorknobs in neighborhoods to get people to call.
You can do flyers on cars, gas stations have video ads and static advertisements on top of pumps. People are standing there for a period of a few minutes pumping their gas. Clearly, they own and automobile, so it's a great place to advertise auto related campaigns. You've got malls and supermarkets, people who are ready to shop. Pizza delivery, which I think is a really cool way to do it. I've seen a few different ad campaigns that way. Your signs, free-standing and yard signs, inside and outside of taxis, and transportation shelters, which are essentially bus stops, train stops, taxi stops, pickup locations that have lots of pedestrian activity.
Airport Ad Examples
Let's think about airports for a moment. There are a couple different places you can advertise in airports and my favorite ones are the ones that you can buy repeat or advertising in where people have to stand there for a long period of time. If you look at this picture on the left, you can see that it's one of the big consolidators. I believe this is actually at LAX International Airport. I took this one myself. Now, they have these signs down the rows of where everyone was just sitting and waiting for their flights. There's a lot of delayed flights, there's a lot of connecting flights, people are just sitting here for long periods of time. I didn't see a single phone number on any of these signs, which is amazing to me because they're digital, so you can very easily test in these locations. If you look in the upper-right, you can even see more of these. I took this also at LAX. They're like continuous down the line, so people see your ad over and over again while they're on the moving walkways and walking to their gate.
Then, when they sit down at the gate, your ad just keeps rotating and rotating and rotating. They see it over and over and over and over again. You can very easily do a Pay Per Call campaign at LAX International. I didn't see a single company doing it, but there are a lot of companies doing branding for insurance or Google, for instance. There's cell phone providers. You can see this one right here is G Suites, which is Google apps for business, but there was no one doing any performance on this and I don't think it's because performance wouldn't work. I think it's because performance marketers aren't thinking outside the box.
Now, this other one I really liked was this four free phones and Metro PCS, so it's a branding campaign, it's telling people they can get free stuff, and they just have it plastered over and over and over and over again in this specific location. When people are coming down the escalator, they're seeing the same ad, I think it was seven times they actually saw the same ad with it on the floor and then on the wall as they turn around. When they see the ad seven times, people just get familiar with it, they remember it, it gets in their heads, so you could very easily do a Pay Per Call campaign very similar to this at specific airports. I think it could be extremely successful, depending on the type of campaign.
Now, another one I really liked is the baggage claim advertising. That one, it's probably my favorite because people are literally just standing there after a long flight, looking around, they're playing on their phone, they don't have anything to do. You can see this one ad right here actually has a phone number in it. People can call it, but they're not focused on getting the phone number out there. They're focused on getting their message across and the interested people see the phone number and call it. You can also see on the other one, there's a phone number on it and you can do really well with these campaigns because every single time someone comes to get their bag, they're going to be standing there. You basically get a guaranteed impression on your ad if it's done well and if it's something general and performance-based, they have the time to make the phone call right then and there. You could actually put on the advertisement it only takes a couple seconds, call now, three minutes, you have time. Right? People will pick up the phone and call.
Now, this one in the airport, though specifically is unlike digital billboards or billboards that we talked about earlier because people are going to see this as a one-time shot essentially. They're going to stand there, they're going to see it, they're either going to be into it or they're not going to be into it. The cool thing about the airport advertising is, if it's failing, you know you don't have to renew. You can run tests much quicker than a traditional billboard with this because people either call or they don't.
Bathroom Ad Examples
Bathroom stalls are some really cool places to advertise and we actually did a bathroom stall advertisement. It went really, really well at a trade show and the key here is making something funny. You can see here, "You can't control the size of everything, but you can control your ROI," so we got a great response for that at the trade show. People came up to our booth and realistically speaking, it was about getting them to our booth. It wasn't about getting them to call or register or anything like that. We were able to funnel people in with that. Now, that doesn't mean you can't use it for Pay Per Call, though.
Urinal advertisements in bars, to me, are the perfect location for legal type phone calls and Pay Per Call campaigns, especially DUI. You can just tell them to take a picture of this sign, you may need it in an emergency. Just have a phone number on there for an attorney that can bail you out of jail or help you with a DUI or whatever. Then, the regulars at that bar are going to take a picture of it and if they run into an issue, they know who to call because they have it in their phone, they see it a lot of different times, they get used to it. It becomes a reference for them. If someone's a regular of a bar and they go there for few hours on a weekend, every weekend, you're going to get hundreds of impressions over time for each of those people. Over time, you're going to see the ads perform better.
Now, you can see that all these urinal ads have one thing in common and that is they're trying to be funny or they are funny, so if you're going to do a urinal advertisement, I recommend that you make it funny, especially if it's in a bar because those people are going to be a little bit tipsy and they're going to appreciate the humor. The humor is going to be memorable for them. They're also going to be more willing to take a picture of it and send it to a friend. Then, they have a picture of it when they do something stupid. If it's a legal campaign, they have your phone number and they know where to find it.
Bus Ad Examples
Buses, you can see here that some of these buses actually have phone number on them, so people are already running Pay Per Call campaigns or call campaigns on the side of buses. These are great because the same people ride the bus every single day typically and then, you're just getting lots of impressions over and over and over and over again on those people, so if they need what you're advertising, you can do very well. Now, you can see here that one of them is for Floors Plus, so a flooring company. Another one is for a law firm and they're very specific and local, but they don't have to be. You could run this same exact campaign by changing the name with the cartoon builder on it and using one of your tracking numbers or the same thing for the law firm on the side of the bus and using a tracking number on it and it will work just as well.
I think what's most important about this is thinking about the people who ride the bus, the people who see these buses, and who's going to remember those phone numbers and who's going to actually need the services before you create a campaign and invest in something like this. Over time, I think you will see an improvement by having the ad on these buses for longer periods of time, but I think depending on the campaign, it's a little different since the human is boarding the bus, they're standing there, they watch the bus come up, they're going to have a much longer impression time than a car driving and seeing a billboard, for instance, so you're going to know what your results are much faster. Then, you're going to be able to decide whether you want to continue the campaign, grow it, or do whatever you want to do.
Billboard Ad Examples
Billboards, like we talked about, you want to create memorable billboards. Here are some that I like that I found on the internet. Some people are doing plays on movies, some of them are doing really unique legal campaigns. I like the one where the billboard here is actually tilted. You can see that's a call campaign. A realtor is up here, licensed to sell. It's cheesy, but it's memorable. I think the issue they have with this billboard is they did not make the phone number big enough and they don't really have that great of a memorable phone number. I think that's a bit of a mistake. I think, also, that the phone number on this tilted billboard could have been much bigger. They have plenty of room to make it much easier for people to read and they can see it from farther away. Same thing with the other one, the billboard is not really focused on the phone number there and the business name is small, so it's a cute billboard, but they could do a better job by improving the phone number size.
The attorney one, he's got his name nice and big, though the font he chose is kind of hard to read, so I wouldn't recommend a font like that. It takes a second to understand the guy's name; it may not be the best. The phone number's bigger on there, it stands out a little bit more, which I think is pretty good, so it's probably a successful campaign. Same with the, "Your wife is hot," it's funny, "It's time to get your AC fixed," and I like they have a vanity number there that's really big. They did the best job with their phone number. It's 866-4Seasons. Their company name is Four Seasons. It's a great billboard with a great vanity number on it. People are going to remember it. It's also funny. Probably a very successful campaign for them.
Here are some more. I love this one in the upper left. This is the epitome of a great campaign. It's an oddly shaped billboard and the text is super short, "Health Insurance Giant." Right? That's it. The phone number is 1-800-TheGiant. They nailed the phone number, they nailed the language, they nailed the visuals. This was probably and ultra-successful campaign. Same with the car accident one. Car accident, it's a call, it's a 911 call, 800-Hurt911. Super memorable, super simple, super visible and bright. Gets into people's heads, they remember it. Same with this lawyer one here, Half-Price Lawyers. They have the dot com on there. I think that's a mistake simply because most people aren't going to see it. Then, they have an amazing phone number, which is the focus of the entire billboard and if you're going to do Pay Per Call, these three outline how you should do it if the phone calls are the hook. Super bright, super colorful, they did a really nice job with that. Okay?
This one right here, this is actually a Pay Per Call campaign for a prayer line, which is unique. "Who is Jesus? Read Matthew's Gospel, 855-4Truth." They nailed it. They nailed it. Big phone number, simple text, easy to remember, it's great. Same with this one, which is Islamic. "Muhammad and mercy to mankind, free literature, 877-WhyIslam." Super easy to remember, so they did a really nice job with this billboard. All these campaigns were most likely super successful for the people that ran them.
Digital Billboard Ad Examples
Then, we have digital billboards. These are really cool. There's one company out there that calls each impression of a digital billboard a blip and they allow you to buy it on a blip basis. You can literally buy digital billboards now no risk. You can spend $10, $100, $1000, whatever you want and you can test them just like online advertising. That's super exciting and companies are starting to do that more and I see it as the future of this and I see it as a massive opportunity for Pay Per Callers because you can test without investing in the physical billboard location. One tactic you could use is to buy blips on billboards and see if those campaigns work over a period of time. If you can make digital billboard campaigns work, then you can very easily go buy physical billboard campaigns for the same result.
Bench Ad Examples
Benches, I think benches are a really interesting way to advertise, so there's a company called Bench Ad. I believe they're the biggest. They own benches everywhere and they come massively discounted when you buy a bunch of them on a contractual period of time. You just basically use it like a billboard and your goal here is the people walking by the bench or the people that sit on the bench are your potential customers. People that walk by it more regularly are more likely to call, so the best benches you can probably buy are going to be the ones in downtown, highly populated areas and you're going to want to look for benches near government offices that guarantee a certain type of traffic to them.
For instance, benches near the DMV, people who are thinking about their cars, either are registering their cars or getting their first driver's license, maybe they need insurance, it's a great location for that, or near the Social Security Office or other government agencies that give you an idea of the demographic or type of person that's going to be going in there and what their mindset is going to be at that moment. Outside of courthouses are another great one. If you're going to do legal campaigns, you can see this one here, "Butt Hurt, 469-1313, Personal Injury Lawyers." I mean, I think that's a decent one. It's not that funny, but it works. The focus is the phone number and it probably was a successful campaign for them.
I think the key when it comes to benches is figuring out a couple placements that work for you and then massively scaling to get your cost down. I think the difference on a bench placement between a one month and a 12-month agreement is going to be like a 60% reduction in cost or something. If you buy 20 or 30 benches for a period of a year, you can get your cost down by 80% or 90%, something ridiculous. Then, you can create some really highly profitable campaigns.
Now, if you want to be conservative when you test this, pay more for the one month in a few locations and see how it works for you. You're going to be able to look at your tracking, see your results, and then go, "Okay, I lost money on this campaign, but if I increase the contract length to 12 months and I buy a bunch of other placements that are similar, my cost goes down 80%. Now I make 800% return on investment, this is a great campaign." Maybe plan on losing money during the testing period and then go renegotiate based on the statistics to make it work for you. If you're transparent with the companies that own these placements, they'll most likely work with you. If you're like, "Yeah, I need a specific cost reduction on this package to make it a return for me, but I'll sign a 12-month or 24-month agreement," they're probably going to be flexible with you because it guarantees that inventory is sold for them for a long period of time.
Door Hanger Ad Examples
Door hangers, I think these are a really cool way to penetrate a certain area. You have to be careful with this because if you just hire random people to put your door hangers out, they'll just maybe throw them in the trash and you'll never know, but there are reputable companies that do door hangers and you want to canvas large areas with specific types of offerings and you can do well. These right here are all call campaigns, they're branded, you don't have to brand them. You can create your own non-branded campaigns and I highly recommend you do. It's not terribly expensive to do this and test it and you'll get your results pretty quickly.
If you do door hangers during open enrollment maybe or a period of time where you know people are going to have issues, then it will probably be a successful campaign. For instance, New Year's Eve, highest number of DUIs any time. Do a door hanger campaign on New Year's Day and you'll probably get a lot of phone calls. For home services, you do it the summer, the spring when people are thinking about doing their homes. Maybe you can figure out some year-long campaigns, but this is a great way to do it and most Pay Per Callers aren't even considering this at all. If you can make this work, you have competitive advantage and no one's going to copy your campaign.
Flyers on Corkboard Ad Examples
If you want to get really hyper targeted, you can do flyers on cork boards. I know this is a silly idea and I kind of laughed when we put it in here, but the purpose is to just show you that you can literally do call campaigns anywhere and you have to be really creative about how you do it to find success. That's why we have it in here. You can make things like this work. People do call off of billboards like this, or cork boards like this. I mean, there's a guy in my building who wanted an additional parking spot. Called him, sold him a parking spot and it was on a corkboard. Kind of a Pay Per Call campaign, obviously not scalable, but you should think about these things.
Gas Station Ad Examples
I think gas stations are an excellent place to do a Pay Per Call campaign. I see attorneys doing it. I see auto insurance companies doing it, other types of insurance companies doing it. For this one in the lower right, it's health insurance. Some of them have static ads that are printed and some of them are video, but either way, I don't think that many performance marketers at all are even considering this as an option, but you effectively have someone that's staring at your ad for a period of, I don't know, three to five minutes while they fill up their car and you can definitely get in their head with a campaign. They have five minutes to pick up the phone or tell them to take a picture and call later.
Then, most people frequent the same gas stations because most people that are filling up their cars are doing it because of a commute. You'll get someone off, but if you target a geographic area, you're going to get the same people over and over and over again. Then, they're going to come to understand your offering. Then, when they need it, they call you. This is similar to a billboard, you're getting people on their commutes, you're going to want to do it over time and you should see improved results over time as these campaigns run.
Mall and Supermarket Ad Examples
Now, malls and supermarkets, I don't think I've ever seen a Pay Per Call campaign on one of these, but you can absolutely do them. Right? There are people that are interested in buying things and they're looking at the ads because they're in a shopping mindset. Shoppers at the mall are at the mall because they want to shop, so it's the perfect time to show them an ad because they're actually interested in seeing it. They're like, "Oh, I'm interested in buying stuff. What does this ad say?" Now, a lot of these are digital, some of them are printed, but a lot of them are digital, so it should be cheap to test. You can test different locations, different campaigns relatively inexpensively. You have the cost of producing the ad and then you have to buy the placement, but it's not printed, so it's very easy on the company to rotate in different ads. You can split test different ads in different locations. I think this could be an amazing way to do Pay Per Call if you want to put the work in.
Pizza Delivery Ad Examples
Now, pizza delivery I thought is an amazing idea and I actually had a guy post in our Skype group and ask about a campaign like this. People laughed at him, which I thought was crazy. I did a bunch of research into this type of advertising and what I found is that there are hundreds of thousands of independent pizza delivery companies all around the country and a lot of them are just small business owners with one to five locations. What you can is go to these business owners and offer to pay for their boxes, we'll just give you the boxes if you use them to deliver your pizzas. Now, that reduces the pizza shop's cost significantly, so they're okay with it. Look at this, you've got a bowling alley and you have a DVD rental place. I didn't realize that was a still a thing, but apparently it is. You could very easily do a Pay Per Call campaign with this. A couple words, like the bowling alley one, and a phone number on the box. That's it. Super simple. You guarantee that someone's going to read it and if they're interested, they pick up the phone and call.
Now, you should also consider the fact that when people do pizza, it's typically an evening thing. Most families do pizza delivery in the evenings, so you're going to want to make sure that your call centers can accommodate the later hours for a campaign like this. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of bounced phone calls. You can also talk to the independent pizza owners and see if they'll put a flyer in with their pizzas. That's another way you can do it, but either way, you can corner the market on something like this and have hundreds of pizza shop owners delivering your message to individual people in their area and the people who do pizza in these local areas usually do it once a week or twice a month or something. They're going to see your ad over and over again and then when they need something, they're going to pick up the phone and call.
Freestanding Signs Ad Examples
Now freestanding signs, these require a lot of work, but I've got to tell you, I have seen a lot of amazing campaigns based on free standing signs. Now, I used to live in Michigan over a decade ago when I got into performance marketing and one of my favorite campaigns that I've ever seen is a guy that went around the area with white signs and simply one word that said, "Single?" Then, they used the city name or the township name and dating or relationships dot com or net or something like that, so it was super easy to remember. Then he drove it to a Match.com campaign. I thought that was really awesome and the crazy part about that is he put those on exit to expressways for years. In fact, I still think near my parents' house, they haven't moved, the guy still runs those campaigns every summer and probably does very well with them because he has no competition.
If you think about that, you can put signs like ... almost like political advertising yard signs outside of neighborhoods or near expressways, the on ramps and the off ramps, and you can run a successful Pay Per Call campaign that way and it's pretty cheap to do. Now, you're going to have to refresh the ads regularly because those signs are going to get taken down every time the city mows the lawn or the homeowner's association mows the lawn, but a really great way to do it. Now, you can see these signs here, a lot of them have phone numbers on them and they're really simple. There's nothing to this. The plastic ones and reusable ones, you have to be more specific about those placements, but the yard signs are just really cheap, weather coated cardboard and they last for a month or two. You just get them placed all over the place. You will generate phone calls.
Now, that requires a lot of work and I think that most internet marketers like internet marketing because it doesn't require a lot of work, but if you can spend $500 on signs, place those signs around, and then get a couple of hundred phone calls that pay $25 a piece, your return on investment can be pretty good. Maybe you do the testing by yourself, but once you figure out how to do it, you just pay people to do it for you and reap the benefits.
Taxi Ad Examples
Taxi sign advertising, this is really interesting. You can do sides of taxis, some taxis have flyers inside them, people have nothing to do, so they'll look at the flyers. You can do wraps on the taxis, the top of the taxis, some of them have advertisements on the back of the taxis. You can even see here that they're running a call campaign on a glazing company for glass in the United Kingdom. If a glazing company in the United Kingdom can do this campaign, you probably can, too. You can also see here that in Singapore they have campaigns on the side of taxis, New York City, Las Vegas, they do it all over the world. You can test campaigns in this fashion all over the world depending on what markets you can operate in, and it works just like anything else. If it works, you keep buying it, if it doesn't, it doesn't. The cost of entry is a little bit higher. You should comfortable with that, but if you can make it work, then you have a contract and competitive advantage.
Transportation Shelter Ad Examples
Transportation shelters, I like these a lot. You have to think about the demographics of people that are going to be sitting and waiting for the bus, so debt consolidation offers are probably really good here, low income type offers are probably really good here, payday loan offers. Probably not home services offers, but clearly, this dentist right here is making it work. They have a phone number on it. You can do a dental campaign here. Instead of branded one, do a non-branded one. Do a debt consolidation one. I mean, this one right here is talking about the learning of children and it's a call campaign, so if they can make that work, you can essentially make everything work.
Now, if you're going to do a bus stop, I wouldn't recommend doing an auto insurance campaign. These people clearly don't have their own car, but lots of other campaigns will work here. Not only that, they're going to be sitting there for a long period of time, so if they're sitting there waiting for the bus for a half an hour and all they have to look at is your advertisement, well if they're even remotely close to interested, they can pick up the phone and call right then and there and you can get a phone call.
Business Card Ad Examples
Business cards, we put these in here because you can do a lot with business cards. A lot of these multi-level marketing guys take business cards and place them on urinals or in toilets or at conventions and all over the place, so if you can figure out great ways to distribute these business cards in places where people will see them, you can create a Pay Per Call campaign with simply using business cards. That's how simple this actually is.
----
Previous Lesson | Next Lesson: Radio Advertising for Pay Per Call
Last edited: