Out-of-Home For B2B: A Marketing Redemption Story

Today's marketers are coming around to the fact that they need to shake up their tactics. 

Digital display, email outreach, and social media channels are not delivering the same reliable performance. There are plenty of macro reasons for this - digital exhaustion, changes in privacy tracking, social channel adoption - but regardless of the why, the fact is B2B marketers need to find a new mix to deliver results for the business.

That’s where out-of-home advertising is stepping up in a big way. New technologies are proving to B2B marketing leaders that out-of-home campaigns are precision-targeted, data-driven, and measurable. 

There are plenty of longstanding myths floating around about OOH - the targeting capabilities, the cost, the format, and the timing. In this blog, we’ll dispel those rumors and show how out-of-home 2.0 can make up for performance gaps in your B2B marketing plan.

The Challenges Today’s B2B Marketers Face

Today’s B2B go-to-market leaders are working through a challenging landscape. They’ve got smaller teams due to layoffs and a boatload of new AI technologies to try to understand and leverage. They are working with a smaller budget to reach a landscape of companies that also have smaller budgets to spend on tools and tech. 

It’s not an era of big bold moves.

It’s also not the time to stick your head in the sand and just keep plugging away using the same tactics you have for years.

Today’s b2b marketing leaders needs to be: 

• Agile
• Efficient
• Data-driven
• Focused 

And the channels they choose need to mirror these qualities too. Contrary to popular belief, OOH advertising is emerging as a channel that fulfills these needs (when executed in a modern way using new targeting and tracking capabilities).

Busting The Common Myths About Out-Of-Home

Most B2B marketing leaders don’t consider out-of-home a viable option to drive growth or meet goals. With good reason. 

In a recent presentation with the marketing community ClubPF, fractional CMO Amber Stevens Picotte shared an anecdote along these lines. She recapped a 2022 conversation with the C-suite of a previous employer that reflected some long-standing assumptions about out-of-home advertising.

Here’s a clip:

Like Amber, many B2B leaders believe the following common misconceptions about out-of-home advertising:

1. It’s too expensive: many leaders believe that OOH is over budget. That any meaningful test campaign would cost well over $100K, maybe even closer to $500K.
2. It’s long-tail and slow: the feeling is that OOH will take a long time to show any meaningful impact on key metrics. So it’s not a quick activation or quick results tactic. 
3. There’s a lot of waste: most marketers assume there’s no way to really target your ICP using OOH. You can run campaigns in specific geographies, but there's going to be a lot of waste in the program and you’re not really going to be able to get to the actual buyer.
4. It’s not measurable: vanity metrics of reach or impressions are the only metrics marketers think they’ll be able to see from an OOH campaign.  
5. It’s only billboards: marketers typically think of big billboards when they hear OOH. These are expensive, hard to implement, hard to adjust.   

These misconceptions are completely valid because they're formed from of real experiences. For a long time OOH didn’t have the right price point, targeting options, measurement capabilities, or media mix for a B2B marketing leader to seriously consider it as a performance channel. 

Until now. 

The New Role of Out-Of-Home as a Performance Marketing Channel 

The time has come for the redemption story we promised you. Out-of-home advertising is having a major moment across the B2C and B2B markets. Here are some macro reasons why:

1. Digital fatigue is real. People are tired of getting messages only on their screens. 
2. Consumers seek trusted brands, and brands are focused on building authority. The purse strings are tightening, among consumers and businesses alike. Dollars are being spent on brands that have established trust and authority in their markets.   
3. Decisions are being made by committee. This makes 1:many communications extremely important for marketers to reach and influence multiple stakeholders.
4. Real world experiences are back. Roughly two years post-COVID, people are returning to offices and business travel, and spending more on the experience economy. They want to share experiences with each other in-person, including ads. 

OOH check all these boxes. It is a medium that delivers a shared experience, communicates one-to-many, lives outside of your screen, and builds brand authority. 

But can it be strategically implemented and tracked? That's a critical factor for performance marketers. Now it can - with platforms like OneScreen.ai and it's proprietary targeting and measurement technology.

OneScreen.ai: OOH Targeting and Measurement that Performance Marketers Expect

The OneScreen.ai platform enables performance marketers to run smarter, more efficient, and more successful OOH campaigns. In the demo below, OneScreen.ai founder Greg Wise introduces the targeting capabilities within the platform. Watching this brief video, you’ll understand: 

1. How we plan a campaign to reach precise targets 
2. How to find inventory that will reach specific target accounts and your ICP
3. The media mix available through OneScreen.ai - from billboards to bus shelters to digital displays 

Out-of-home campaigns don’t have to be looked at as casting a wide net just to get some eyeballs. This proprietary targeting technology enables you to put together a really precise campaign, with measurable results.

To measure the success of every campaign, OneScreen.ai uses Mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs), to track individual devices. We shared how this works in a recent blog post:

“OneScreen.AI's platform exposes mobile devices that entered the inventory's viewable area and identifies which of those same devices took the desired action within the lookback window. If the objective of the campaign is "visiting the website", OneScreen would identify how many of the devices that encountered the billboard also visited the website within the designated lookback window.”

Using this tracking system, the OneScreen.ai team can report out a holistic view of campaign performance for our clients. This includes the following metrics:

• Impressions Audit - total impressions across the whole campaign lifetime
• MAID/Audience Delivery - to enable retargeting on digital and social channels 
• Pixel Attribution - shows traffic on a specific webpage or landing page
• Lift Analysis - shows impact of website traffic or a point of interest footfall
• Total ROI - gives a holistic view of true business impact of your campaign

Get Started With OOH for Your B2B Business

OneScreen.ai technology has brought OOH measurement capabilities up to par with other marketing channels. It's giving a longstanding advertising medium an exciting redemption story. 

Embracing OOH 2.0 is all about making data-backed decisions and removing intuition and guesswork. Using the data from all the campaigns run on the platform, OneScreen.ai has built an extremely intelligent database of data and learnings so every out-of-home campaign is more precision-targeted than the last.

Understand how to put this powerful medium to work for your business, with a free media plan.