Billboards are a powerful advertising tool, no doubt. 

But with their limited space and the very limited amount of time that passengers in a car can give to that billboard, a Clarksville business normally only has enough opportunity to push just five words (or fewer) to on-lookers.

The problem is most businesses aren't big brands like Coca-Cola, Apple or Target. They're lesser known and need more than a handful of words to get their message across—especially to onlookers who know little to nothing about them. 

How can you effectively get your message across? 

There's another type of "billboard" known (within its own industry) as "indoor billboards"—however, you've probably already experienced it, and referred to it as something like "restroom ads." 

Some principles hold true for BOTH types of billboards. Effective billboard design, no matter if we're talking "outdoor" or "indoor," is an art form that requires creativity and a concise delivery of your message. The right visuals, words, and placement will make a huge difference in your message’s effectiveness. 

In this article, we’ll discuss how to use the art of effective billboards to make sure your message is seen, remembered, and most importantly—how to encourage viewers to take steps toward working with you.

Defining your message

Before you even begin to think about your design, you must start with a solid foundation: your message. You want to ensure that what you’re saying is clear, concise, relevant, and authentic to your brand. Speaking about your brand… 

Since I'm here to give you clear advice and not sugar-coated feel-good affirmation, I'll warn you about a pitfall we've seen too may times: a small business will publish their ad as they see fit, not how their best customers see fit. 

In other words, they don't really have a message, they only have a cute image. There's no incentive. There's just a message that basically says,

"Here we are. Don't we look [clever/cute/friendly]? Don't you want to come buy something from us now? You're welcome."

These are the worst ads. Remember: unless you're a huge brand like Nike or Doritos, you, nor I, get to enjoy such privileges. We need to put some heavy lifting into the message. Some would say: Start with your offer. 

That's not terrible advice. But there's a way to do this within our FRAMES™ Local Brand Growth System that guides business owners to optimize this. Hint: No, you actually don't start with the offer. Many businesses start with the wrong offer. If you have the wrong offer, how in the world are you ever expecting to incentivize it? 

Think about it: 

If I'm offering you piranha-stocked pools… what message could any sane person hear to persuade them to take you up on that offer? 

So the offer is crucial and yes, you must have one in order to ever dream of having a successful billboard at all, indoor or outdoor. But there are methods of even optimizing this before you ever get to the design phase. 

Let's take the benefit or offer you are promoting and move into the next phase— the phase of finding the words that will ensure that your billboard is clear, concise, and memorable.

Writing your five words

Even though an indoor billboard allows you to use a lot more than just 5 words, it's still not a bad exercise to get you coming up with one dynomo ad. Once you’ve nailed down your offer and what you are ready and willing-and-ready incentive, it's time to move on to your headline. 

Our FRAMES™ System walks business owners who are upleveling their advertising to brainstorm this and don't get caught up too much into nailing down the "Perfect Headline." The best ads evolve into their persuasive versions because they've gone through stages of getting better. So it's okay to allow yourself to come up with a headline … and then at least 20 more versions. 

What you'll naturally find is all of these new ideas for angles to take will find their way to the surface. In fact, be prepared that your ad might completely take a different turn entirely. 

That's okay.  

It's not like you've published anything at this point. Give yourself permission to still be in the development phase. You might creatively stumble over a different aspect of your business that you think you'd be a fool to not promote. So brainstorm those headlines and choose one. You can always use a different headline—or "angle"—later. 

No matter your style of ad—either an outdoor billboard or an indoor billboard in a public restroom, your headline is the most important part of the ad and will help guide the rest of the copy. 

You want to make sure your headline is clear, concise, and benefits-based. When writing your headline, try to use the “what” and “why” from your message. Once you have written your headline, you can move on to writing your body copy. When I say the word, "copy," I'm talking about the words that you write. And I'm going to give you an easy way out (because I know many people reading this either think (1) "I don't write real good" or (2) "I know! I can get my Aunt Susie to write our copy—because, being the retired english teacher she is, she's totally qualified!" 

Stop. 

Please don't think like that. Neither of those thoughts are healthy. Your business can build its brand and customer base without 'good writing' and your dear Aunt Susie's input. You might've had a goal of earning a good grade for your creative writing in high school, but your prospects don't care about your essay-writing skills. 

Anyone going through the No Nonsense Advertiser (a 29-minute fluff-free course exclusively open to our clients), will be sure to learn how to break this down the quickest, but an easy hack that I'll share here today is this: think of what your best patrons have said about you when they were bragging about you. What have you heard them say? 

This is the part where you can go into more detail about the offer, details of the product, company information, etc. You want your body copy to be concise and clear. However, don’t be afraid to expand on your headline.

Creating the right visuals

There is one element that stands out as, arguably, the most important component of everything—and this applies to both outdoor billboards as well as restroom billboards or any other type of visual advertisement. 

I'm talking about your imagery—the first thing people will notice and either make the split-second decision to stop and devote more of their precious attention to more of your published message, or if they'll be completely blind to it. 

When it comes to choices for visuals, some pitfalls include using mediocre, "me-too" photos that say nothing or even photos of yourself or your team—which also say nothing. 

Keep in mind here, not only WHO you're trying to speak to—but where they are in their journey. 

Do they know you? We often recommend thinking of them as "cold." Not as in, heartless, but "cold" is marketing jargon that means, "they don't know you at all." 

So we often see people, with the best of intentions, use pictures of themselves. They might be thinking, "This is a great way to educate the local public about my brand." However, the reality is the general public just doesn't care just yet about their brand. They're "cold" — and they don't care who you are because they don't know what you can do for them. 

And by the way, be careful of your logo. That's yet another pitfall: the prefrence of the business to make their logo front and center! Someone might think this is helping them grow local roots—that they're becoming more and more recognizable. But we recommend avoiding this thinking. We're not anti-logo. We're just very intentional to guide you about how to use that logo, and to be careful that it doesn't hijack a lot of very valuable visual real estate that could have been used for far stronger communication: like vision-painting how you solve problems. 

Let's keep going. Before you think about visuals, you need to make sure that you have the right message. If you can’t fit your message into five words (give or take), then you should rework your message. Start by understanding what your audience is looking for. Once you know this, you can start using visuals to connect with your audience on an emotional level.  

Don't forget that words can also be considered "visuals" too. You want to think about what each of these images means to your audience and how it can connect them to your message.  

Does your attention-getting image spell out the vision of what your prospect's future could look like? Does it paint the picture for them of what their life currently looks like at this very moment (since they do not have your product or service in their life)? 

Images are an easy way to create an impactful visual that can help your audience connect with your message. When choosing an image, make sure it is relevant to your message and that it compliments the incentive that you're offering within your ad. 

The stronger your visual hook, the better chance of your billboard being remembered.

How much time do you get?

If you've read this far, then you deserve to know just who you're getting this insight from.  

This is a Whizz Advertising article. And Whizz leverages the 'time out' moments of people … ahem, … "taking care of nature." 

Here, I'll just say it: We use a format—the very specific time and place of your prospects relieving themselves at a public restroom. 

Cool? 

So now let's talk about why we'd ever be crazy enough to do something like that. 

We live in a day where the people who make up the local economy of Clarksville and Ft. Campbell have limited time and attention.  

*If you do not capture a prospect's attention (and get them to continue for a few seconds more of devoted attention), you lose the game.  

Attention is the currency you're after. 

When a resident of Clarksville locks their attention onto your message—AND when it's just kind of weird for them to look around—then you've got a chance to communicate a lot more than your competitors. 

Feel like you can squeeze 5 words on a billboard and incentivize people to give your business a shot? Then go for it. 

But if you feel like you have a few more valuable points you'd like to get across to your prospects—(or if you've already burned your ad budget on 'regular billboards' too)—then this is where Whizz's service shines.   

Clients rely on our own FRAMES™ System to create a billboard that'll exist in people’s memories. The first time someone sees your billboard is an important time, and you want to make sure they remember it. It all starts with having a clear, concise message. Having said that, businesses who take advantage of the moments where people are destined to be taking care of nature, can have a little more cusion on the time factor. No, they don't need to stress about getting everything just perfect, because their viewer isn't going anywhere, at least for a minute or few.

Measuring your success

Probably the most neglected facet about advertising in general: tracking data. 

If you can measure it, you can improve it. The problem is: most everyone (and this is good news for you, because that includes your competitors) are NOT tracking their ad efficacy. 

We don't send our kids to school only to come home with a report card of "grade unknowns." You wouldn't pay patronage to a mechanic that didn't have at least some sort of process to evaluate your car's state. An doctors don't diagnose with guesses. 

Just about every professional you put your trust into, uses systems or methods to test and make the best decisions on how to move forward in the future. Yet, most local Clarksville businesses neglect to track their ads' effectiveness. 

We don't fault people for this. They're busy. Of course! They're running their business (it's not like it'll run without them). So we found a way to deliver tracking through our FRAMES™ Brand Growth System.  

We could see that it was simply too unrealistic of a challenge, so we included a mechanism to help clients measure their success and make adjustments as needed.

Conclusion

Billboards can be very effective advertising tools—both outdoor and indoor—and the art of effective billboards can be used to get the most out of your campaign. 

We want to see businesses succeed and grow, which means a clear and concise message on a board is going to be a huge deal. Your message is the most important part of your billboard, and without it, your billboard is useless.

Don't fall for the "but-everyone-else-is-just-puttin'-their-logo-and-hours-on-a-plaque" trap. Once you have a clear message (based on your market's problem, the solution you can provide, and the incentive you're willing to offer to get your market to give you a crack at solving that problem), you can start to design your billboard.