Billboard advertising is an exciting, accessible, and effective form of marketing that allows your business or product to be seen by large amounts of people who may have not normally been led to discover what you have to offer. They are utilized to reach daily commute drivers, those on public transit, walking and cycling commuters, and even the unexpected passerby. The success of a billboard, however, can largely depend on its ability to captivate the eyes of a viewer, making its design crucial. While these may seem daunting, creating a well designed billboard does not need to be a struggle, here are six things to consider when designing your billboard.
- Simplicity, Speed of Comprehension
One of the most important things to remember when designing a billboard is how much time most people will have to digest the content within it. Typically people see billboards while driving, walking, or sitting on a train or bus. Time to read your billboard may vary per person. But you want your viewer to be able to digest all of the content on your billboard within just a few seconds.
What does this mean for your billboard design? It needs to be simple. Whatever text is on your billboard should be quickly readable, large, and highly memorable. Questions and solutions are a great way to do this, rhymes are a great way to do this, a catchphrase, or even a code or short web link.
Because of how fast you need people to understand your billboard, avoid explaining your product in detail on the advertisement. This is where you can take advantage of the digital medium. Show your product, use text to lead others to more deeply engaging with it later. A billboard should show more than tell, and be a step of discovery, rather than explanation.
- Visually Interesting
A boring billboard will go unnoticed. Make sure that you put the effort into making your billboard pop, making it catch the eye and excite your new customers. This means using color! Use an interesting image, or a piece of artwork that makes people want to continue looking at it and exploring it. Try to avoid making a billboard that perfectly matches the skyline surrounding it, because you want it to stand out!
There are two different types of billboards you can take advantage of depending on what city you are in. Print billboards, and digital billboards. If you have the budget to take advantage of digital billboards, you can utilize animation, video content, moving backgrounds and evolving text to make your billboard more eye-catching and interesting. These types of steps can help your marketing campaign draw in a number of new customers through an entertaining piece of art.
- Design Storytelling
Remember that your billboard needs to tell a story, but tell a story quickly. The ability to create a narrative within your design, a demonstration of cause and effect is a great tool for providing onlookers with a reason to dive deeper into your product, service, or business.
Carefully plan what story it is you are trying to tell and discuss this with your designer or design team. It will take trial and error to simplify this into something rapidly digestible, but it can help create a more individual relationship with your soon-to-be customers.
- Understand Your Location
Billboards are not a one-kind-fits-all for every city. Boston billboards should look different than Chicago billboards. You are trying to reach different groups of people wherever you advertise, so it is important that you create billboards that effectively target your audience in each city.
This can even go down to researching specific locations within the cities you place your billboards. You want to ensure that you create a relationship with your locals such that they feel you know and understand them. If you take a marketing plan from another state or city and try to copy and paste it, you may find that you not only fail to bring in new customers, but that you actually push them away. Keep this in mind as you design your billboard, the specificity of your marketing campaign can perform wonders for your products.
- Be Bold
Be bold. Be shocking. Sometimes being a little bit risky—whether its a joke, or piece of local culture—can have a huge turnaround. You want to be the most noticeable billboard in the area. So as long as you are still being polite, producing an obvious, in your face kind of billboard can be a great way to bring your business into the forefront of people’s minds.
- Research
Lastly, research consistently. Find out what designs work, find out which of your designs work, and poll your audience. Regularly engaging in this process will do wonders for your campaign.