Billboard Advertising and Usability – Best Colors
I was driving to work and noticed three billboards in a row where the content of the billboard ad were all quite familiar to me.
I’ll give you one guess as to what set those billboards apart from many of the others along my commute.
The billboards all used a yellow background. Yellow is used on traffic signs (at least here in the USA – pardon my ignorance) to denote “caution”. Our eyes are trained to pick up the color yellow for at least a quick scan. If your business can make good use of billboards to take offline leads online (and most businesses can’t – so be careful), give it a try.
This loops back into old fashioned marketing principles. What gets our customers excited, or what gets their attention? It does not always take shock marketing – sometimes it is just a simple change of color.
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The example shown is the worst form of advertising ever concieved.
No headline
No Benefits
No call to action
And most important…..no results for your $2000 a month.
“Good old Advertising” has no connection to warm and fuzzy feelings. Unless tied directly to results.
If there are no results…the ad is changed for a better one.
Not your example.
- Chuck
Chuck, you are absolutely correct – the ad is a textbook example of all that is wrong in the field of marketing. In my line of work, it\’s so much easier to call myself an SEO than an Internet Marketer, though the former is a small subset of the latter primarily because of \”Madison Avenue\”-type advertising that produces a pile of warm fuzzies but no results.
However, that I noticed the billboard despite the lousy copy just reaffirms that the yellow color is a winner.
Happy to agree with you. I had a brain-flash of the most perfect billboard campain though.
1 buy lots of radio commercial time on a low power station.
2. Inside the good reception zone use billboards with a headline, benefit, and call to action (103.5 FM) and/or a telephone info line…(for Cell phones)
3 radio ads include call in information phone numbers.
SO…..during the short commute a person changes the station.
Continuous commercials remain on the radio.
The person jots down the needed info from the radio at some point and call the infoline and leaves contact information.
Target the customer,keep costs low and get trackable results.
Brilliant brain-flash Chuck – multiple methods of contact is the way to go. That takes care of everyone who likes to jump right in and ask questions down to the “lurkers” who like the barrier that radio provides.
On the Internet side, I noticed (finally) a new crop of landing pages that enourage the personal contact by offering several methods of communication between the customer and business. We’re going to try implementing this in a revamped site design. Hopefully we’ll do better than all those sites out there with the live chat box that is never live
We are a free standing outpatient medical imaging center. We are located in S. Williamson, KY. We currently have two (2) outdoor billboards. However I don’t feel the boards are very noticeable. I am looking for some advice on a billboard design that would be more noticeable and effective for our business. Can you advise me or direct me where I can find some information.
Thank You.
I think folks are taking this post in entirely different way. As per my understanding, this article is just a suggestion to the ones who are already in billboard advertising and the suggestion is just to use yellow color only because US residents are already used of this color.
I don’t think that suggestion is in regards to lay outing a bill board!!! Sorry to say but I don’t agree with the criticism done specifically in first 3 comments.
Try understanding core theme of the article and then reconsider your criticism!!!
Why not advertise online for that money?
Aug 26th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
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