Why Your Billboards are Useless

Why your billboards are useless... without a real strategy

In a day and age where the word "marketing" gets thrown around by just about everyone to mean just about anything, it's important to understand what marketing really is and how it can help your business. At Four Columns, we know that providing effective marketing services to our clients entails developing sound marketing strategies and employing proven resources from many different disciplines. You see, often times today, the ability to design a logo, or build a web page, or producing a video is presented as "marketing" to business owners seeking to grow their company. It's attractive because the cost is often low and the promised output sounds great.

 But here's where the rubber meets the road: effective marketing that delivers real, bottom line results requires more than something pretty. And, with rare exception, just creating increased awareness is not enough either. To engage in marketing efforts with predictable outcomes that positively impact your business,  you're going to need real marketing strategy...and developing a potent marketing strategy requires analysis.

 The Burden of Proof

Here's a recent example real marketing strategy implementation and how that delivered measurable value to one of our clients:

Wishing to gain increased penetration into the Waco and Temple markets to combat competition, a Four Columns client asked us for recommendations. For the client's particular industry we identified outdoor signage as an effective and cost efficient medium. Now the question became how to implement.

Our team didn't take the easy route by calling one billboard company for available locations, pick a few and submit a proposed solution to the client. Quite the opposite -- We compiled available billboard locations (and even some that weren't available but would be between now and the end of the year) from over a half dozen companies within a 50 mile radius of Waco.  We included traditional billboards and digital boards as well. Not only that, but our team gathered detailed statistics for each location including weekly impressions, direction faced, side of the street, production cost and rates. Photos of each board were also included in an interactive map created by our team showing each board location with a rating system developed internally utilizing all available data factoring in proximity to specific locations and competitors. The top rated boards according to the data gathered and analyzed by our team formed the recommended outdoor strategy for the client.

We have now completed creative production and our marketing strategy is underway.

 This analysis was a critical component of developing a winning marketing strategy, and this is the level of work you get when you work with Four Columns.