How to use digital signage for a guerilla marketing campaign

Digital signage is frequently used for outdoor advertising campaigns. You only have to think of Times Square, New York to understand the popularity of digital screens for outdoor marketing and advertising. When used for guerilla marketing campaigns, digital signage can give you a competitive edge that makes your business stand out from the crowd.

Guerilla marketing refers to an advertising strategy that plays on the element of surprise or unconventional interactions to promote their product or service. Guerilla advertising can be seen in both outdoor and indoor advertising. By using guerilla techniques in your Digital Out Of Home advertising campaign, you can make sure your marketing campaign catches the attention of potential customers as they go about their daily routine.

In this article, we will explore how you can use digital signage for a guerilla marketing campaign. We will also share examples of some previous digital guerilla marketing campaigns to inspire you for your future campaigns.

What is Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) media?

Digital Out Of Home media, otherwise known as DOOH, refers to digitally displayed advertising in outdoor public spaces. DOOH advertising can be found in various public spaces including airports, shopping malls, road-side billboards, city centers, sports stadiums and outside hotels.

While Out Of Home media is one of the oldest traditional marketing techniques, the ever-growing digital landscape of advertising has transformed outdoor advertising at a rapid pace.

According to the OAAA, the out of home (OOH)  marketing industry has experienced consecutive growth. In the first quarter of 2020, OOH advertising revenue rose 4.8 percent accounting for $1.86 billion in revenue.

Digital out of home advertising offers a multitude of benefits. Using digital displays, DOOH can be a cost-effective, dynamic and flexible option for advertising. These digital displays can be used to display multiple ads in rotation enabling businesses to share media costs with multiple advertisers.

The ability to create dynamic adverts also adds a new dimension to your advertising creative. These dynamic display features offer flexibility and personalization as your advert can change to display new information depending on various factors such as weather conditions, time of day and almost any other type of real-time data.

With its exponential growth and flexibility, it can be expected that advertisers looking to use digital out of home advertising techniques may need to start thinking of the box and, therefore, may want to incorporate guerilla marketing techniques into their next digital outdoor campaign.

Examples of guerilla marketing that use digital signage

As the use of digital signage for guerilla marketing grows in popularity, you will likely see advertisers developing creative, crowd-stopping campaigns. Two of our favourite examples of guerilla marketing campaigns that use digital signage are Spotify and Google.

Each year, Spotify uses user generated content to build unique “Wrapped” reports for each of their users. This report informs users of various details about their usage history over the past year such as their top played songs, favorite genres, and other statistics.

In 2018, outdoor advertising played a key role in Spotify’s “Wrapped” campaign. This campaign gave Spotify users the opportunity to share their own Wrapped report on digital billboards in iconic outdoor locations including Times Square in New York, Piccadilly Lights in London and Melbourne Square in Australia. By using digital signage, Spotify were able to use real-time data to dynamically display user profiles on digital screens around the world.

In 2019, Google used dynamical digital signage to create their “make the most of Summer” outdoor advertising campaign. Through this outdoor advertising campaign, Google used responsive, data driven techniques to show the ways Google helps people enjoy Summer. Based in the UK, this campaign showcased Google’s search functionality by using popular city-wide search terms, such as “best ice cream in Glasgow” or “parks near me.”

Full motion sites across various cities in the UK, also listed the results for these search terms including star ratings, opening times, and map directions with creative also reacting to time of day and local weather conditions. By dynamically displaying this content on digital screens, Google was able to provide passersby with the most relevant creative in the moment.

How to use digital signage for guerilla marketing

If you are planning to use digital signage for your next guerilla marketing campaign, there’s a few factors you may want to consider to ensure the success of your advertising strategy, approach and messaging.

Digital signage offers many benefits for out of home advertising campaigns. Therefore, it is important that you choose the best display for your campaign. The screen type, size and software features can all influence the functions and effectiveness of your guerilla marketing campaign.

When selecting a screen size and shape for your DOOH guerilla campaign, think about what screen size and shape would deliver the most impact for your advert. A large curved LED digital screen may be an appealing choice for showcasing your latest product release in a busy outdoor public square. Alternatively, a portrait free-standing display signage may work best if you are advertising inside a shopping mall or food court.

As well as considering your chosen screen size, you should also think about the software features you need for your advertising campaign. Digital signage offers endless app capabilities meaning you can create unique advertising creatives for your guerilla marketing campaign.

You can use digital signage software capabilities to display timed messages, real-time weather updates, interactive content or dynamically displayed content based on real-time data updates. The capabilities of digital signage don’t stop there. These screens could also be equipped with sound functionality, motion detection, touchscreen functionality and even facial recognition to allow you to create a truly unique guerilla marketing experience for passersby.

Once you have settled on the best digital signage display screen and functionality for your advertising campaign, you will need to think about your target audience and how to connect with them. In order for your campaign to connect with your audience, you will need to choose your location carefully.

Consider placing your advertising campaign in locations where your customers are likely to visit. If you are using your guerilla marketing to promote a new product, you may want to place it near to your store locations.

Alternatively, if your guerilla marketing messaging focuses on commuters, opting for public transport locations may work best for your campaign. By understanding who your target audience are, where they are and what you want to accomplish you will be able to choose the best location for your digital guerilla marketing campaign.

Tracking success

Finally, you might want to track the success of your digital guerilla marketing campaign. Whilst you shouldn’t let tracking your campaign be the main focal point, it can be beneficial to have an understanding of how your outdoor advertisement performed. There are several ways you can track the success of offline advertisements.

One way to track your DOOH campaign would be to use a unique website landing page within your campaign messaging. By directing people to a unique landing page that is designed specifically for your DOOH campaign, you will be able to successfully analyze how those users interacted with your site after seeing your outdoor advert.

You could also include a social media hashtag on your outdoor marketing campaign. You can then track social media engagement and sentiment around this hashtag and other keywords relating to your outdoor campaign to gauge how users reacted to your campaign.

By including a QR code on the creative displayed on the screen, you can also encourage app downloads by making it easier for people to locate your app by simply scanning your QR code.

Digital outdoor advertising enables businesses to get creative with outdoor advertising. By combining digital signage with guerilla marketing techniques, your business will be able to create a unique, dynamic outdoor advertisement that catches the attention of you audience.