Unlocking New User Acquisition with Out of Home Advertising (w/ Simon Mills & Opencare)
Learn how Simon Mills helped a consumer services company match their digital cost per acquisition with legacy out-of-home advertising.
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Meet Simon Mills, growth consultant.
Simon currently runs George St Growth, a growth consultancy that helps startups across Canada and the United States grow as a fractional Head of Growth.
In 2019, Simon was the Growth Manager at Opencare, a dental tech startup in Toronto. Simon was tasked with helping Opencare test and scale new channels to drive new user acquisition.
At the time, Opencare needed new channels to grow. They’d hit a ceiling with Facebook Ads, paid search was scaling nicely, and they had recently launched an Affiliate program.
With low-hanging digital options already in play, they turned to Out of Home, A.k.a billboard advertising. They’d start in Toronto, and later expand to Chicago and San Fransisco. Opencare’s persona was a broad swatch of the consumer market, so Simon figured they could turn OOH into a performance-first direct response channel.
How Opencare Tested OOH Advertising
The focus of their initial test was to see if OOH could become a direct response performance channel. As a result, they initially focused on:
Sought Ad Placements with High Dwell Time + High Frequency: Initially, Simon sought to focus his placements where they'd be seen for long periods of time. He landed on Toronto’s city transit authority, the TTC. He placed posters on subway station walls and walls on the inside of subway cars, first focusing on Toronto’s “Line 1” and concentrating at particular stations in areas with high proportions of his target personas. He wanted to make sure that their target demo was seeing their ads in multiple places, multiple times a day. If you were in our target demo, they wanted it to feel like Opencare was everywhere.
Bought Longer Ad Placements: Their initial buy was for eight weeks. Simon knew that people need to see your ad multiple times to take action, and he wanted to make sure he could capture OOH’s storied “long tail” ad response.
Focused on Direct Response Creative: Simon made sure his creative included a compelling offer, a clear call-to-action, a promo code, and a web URL specific to the campaign.
Opencare’s OOH Advertising Test Results
Within the first two weeks, Opencare’s Toronto campaign started showing signs of success.
Early indicators began appearing between the second and forth week of his placement. People were starting to redeem the promo code listed on the ads.
Their cost per acquisition got progressively cheaper until it eventually reached his target CPA by week ten.
How Opencare Scaled Their OOH Channel
After the success of his initial campaign, Simon doubled down by extending his buy in Toronto while going even bigger with billboards and a greater presence on the TTC.
Soon after, he also launched OOH in San Fransisco and started exploring a buy in Seattle before COVID’s arrival derailed his plans.
His San Fransisco buy was not as successful as Toronto’s. Simon attributes this to the available ad inventory – his San Francisco buy focused on wall murals and billboards vs. transit systems. From this, he realized that for OOH to work as a performance channel, high dwell time is critical and transit is generally the best way to achieve that.
How You Can Drive New User Acquisition with OOH Advertising
Focus on High Dwell Time Media: If your goal is direct response, people need time to absorb the message. Places like transit, restobars (i.e washrooms), transit shelters etc are great placements to capture and hold people’s attention for an extended period of time
Frequency and Longevity are Key: People need to see your ads multiple times in multiple places over an extended period of time for them to take action. You need at least 6 weeks to really drive results beyond brand awareness and site visits.
Creative is Critical: Make sure you have a clear, large logo, a visible URL and even a promo code and/or CTA. People need to know who you are and where to go to take advantage of your offer.
Ensure Proper Measurement: Although you can look at direct promo code redemptions and custom URL visits etc, you also want to be measuring overall lift via search queries and organic site visits within your campaign geo while testing.
Simon currently runs George St Growth, a growth consultancy that helps startups across Canada and the United States grow as a fractional Head of Growth. Connect with him on LinkedIn.