How can B2B start-ups leverage digital billboards to their advantage

We know, right? The title itself sounds so ludicrous that it’s even hard to believe this can even be true.

No kidding…

Well, we may be all about the occasional giggle here and there but when we’re talking business, we’re not kidding.

The world of B2B startups is a different beast altogether when you compare them to their B2C cousins, true. Even though both of them are angled around the same growth patterns, B2Bs cater to a totally different audience that buys for totally different reasons.

When you put startups, B2B and billboards in the same sentence, it doesn’t really make sense for many.

We’re here to unclog that old sink and let you in on a little secret that is going to rock your B2B startup world – digital billboards are HOT and RISING, and B2B startups can take advantage of them too!

That’s a good sales pitch, but how do you make it stick?

Let’s deep-dive into the subject and we’ll show you exactly why and how B2B startups should be jumping on top of digital billboards.

The secret sauce – it’s all about hourly buying

If you’re wondering why digital billboards are even in the same sentence with startups, there’s a very good answer for that – hourly buying.

What? But how can you do hourly buying on digital billboards?

That’s where our masterful tool, Blindspot, comes into play. Our user-friendly, ad-manager interface allows anyone to make hourly buying on digital screens, across the world.

With just a few easy clicks, you can select the city, screen(s) and precise hours that you want to deploy your content to. It’s so easy you can do it yourself, without any agency middlemen in between you and the billboard.

That’s all good but what about the price? Aren’t billboards still expensive even with hourly buying?

That would have been true if you were buying media in bulk. A billboard in a city like New York would set you back $2000 – $4000 per month per ad per billboard. With the magic of Blindspot you can now get on a billboard like Thomson Reuters, in Times Square, for roughly $280 per hour.

Say what?

$280 dollars per hour for a billboard in North Times Square, that’s what! It doesn’t get more budget-friendly than that, especially on a startup’s budget.


The fellowship of B2B and digital billboards

All good on the hourly buying, but how can you justify using digital billboards as a media channel for B2B?

We thought you might ask that and here’s the secret – you don’t use it on its own!

Huh?

To make digital billboards an efficient channel for B2B marketing you need to use them as complementary media to your performance media campaigns.

Hmmm, how does that make sense though?

Well, it’s quite easy, to be honest.

Let’s assume that you want to do an account-based marketing campaign. In more earthly terms, this means that you want to target the decision-makers in a company to sway them towards your product/service. In a normal world, an efficient account-based marketing campaign would use a geo-targeted mechanism in order to reach out to the audience at the headquarters of the company.

But what if the conversion rate of your performance marketing campaign could increase twofold by using digital billboards?

I beg your pardon?

No “haha’s” involved, pinky promise! We’ve had clients that have managed to do just that – increase their performance marketing campaign’s output by 2x, by using digital billboards to go with it.

But how exactly?

Synchronously with your performance marketing efforts, you would buy hourly slots with some nice creatives and great messaging at the exact hours when people are going in and coming out from work. The shiny visuals would serve as an initial activation for the decision-makers that are passing by when going in and out of the office building, while the performance marketing campaigns would serve as exploration triggers once they have reached their private screens. This way, you’re making sure that they’re “heated up” to your brand before the actual sales pitch goes in.


Billboards make great social-media content

Imagine that billboards, up until recently, were the avenue of big brands only. They would put up their awesome ads, people would stop and stare, and everyone would be amazed by the billboard magic that poured out together with the top-shelf creatives from the agencies that tinkered them.

Now imagine that smaller brands, startups and other organizations or entities start using digital billboards. This is some big feat for them! It’s almost like touching the clouds when your feet are anchored to the ground. The sheer social-proof of having your brand on a billboard is grounds enough alone for share and likes.

The best thing about it? Billboard social-media content can go viral – WILDFIRE VIRAL!

How so?

Step 1 – put some nice contextual content on the billboard

Step 2 – film it and put it on a social platform

Step 3 – watch it explode

You can check out what we did with “Wallstreetbets” and see how this can get your brand to the top of the feed – nr. 2 most upvoted post on Reddit of all time to the top, that is.

Asides from that, it’s a great way to use it as a trust-building mechanism for your marketer’s personal brand, sharing it on LinkedIn as a case study, which would definitely pique the interest of the professional community there and get you some sweet, sweet awareness.


Billboards for B2B win

It doesn’t matter if you do SaaS, some hardware product, or maybe some other, great tech. Billboards can be as effective for B2B as they can be for their B2C counterparts. Because of the power of hourly buying and contextual content, you can leverage billboards to spike your conversion rates and expand the awareness of your brand to the audience that you’re looking to activate, not just to some random people passing down the street.

If you’re still not convinced, you can go ahead and create a free account with Blindspot right now, no minimum buy-in required and see for yourself how easy it is to make B2B marketing with billboards.