Turn it up to 11! You’ve probably heard this phrase before, but have you ever wondered where it came from? If you’re a rock fan then you’ve seen ‘This is Spinal Tap’. If you haven’t, check out this 1 min clip below.
“These go up to 11,” says lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel showing Marty DiBergi his latest Marshall amplifier. “Why not just make 10 louder?” asks Marty. Nigel pauses before repeating, “These go up to 11.”
In other words: don’t just turn up the volume, make a show of it! Turn it up to 11, turn it up to 12! Rip the knob off!
It’s not just about who shouts louder, it’s about what you do to get heard in the first place – it’s about being bold and standing out.
After ‘This is Spinal Tap’ aired, requests flooded into Marshall for Amps that went up to 11, and later on that year the company doubled down on the idea, releasing Amps that went up to 20.
It’s a great story right? Marshall not only provided great amplifiers, but also managed to amplify their sales by standing out from the competition with a quirky idea that embraced the spirit of rock and roll.
So what can you do to amplify your existing marketing efforts, aside from just shouting louder? How can you take things to a whole new level? How can you break the mould enough to stand out and connect with customers?
Out-Of-Home amplifiers
You need to find a resource that can enhance popular advertising strategies, whilst reducing how much you need to spend on them.
For many of our clients, that includes investing in a promotional vehicle based campaign, to augment their wider marketing strategy.
Out-Of-Home (OOH) strategies have a number of advantages over digital mediums that can be used to segment your audience for a fraction of the price of digital advertising.
Heightened impressions
Firstly, you can’t really avoid seeing physical advertisements, unless you walk or drive around with your eyes shut, which heightens your rate of impressions. This means OOH ads can be used to rapidly amplify your reach, thus growing your audience without competing for digital real estate.
Digital ads obviously work and most companies will choose to invest resources into them, but it’s an auction house system and the fattest pocketbook always wins.
Digital ads can also be blocked on PC with free extensions such as AdBlock – one click and a user will never see your ads again. As many as 42.7% of internet users globally use ad blocking software, so it is advantageous to diversify your advertising strategy if you want to maximise your results.
Reduced animosity
A second and often overlooked benefit, is user frustration. For example, un-skippable ads on online videos are irritating, passing a McDonalds sign is not.
In fact, if you are hungry and you pass a McDonalds ad, there is a good chance you will visit the restaurant. This is why the company spends so much on OOH ads, nearly $60m in the USA in 2020.
Meanwhile as many as 76% of users skip video ads out of habit alone (IPG Survey) and 90% skip pre-roll ads (ORC International Survey), so smoothing the way you ingratiate yourself with potential leads is critically important.
Real human interaction
One of the greatest benefits of certain types of OOH campaigns is how they can humanise your brand. Real interaction with passionate team members can swing the needle of trust in a way most affiliate schemes can’t.
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Using an affiliate is a way of borrowing credibility from someone else, some of that trust converts to you, but if that influencer decides to go in a different direction, they take their audience with them.
Using your own reps allows you to establish a firmer foundation of trust, one that wont crumble at the first sign of competition. You can build true brand loyalty by putting products in peoples hands, having engaging conversations and explaining your services in a relaxed setting.
This authenticity is something our clients find ideal for online-to-offline campaigns and vice-versa.
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With an eye-catching yet professional display, you are able to demonstrate products, engage with customers and spread your brand message WITHOUT it feeling forced like a regular ad.
Getting personable with your customers on a human level is one of the best ways of turning your customer base into a community.
A less transactional relationship helps customers to change their opinion of you; less faceless corporation, more caring thought leader.
Cross marketing integration
The integration possibilities here are also excellent, a real chance to truly amplify your wider efforts. You can use your OOH strategies, such as an eye catching vehicle setup or display, as a shortcut to trend organically on social media and web searches.
Many of our clients, for example, use our promotional vehicles as part of PR stunts to augment their services – giving out free samples and providing photo ops for customers to hashtag the campaign name and thus spread the message online.
Similarly, many vehicles are also branded with largescale contact info, such as QR codes, that take consumers to a landing page.
This method is another useful shortcut, that avoids the expense of competing for that number one spot on Google.
If you have a great location you may directly engage with hundreds or even thousands of customers in a single day.
This gives you a golden opportunity to further profile your target audience, data that can be fed back into your other marketing activities.
Cost effective
One of the greatest advantages of using a promotional vehicle to amplify your marketing efforts is the price point. Apart form the draw generated by the vehicles themselves, the vinyl wrap used for branding has a greater ROI CPM wise than any other advertising medium.
Vehicle wrap based ads are more than 100 times cheaper than Google ads, and a 1000 times cheaper than television ads.
It works out at just 2 pence per 1000 views – astronomically cheap when you consider a well-placed vehicle can generate up to 70,000 impressions a day.
What are my next steps?
With 93% of WOM brand impressions occurring offline, it really does pay to invest in some OOH strategies.
It doesn’t cost a lot to dip your toes in and you get a lot of bang for your buck. The best strategies catalyse and amplify your existing efforts by funnelling fresh leads into your wider marketing campaigns.
If you want to learn more, I would recommend you read these articles on ROI, cost and planning as your first 3 steps towards amplifying your next marketing campaign.
