Build A Winning Brand Narrative For SaaS Business Using OOH

This piece was first published in MARKETING WEEKENDER Issue 354

By Moving Walls

If you’re a B2B SaaS company, you may think that large spectacular billboards along the freeways don’t make sense for your industry. 

Here’s the truth: in case you assume out-of-home (OOH) advertising can’t assist you, or that your competitors aren’t pouring large budgets into the medium, you’d be wrong.

Getting your brand out there 

In a heavily saturated B2B market, most brands are either contemplating or switching to the Software as a service (SaaS) model, that is, if they haven’t already. This has made competition tougher and costlier for brands like yours. 

If there’s one thing that separates you from your competition, that would be brand narrative. Nearly 82% of B2B marketers agree that brand execution is something SaaS companies need to emphasize on. 

Yet brand investment isn’t a new phenomenon. Simply put, it is creating a level of experience that has a direct impact on the perception of value and quality. Think of it as Simon Sinek’s gleaming golden circle. 

That said SaaS brands cannot stop with the why. The how and what needs to be in a flux. Meaning your brand needs fresh chum for the funnel and more fuel for sales. 

Tech brands and those in the e-commerce sphere are also starting to realize that outsized budgets across social media platforms are not working. Instead many are turning to OOH medium for more visibility. OOH was once referred to as an old school medium however exciting new placements, audience targeting, geolocation data and triggers have transformed OOH into a sophisticated model for savvy markets.

Make a real impression to drive online engagement 

We have found that while SaaS providers have become more effective at down-thefunnel activities, heavily relying on optimizing conversions, the top of the funnel is still the biggest single obstacle to hitting quarterly numbers.

The counter-intuitive appeal of OOH advertising for SaaS companies is simple: billboards create top-of-mind brand awareness as good as which is unrivaled. And when you’re struggling to keep the top of the funnel full, more of that is what you need.

• Be seen more often.  At the end of the day although brands are transacting in an online world, they are still trying to reach humans. Humans by design, what we see often, think  often, do. So it does not help to merely be present in the digital medium, in fact it’s costlier. What works better is a marketing mix that combines as many touch points as possible. This enables brand recall and faster conversions.
• Impressionable – OOH is a medium that is unskippable, unstoppable and unavoidable. If your creatives are well-designed and throughout, chances are that customers’ attention will be drawn to it and will linger in their minds longer. Customers will either look for your name or recognize it when it pops up. 
• In markets where you have no sales support – it helps to have this kind of awareness where when a buyer eventually communicates with your brand, they would have already known, seen or heard something. 
• Cookieless world – In a cookieless world it can get harder to reach clients if your marketing mix only has digital medium on it. Digital out-of-home takes things further by targeting people out and about by adding AdTech to the mix. Tools and technology such as tracking, retargeting, personalization are enough to deliver powerful campaigns. 
• Multi-market – Since the medium is digital, ads can be sold, changed, looped and interacted without manual labor. This makes targeting easy and cost-effective. Campaigns can be adjusted in real-time without setbacks such as those in the offline world. 

What is your next move? 

With so much competition for visibility and conversions, we hope this has given you some ideas to break through the noise. Our rich inventory has every kind of format from place-based, to street furniture and transit across several countries from APAC to beyond. If you’d like to learn more about launching campaigns, explore and book your first pDOOH campaign today.