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Billboards are still an effective tool in marketing, especially for local businesses. Effective billboards build brand awareness among a huge, diverse audience, helping you enjoy higher brand recognition in your service area. When designing a billboard, it’s important to base the design on four key principles:

  • Simple designs are most effective
  • Word count must be low
  • Designs must make fast impact
  • Billboards should include a call to action

Billboards can be a great advertising tactic to reach your target audience while they are out in the community. It’s an efficient way to get your message in front of thousands and thousands of people. An effective billboard catches a person’s eye and includes specific, intentional messaging, leaving them thinking about the messaging you communicated long after they have driven past the advertisement.

Designing a billboard that speaks to your audience and makes them take action requires a deep knowledge of your brand and audience, ad placement best practices, and professional design expertise.

M&R’s team of award-winning designers create conversion-driving billboard designs utilizing these best practices:

Simple = Better

When approaching a billboard design, think less is more. Less content and design elements mean more attention can be put on what you do include. If you want the few seconds that your billboard is in front of a driver to be effective, take time to really determine what the most important details to include are so you don’t waste any opportunity to convert.

Stick to one design theme and topic, there isn’t enough exposure time to highlight your entire company. Choose a product or service highlight and let that be the focus of your billboard. You can always have multiple designs that cover different topics and test them out to see which one is worth keeping up, but it’s never a good idea to have multiple topics squeezed into a single design.

Understandable, intentional content put into a simple but eye-catching design can take your billboard from a waste of money to a conversion-driving advertising tactic.

View Time

Drivers have several things taking up their attention when they are behind the wheel like navigating the road, passengers in the car, and other vehicles on the road. When they drive by your billboard, you have to fight for their attention in that sea of distractions. Not to mention the other billboards, outside advertising, and businesses lining the road. You only have a few seconds to make someone read your billboard and understand the message you’re trying to communicate.

Readability

Like we mentioned, you only have a few seconds to make an impression. That means the content on your billboard should be instantly legible to drivers passing by. You should also consider that your billboard will be high in the air. Make sure your logo, call to action, and product or service focus are large enough to be easily recognized, read and digested, and remembered.

Call to Action

Arguably the most important element to include in a billboard design, a call to action is necessary so that your audience knows what to do after reading your billboard. Include your website link, phone number, or physical location so you can capture those that want to reach out after seeing your advertisement. Even further, you can create a unique landing page or call tracking number to accurately track leads and conversions that directly came from your billboard.

Partner With M&R Marketing

M&R Marketing can help create a plan of action for creating effective, conversion-driving billboards to take your advertising strategy to the next level. When you hire us, you are choosing an in-house team of web developers, copywriters, account managers, digital strategists, and graphic designers who live and breathe marketing. We are creative, accessible, and dedicated to YOUR success. We’d love to partner with you! Send us an email at hey@mandr-group.com and we’ll get this conversation started.

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