February 2019 - Face First Media

What To Expect When Using Billboards For Advertising

Man Holding A Billboard Jumping Into Blue Sky If you have a business you have probably carefully considered your marketing and advertising plan and your budget. With so many packed national roads, frantic highways and busy roads in South Africa, you simply cannot go wrong with a well-placed billboard, especially if your business is local! The audiences in certain areas are huge, and getting your brand noticed will be easy if you choose to use cleverly designed and well placed Billboards. They are cost effective and highly visible, and this increases the visibility and recognition of your brand.

If you have a business you have probably carefully considered your marketing and advertising plan and your budget. With so many packed national roads, frantic highways and busy roads in South Africa, you simply cannot go wrong with a well-placed billboard, especially if your business is local!

The audiences in certain areas are huge, and getting your brand noticed will be easy if you choose to use cleverly designed and well placed Billboards. They are cost effective and highly visible, and this increases the visibility and recognition of your brand.

If billboard advertising is new to you, you will probably wonder what to expect. One of the most important things is to find a professional outdoor media partner to assist with positioning your billboard design and locations for high impact. Here are some guidelines on billboard advertising.

Start at the beginning: You want a billboard, but you need to know what your message should be. An effective outdoor advertising partner can provide insights about design, location and the correct type of outdoor advertising. Do your homework and check out billboard providers in your area. Face First Media is one of the most innovative and customer-centric outdoor advertising companies around, and we are able to offer assistance, great design and prime locations.
Get a consultation: You have to understand your message and your audience in order to put together a high impact outdoor advertising campaign. At Face First Media we will arrange a consultation with you to gain information about your advertising needs and suitable locations. We provide invaluable advice and fine-tune all the elements that come together to form a fully comprehensive billboard campaign. We take the time to fully comprehend your business, marketing needs, and your competition. Only after this has taken place, we start to flesh out ideas about billboard design and locations to suit your demographic.
Build a sample: Once the ideas have been formulated we design mock-ups of the billboards, pinpoint locations for the most impact, and provide a cost estimate. Because we are experienced, we use our expertise to find the best outdoor advertising solutions for you. Once you are happy with the sample, location and price, we go about creating your billboard. Costs vary according to the location, e.g. prime locations are more expensive than others, but your return on investment will be better on account of higher visibility.
Set up and get noticed: Once the billboard is designed, we print and set it up at the desired location. Your brand will immediately get noticed by the people who count! Statistics prove that people who repeatedly encounter a brand via advertising are more likely to invest in this brand than other similar brands, even if they haven’t used that particular brand before. So all you have to do is to sit back and wait for the clients to start rolling in!

Keen to get your own billboard? Then contact our team at Face First Media immediately!

Vinyl Billboards And The Environment

Most modern billboards are made of printed vinyl. In the past, large pieces of paper were used and glued together to form a single image or message, but nowadays large, intact sheets of vinyl can be printed with special machines. The type of vinyl that is most commonly used is called PVC, and because this consists basically of plastic, people tend to consider it environmentally unfriendly. While digital billboards are starting to surface on the market and are considered more environmentally safe, the components going into digital billboards can actually be quite difficult to dispose of because they contain toxins that can leach into groundwater and soil – the same way that all electronic equipment can be dangerous to dispose of. Vinyl, however, can be repurposed for different things and the demand for vinyl scrap from billboards is getting increasingly higher.

How Are Billboards Made?

But, before we talk about repurposing vinyl it helps to know how billboards are made. Billboards (regardless of size) are usually constructed with a frame and a permanent backing that sits within the frame. The image sheets are then usually screen printed – a process that prints only one layer of colour at a time. Screen printing is very cost effective when it comes to large sheets, especially if multiple copies of the same image have to be made for different billboards. Digital printing is also used, and this is more expensive than screen printing. The beauty of digital printing is that the ink used in this process is specifically designed to be weatherproof, which means that colours don’t fade and that the billboard remains intact and highly visible for long periods of time. The vinyl on which the image is printed is made up of two layers that are covered with a nylon finish which is UV resistant and water resistant, and stops the vinyl from ripping. This means that the vinyl itself also has quite an impressive lifespan – around 3 years, even in harsh weather conditions.

Re-using And Repurposing Billboard Vinyl

Because vinyl is a practical and flexible material, it can be used for many different things, and there are several companies that specialise in creating art pieces and reusable items from billboard vinyl. From shopping bags, tarpaulins, slip & slides, waterproof sleeping bags for the homeless to tent liners, tents and woven mats are all created from the leftovers once the billboard poster is taken down. The businesses and individuals that recycle or upcycle billboard vinyl in this manner not only benefit the environment, but also provide employment and teach new skills. This means that, if you are worried about the environmental impact your vinyl billboard will have, you can stop worrying! Billboard vinyl is usually recycled and is a very environmentally friendly way of advertising.