Crafting the perfect advertising strategy requires marketers to take a number of different factors into consideration. One of the biggest initial questions? OOH or digital?
Many advertisers choose between the two, but those who truly understand the modern era of marketing know that the best digital campaigns are only made better by incorporating out-of-home (OOH) advertising.
Learn how to incorporate OOH advertising into your digital campaigns and why a hybrid strategy makes the most sense for maximizing both reach and conversions.
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Advantages of Hybrid OOH and Digital Strategies
The advantage of crafting a hybrid OOH and digital marketing strategy is simple: both out-of-home and digital advertising have strengths, so using the best of both allows marketers to create the most holistic campaign.
Digital marketing is cost-efficient, highly measurable, and makes it easy to reach a vast number of people in seconds. However, as more and more people are experiencing digital burnout, digital marketing also runs the risk of being ignored, swiped past, or quickly forgotten.
Out-of-home advertising, on the other hand, has the highest return on investment (ROI) largely because it’s such a valuable tool for building brand awareness and because real-world moments and interactions drive retention in a way that digital advertising doesn’t. 80% of consumers who view a billboard take action, which is unheard of in the world of digital marketing. However, OOH advertising can be more expensive than digital marketing, and is not quite as easily tracked (though there are formulas to discover your reach and frequency).
When combined, OOH and digital advertising work together to craft campaigns that meet each other’s blind spots, leading to higher conversion.
How to Incorporate OOH Advertising Into Digital Campaigns
You understand the value of utilizing both OOH and digital advertising—but how do you do so seamlessly?
Here are our top tips:
Unify Your Messaging
For a marketing campaign to work both online as well as out-of-home, your messaging needs to be clear, straightforward, and aligned. If a consumer comes across your campaign both online and on the go, you want to make sure they know that they’re seeing the same campaign—that there’s a throughline between the two for easy association.
Use the same colors and imagery, stick to your brand voice, have a headline that is used across all campaign materials, and make your message unmistakeable. Remember, a customer typically needs to see an ad a minimum of seven times before they’ll take action—but when your ad is on social media and on their daily commute, you’re building repetition and the likelihood of action with every sighting.
Pair Digital Campaigns With Real-Time Social Content
Digital billboards make it easy to keep ad content updating in real-time. And when you give your customers a clear place to interact with your digital advertising through reposts and hashtags, you’re giving them the ability to take what they’re seeing in-person online and allowing your brand to take what’s happening online into the real world.
By pairing your ad with real-time social content, you’re boosting your engagement and keeping the conversation going.
Design Billboard Viewers Can’t Help But Share
A picture is worth a thousand words, and the more shareable your billboard is, the more likely it is to go viral online. Design your billboard with virality in mind from the start. While there’s no formula to ensure virality, billboards that are clever, eye-catching, or memorable are likely to make their way onto Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok without your team having to do any heavy lifting.
A few of our favorite ways to drive viral billboard design include:
- Unique or larger-than life billboards
- Witty copy that becomes a meme
- Ads connected to culture or current trending moments
Make Your Billboard Interactive
When customers have a way to interact with your billboard, they’re automatically more likely to care. Incorporate QR codes to drive online traffic, use geotracking to make sure your billboard ads are getting in front of local areas where they’ll perform the best, or give contextually-relevant updates that make viewers realize this is more than just a standard ad.
Tease Social Campaigns Via OOH
Nothing goes viral faster than a mystery. Teasing upcoming campaigns with billboard ads send customers on a mad hunt to piece together the clues and collaborate online to figure out what you have up your sleeve.
One of the most iconic examples of this took place in 2025 when Sabrina Carpenter teased new music with billboards along busy highways paired with a video on her social media of the pop star attempting to hitchhike. Fans immediately took to socials to discover the locations of all of the billboards in the hopes of figuring out what was coming.
Design an Advertising Strategy That Works Online and Off
At Alluvit Media, we’ve seen firsthand just how powerful the right marketing strategy can be. When paired alongside each other, OOH advertising and digital marketing campaigns create buzz that builds brand awareness and generates conversions.
Craft your next ad campaign with the support of one of our expert media coordinators. Request your free proposal to get started!
FAQs
What types of OOH work best with digital marketing?
OOH advertising methods like billboards, wallscapes, and murals all pair well with digital advertising efforts as they can be strategically designed for online sharing.
How do I create an ad strategy that incorporates digital and OOH advertising?
To design a marketing strategy for digital and OOH, you need to have a clear objective, understand your audience, choose channels that match where your target customer spends their time, and stay consistent.