What is it?
While it may seem old-school, larger newsletters still leverage billboards to drive massive awareness.
The idea is renting a billboard in a high-traffic spot (like commuter routes or in the middle of town), and plastering your newsletter's brand name and value proposition up there.
You get persistent, passive branding that quite literally cannot be ignored.
Just make sure to include a call-to-action to convert those viewers into subscribers. A short, catchy URL or QR code works well.
For most growing newsletters, billboards are going to be prohibitively expensive. It’s a lot of money upfront for an impact you can’t directly track in the same way as social ads.
But for larger brands, they’re a great way to build some “real-world” legitimacy.
Because they’re specifically targeted to people in a certain place, I have a hunch they might do well for local newsletters, too. If anyone wants to try running this as an experiment, get in touch to let us know!
The Good and the Bad
- fun, brand building
- not much work
- risky
Examples of how to crush it
Morning Brew
Here's Morning Brew promoting their referral giveaway with huge billboard in the middle of New York, on the side of the Nasdaq offices.
This particular promotion was probably free in exchange for promoting Nasdaq in the Morning Brew newsletter, but you can still look at that as "paid" in the sense that Morning Brew miss out on the revenue from selling that slot to someone else.
Oatly
This oat drink decided to try and capture new fans by promoting their newsletter on subways/metros around the world.
It's impossible for commuters to miss these ads. They're presented in such a way that induces a lot of curiosity, with this sort of off-kilter marketing defying people's expectations of "boring" ads and demanding attention.
