Billboard advertising

Looks cool and that is about it!

August 1, 2010, the Weekend Oasis Vacation Rental billboard went up in Northeast Pennsylvania. After some research and phone calls I was able to justify the spend (the price was affordable after being totally out of range) and thought I should try this form of advertising. To date, the only advertising that works for my business is on-line advertising.

To make this very aggressive I had my graphics guy design the billboard and I was offering one free night ($200 value) to anyone that took us up on the offer. The billboard was at a major 4 way intersection in Kingston, PA. We've had a lot of Northeast Pennsylvania guests so I know they fit my target market.

After an entire month I had absolutely no increase in website traffic and not one single phone call. As a result, the billboard resulted in $0 return on investment.

I do suspect it has helped branding and it was pretty exciting seeing the billboard, but I thought it would result in at least one booking or an increase of website traffic from that geographic area. Being a website analytics nerd I really dug into it and couldn't tie anything to the billboard.

So, if you are considering it, only do it if your marketing budget has extra spend and you simply want to say you had a billboard. For vacation rentals, it resulted in nothing.