How many times does someone need to see your billboard before it sticks in their head?
Mark Watson, Senior Account Executive at Blip, has an answer. According to him, seeing a billboard six times over 90 days is enough to build real brand familiarity. He calls these six views qualified impressions.
Get enough of these impressions, and you start to build actual brand trust.
With nearly five and a half years at Blip, he’s worked with accounts from big national names to single-location small businesses. He knows how to identify what actually drives results (versus what sounds impressive on paper).
His Reverse Budget Blueprint is a people-first method for building your billboard budget. Here’s how it works.
Key Steps:
- Don’t just try to be seen. Try to be remembered, through multiple impressions.
- Start with who you want to reach and where, then make decisions from there.
- Aim to run your digital billboard ad at least once per minute, if not more.
- Run billboards where and when your targets will see them. Then watch your sales inflate.
Start Hearing “I See Your Brand Everywhere” in Just One Quarter
A protein brand in Northern Utah ran Mark’s Reverse Budget Blueprint and saw it work in the real world.
Despite manufacturing products for two well-known competitors and moving more volume than either, the brand had zero awareness in a market of 2.5 million people.
Within 90 days of using Mark’s plan, the brand became impossible to miss. Mark even started using them as proof when talking to his own prospects: “Have you heard about this protein brand?” Every response: “Of course. I see them every day.”
When “More Billboards” Backfires
Many small businesses getting into billboard advertising make a common mistake: they think they want to be seen on every billboard in town.
Blip’s platform makes selecting multiple locations easy, and it’s natural to want to be seen by as many people as possible.
But spreading across too many boards consistently fails, without the budget.
When a business with a $2,000 monthly budget tries running on four, five, or six billboards at the same time, they create what Mark calls “a fraction of an effective budget per board.”
Instead of trying to reach as many people as possible with those $2,000, Mark recommends reaching the right people more times. (Six times, for example…)
Many business owners come to billboards with a digital mindset. They want to tweak their campaigns weekly, change board locations constantly, and adjust their budget, all to chase higher numbers of views and purchases. But those instincts directly ignore how billboards work best: high frequency in carefully chosen locations to create brand recognition.
Changing Your Mindset
There are a few common mistakes we see being made in the industry.
Most businesses start with what they can spend and work forward, but Mark’s approach starts with who they need to reach and works backward. That single reversal changes everything.
This method asks business owners to put their ideal result into words. How many people in a certain area do you want to reach?
From there, we can get those people to the “qualified impressions” stage. Those target people can see your billboard six times in 90 days, resulting in real brand awareness.
The Reverse Budget Blueprint
Follow these steps to use Mark’s method for your own business.
- Map Your Customer’s World
No one knows a company’s customer base and its patterns better than a business owner.
“First and foremost, business owners are the experts on their business, and they know their customers better than we know their customers,” Mark explains. “Who is your customer, where do they live, where do they work, where do they drive, and how do we find a board or a location that overlaps best with all of those things?”
This step requires you to know specifics about your own customer behavior, not just general traffic. A restaurant serving lunch to office workers needs boards along morning commute routes leading to business districts. A home services company needs boards in residential neighborhoods where homeowners live and travel for errands.
- Count Real People
Once you’ve decided where to put your boards, it’s time to look into who the people seeing those boards are, and how frequently they’re seeing them.
This calculation separates Blip’s approach from traditional out-of-home vendors. While competitors report raw numbers and stats, Mark asks: in an area with 2.5 million people, how many actually see the selected boards?
For each board, Mark can guess how much money spent can turn into actual people seeing the board. A lower budget might result in a person seeing the billboard less frequently, but that just means it’ll need to be run longer to achieve that six-times-in-90-days sweet spot.
- Price the Outcome
With this information in hand, you can now officially decide what amount of money you’re comfortable spending to reach your specific goals.
During this part of the process, you’ll have to be honest about your needs and goals. What can you realistically spend, and for how long? The best way to make your budget work for you is to commit to consistency.
Mark offers a simple example to consider. One billboard running your ad once per minute costs approximately $5,000 monthly (this can vary by market), and that’s an effective frequency. A $2,000 budget split across multiple boards simply can’t deliver the same exposure.
When Mark is working with a business with a fixed budget, he suggests a customizable option. Businesses can choose to run their boards only at certain times, such as during morning and evening rush hours when most people drive.
Start with the outcome you want to see, then build your budget. And don’t forget, our team is here to work with you and your goals every step of the way.
- Concentrate, Then Expand
Let’s go back to the 90-day goal. Once you’ve set your placements and budget, Mark can execute your campaign with this timeline in mind. For those 90 days, we’ll track real results from real people.
After you see success in those 90 days, we’ll evaluate your goals and adjust them. 90 days is enough to make a real difference in your brand recognition, but it’s also just the beginning.
The hope is this: by the time customers need what you sell, they’ve already seen your name six times. You’re not asking strangers to trust you. You’re talking to people who already know your name.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the minimum effective budget vary by market?
Differences in population, billboard availability, and competitors create different minimums across markets. A campaign that works at $1,000 monthly in one city with abundant billboards and lower costs per impression requires more investment in competitive areas where costs per impression run higher and board availability gets constrained by demand.
When should businesses NOT use billboards?
- If your product is too complex to explain in a few words
- If you don’t have a clear target location where you want to reach customers
- If you’re just beginning to market your product or service
Billboards work for pure awareness campaigns when businesses can sustain operations while building recognition.
What happens after the initial 90-day campaign?
Businesses don’t need to maintain full market takeover budgets indefinitely. After establishing recognition with 70-80% board coverage in the first 90 days, companies can drop to 40-50% board coverage for maintenance while moving budget to a second market for another concentrated push.
This phased approach prevents competitors from filling the awareness gap while managing costs more efficiently than permanent saturation.
Each business and their goals are different, so Blip will work with you personally to make a plan that works for you.
