Ask a small business owner why they have never tried a billboard and the answer is rarely that nobody would see it. It is that they would have no idea what it had done for them. Digital marketing comes with a dashboard; a poster on a busy road comes, at best, with a hunch. When every pound has to earn its place, a hunch is hard to justify.
That concern is understandable, but it is mostly a planning problem rather than a limit of the medium. Billboard results can be tracked quite precisely, provided the tracking is built in before the poster goes up. First, though, it is worth being clear about why billboards suit local businesses so well.
Why billboards suit local businesses
A local business does not need to be known nationally. It needs to be the first name that comes to mind for people within a few miles, and repetition is how a billboard gets you there. The same commuters, delivery drivers and tradespeople pass the same road every day, so by the time they need what you sell, your name already feels familiar.
It also puts you in front of the right people at the right moment. Meridian Building Plastics told us that roadside advertising helped them become known to the drivers who spend much of their working day on major routes, and they welcomed customers through the door shortly after the campaign began. The effect often reaches beyond footfall, too. People who recognise a name are more likely to search for it, click on it and pick up the phone, which means a billboard tends to make the rest of your marketing work harder.
The commercial results are there as well. Shutters of London saw sales in their area rise by 5% after their billboard went live, and they have since taken on a second location.
How to measure what a billboard delivers
A billboard has no click-through rate, but that does not mean there is nothing to count. The simplest starting point is a dedicated phone number on the poster, which makes every call attributable. A short web address or QR code pointing to its own landing page does the same job for online responses.
Neither will catch everyone, so pair them with the most low-tech method there is: ask new customers how they found you. Add “saw your billboard” as an option on enquiry forms, quote requests and phone scripts, and you will pick up the people who remembered you and searched later.
That later search is worth watching in its own right. Billboards tend to lift searches for your business name, so compare branded search volume in Google Search Console across the four weeks before launch with the weeks the poster is live. Then set everything against a baseline: record enquiries and sales in the area before the campaign starts, and compare once it is running, allowing for seasonality. Be patient, too. A single month is rarely a fair test.
Getting the creative and the timing right
Tracking tells you how a poster did, but the creative largely decides how well it does. Drivers have a few seconds, so aim for around seven words or fewer, one clear message, and a single contact detail, either a phone number or a web address, that is large and high-contrast. Resist the urge to list every service you offer, and match the message to the road: trade customers on a major route will respond to different copy than shoppers in a town centre.
Timing matters just as much. Longer usually beats shorter, because recall builds with repetition and a short burst rarely gives people time to notice you, let alone remember you. Bond Lovis, for example, ran a six-month campaign on the A127 and reported a good response, and 85% of the businesses we work with come back to book again.
A billboard is only unmeasurable if you do not plan for measurement. Set up a tracked number, ask customers how they found you, record your baseline and give the campaign enough time to work. Do that, and you will have an answer to the question that put you off in the first place.
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