Free outdoor advertising for small businesses no longer a pipe dream

Free outdoor advertising for small businesses is not a pipe dream anymore with a new initiative that will allow SMEs and entrepreneurs to advertise on digital billboards free of charge.

Tractor Media Holdings, a South African independent media owner, is allowing entrepreneurs and SMEs to promote their businesses through its nationwide network of digital boards to support the country’s economic recovery.

The SME Launchpad is a platform that will allow small businesses to benefit from widespread marketing exposure across Tractor’s roadside digitals and Digilite networks in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.

SMEs will be able to use the SME Launchpad to create awareness around their products and services in the cities where they operate through a high-reach, high-frequency digital out-of-home campaign that will be live for two weeks.

“The initiative was inspired by Tractor’s #SMEHeroes campaign, which ran in 2020 and 2021. The campaign intended to support businesses that were hardest hit by the pandemic, through tapping into the greatest resource at our disposal – our network of outdoor inventory,” Remi du Preez, commercial director at Tractor Media Holdings, explains.

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How to use the free outdoor advertising service

Qualifying businesses received an extensive media package that would help increase top-of-mind awareness, with a total media value of around R8 million.

He says the campaign received such a fantastic response that they decided to launch an ongoing initiative that would allow any small business to apply and benefit.

 “To increase access to outdoor advertising, we needed to develop a self-service platform, which would become a permanent fixture hosted on our website. The SME Launchpad was specifically designed with SMEs in mind, allowing them to quickly and easily build a campaign thanks to its user-friendly interface.”

Du Preez says they realise that small businesses generally do not have the resources to employ agencies to design their creative content or manage their campaigns and therefore they kept things very simple.

“To apply, a business owner or representative needs to visit our website and create a profile, where they will be asked to provide details about their business. They are then directed to a dashboard where they can upload their creative content which needs to be supplied according to predefined specifications and select the region where they would like the campaign to flight.”

Once the application is validated and the creative content approved, the campaign is slotted into Tractor’s DOOH flighting schedule, based on the live date the user selected, subject to availability. The dashboard will even allow applicants to monitor their campaigns once live.

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 “The initial vetting of the artwork is automated to streamline the process and we also enabled an end-of-campaign reporting functionality, which sees users receiving an overview of the inventory their creative content flighted on, how many ad serves they had at each location and the approximate number of consumers who viewed their campaign.”

According to Du Preez if the recent pandemic taught us anything, it is that South Africans need to stand together and support one another as best they can.

“The growth and success of the small business sector is regarded as critical to the country’s economic revival. The SME Launchpad is yet another way that Tractor aims to support those around us, in line with our vision to effect ripples of change that will positively impact the socio-economic success of our country.”