Digital billboards: Should your pest management business use them?

Greetings from the Great Smoky Mountains! We are in the full swing of summer, and lots of tourists are going to Dollywood and our wonderful National Park. Gatlinburg is open and ready for business, in spite of the horrible wildfires we had last November, and I just wanted to spread the word that we are ready for everyone to come back and enjoy our unique area of the world. Remember, the Great Smoky Mountains is the No. 1 National Park in America. More than 11 million folks came last year, and we all hope that number will be beat this year.

Moving from community promotion to business promotion: I use two digital billboards located on two busy highways to promote Johnson Pest Control. We can come up with a message on the spur of the moment and voila, that message is uploaded to the sign within minutes. If it’s snowing outside, we have a message to drive carefully. If it’s Mother’s Day, we have a message for that — as well as for Father’s Day, Fourth of July and so on.

On Jan. 18, 2016, Eagles’ lead singer Glenn Frey passed away. Within minutes of hearing the news, we had a message up saying “‘There’s A Hole In The World Tonight’/You Will Be Missed Glenn Frey.” We also bought a photo of him to use on the sign. We left the sign up for about a week. Many Eagles fans saw it — and stopped to thank us for it by phone, email and even in person. It was just another way to let our customers know we are about more than pest control.

Here are just a few of our recent messages that have caught the eye of drivers — and potential customers. (Click to enlarge.)
Photos: Ray Johnson

We have had lots of fun coming up with creative messaging for the sign. We rotate newly crafted ideas that send out our “Bug of the Day” or a message like “May the Fourth be with you” on May 4 to make “Star Wars” fans happy. That’s the delightful thing about this type of advertising, you can change the sign whenever the mood strikes. You don’t have to buy a plastic canvas that will be up for months at a time, where the message cannot change. And because it’s digital, it’s controlled by us — not like those old portable roadside signs, where pranksters can rearrange your plastic letters into a completely different message than the one you intended.

Most people travel the same route to work every day. I have had people tell me they look forward to seeing the different messages on our sign. Talk about consistent branding: Which company will they think of to call when they need pest management?

One last bit of advice: You should have fewer than seven words on the sign for drivers to read as they whiz by. It amazes me to see billboards with so much message you have to pull over to the side of the road to understand them fully. Keep it short and sweet, and you’ll find success.

You can reach Johnson, a past president of the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), president of Sevierville, Tenn.-based Johnson Pest Control, and founder of ACES for Business at ray@johnsonpestcontrol.com.