Lots of organisations take the leap towards digital signage and when they do, they spend time assessing the different digital signage platforms, simply focusing on the technology. While the technology is somewhat important it won’t deliver you the results on its own. The other key ingredient is the digital signage content. What you display on the screen is what delivers you the ROI.
Organisations have the opportunity now to move beyond adding a static image or rerunning existing ads or live streaming day time TV. Your digital signage can create an experience that is similar to what customers expect online. This includes guided experiences, interactivity and immersive content.
Lots of organisations do not have dedicated teams of people whose soul job it is to create digital signage content. For the rest of this article we will take a look at five steps that can help you create digital content that delivers results.
Six Steps to creating Digital Signage Content That Delivers Results
1. UNDERSTAND YOUR GOALS
The first step is to get clear on what you want the digital signage to deliver for your business. This involves thinking about two things:
What experience do you want to deliver to your customers?
How can digital signage enable this for your business?
Digital signage can inform, educate, entertain, promote, sell and persuade. If you think about the different physical spaces that you have in your business, brainstorm how those spaces could be used to deliver an experience.
For example, if your business operates in an office building, you will want the digital signage to help your visitors get where they want to go quickly. Alternatively, you may need your digital signage to make the COVID-19 check-in process quick and seamless. You could also want digital signage to educate your staff on new policies and procedures.
If you own a car dealership, you might want to create an immersive shopping experience that allows customers to design their own car. At restaurants, digital signage is often used to tell guests about wait times, display menu items, and allow customers to place their orders. In a school, you may want to keep parents up to date on school events or showcase student achievements.
We recommend getting your team together to brainstorm all the different experiences you could offer customers and then in the next step you can valid whether these experiences will deliver results.
2. RESEARCH AND UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE
Think about how your audience wants to see your digital signage content, because it’s not just about the information. The right content must also be delivered in a way they find acceptable and engaging. If you run a retail store for Millennials, their preferences regarding content delivery will probably be very different than a store designed for older professionals. You may already have customer personas for your business. If you do, great, these personas can be used for this process. If not, for more help creating these buyer personas, download some of HubSpot’s templates.
For each of your personas, do your best to answer important questions like:
What is their background?
Job?
Career Path?
Family?
What are their demographics?
Male or female?
Age?
Income level?
What are other meaningful identifiers?
Demeanor?
Preferred communication method?
Pain/Problems that want solved
Needs
If your goal is to simply show people where to find the office they’re looking for, answering these questions is probably overkill. However, if your goal is to increase engagement time or how much a shopper spends at your store, understanding every detail of your buyer personas is a powerful competitive advantage.
Once you have this information you can start craft key messages that speck directly to these personas. The content will resonate with the audience.
3. SCHEDULE, SCHEDULE, SCHEDULE
Timing was never much of an issue with traditional printed displays. The time of year was usually the extent to which this factor mattered. However, with digital signage you have the incredible opportunity to craft specific messages for certain times of the day or even days of the week. We recommend taking the time to think about how important different key messages are for your audience at different moments in time. These messages can help both your business to achieves it’s goals and your customer to achieve these. Let’s look at some examples.
Think of a café or bistro. The same digital sign can advertise breakfast, lunch, happy hour, and dinner specials at different times throughout the day. This helps to inform customers with content that is relevant to them, but also helps you to drive sales with menu items that are relevant to what the customer is likely going to want to eat or drink.
The length of time for the content matters. If you intend to use video to pull people into your store, it will help if you understand how much time the average passers-by or window shopper is willing to give your video. Otherwise, the content will not be effective.
Similarly, if you want to help customers pass the time while they wait in line, you should know how long the average wait is. This way, your customers won’t perceive it as being significantly longer because they have to endure the same video on loop over and over and over.
4. POSITIONING MATTERS
There is also an expression in digital signage: “Content is king, but positioning is queen.” This means, your digital signage marketing strategy should prioritize the locations of these screens or the right content isn’t going to matter much. Let’s look at a retail environment again. One sign can face passers-by with the goal of convincing them to enter. Another sign can advertise some of the more popular items throughout the store. Still other signs can be used throughout the store to explain how certain products work and even offer an interactive experience for customers who want to learn more.
Switch the location of those signs around and you’ll greatly reduce their impact, which helps illustrate why positioning needs to be a central part of your strategy. The good news is that discovering the locations that will give your content the exposure it needs is fairly simple.
If you’ve identified your goals, the right positions should be obvious. For example, reducing perceived wait times means having a sign next to where customers line up. Increasing foot traffic means putting signs where passers-by will see them.
5. DESIGN & CREATE YOUR CONTENT
Now that you know what experiences you want to create to help your customers achieve their goals and you have thought about what schedule to run the content on and where to position the signage, its now time to actually create it.
For some businesses this is the hardest part. CommBox Signage does make this easier for you. You don’t need Photoshop or Illustrator. We have created a template library that allows you create professional and impactful signage. Simply select the template that suits your key message, update the text, save and send it to a screen.
Remember you can add existing video content, you can add videos via a URL. If it all feels too hard then, outsourcing is simple too. Find local graphic designers, post on Upwork or use Canva.
Reach out to the team at CommBox who can help you create the perfect experience.
6. MEASURE YOUR SUCCESS
Finally, as with any marketing collateral your business invests in, you must measure the success of your digital signage content. Again, this is much easier to do when you put sufficient time into that first step. You can’t measure success without having a clear understanding of what your goals are. Still, don’t implement a digital signage marketing strategy until you’ve also gotten clear about how you’ll measure its performance. For example, do you have the tools for measuring dwell time, foot traffic, or other important KPIs you care about?
Furthermore, will these digital signage tools allow you to regularly check these measurements? If you need to wait months before you can tell if your content is doing its job, you’re not much better off than those companies that rely on traditional signage.
When you consider that one of the biggest advantages of digital signs is how quickly you can modify them, the importance of being able to measure their performance is obvious. The moment you see that one is not performing it can be changed. Digital signage allows you to be agile, get a new idea, you can double-down on it and enjoy even greater results.
