New Year’s resolutions aren’t just for personal growth. They can be made for businesses, too. If you’re looking to increase sales or promote a new product or service, there are many reasons you should invest in digital signage.
Whether you’re a digital signage novice or looking to expand your current marketing campaigns, follow these simple steps to give your digital signage the kickstart it needs into the new year.
Benefits of Digital Signage
Digital signage has been shown to generate sales conversions 70% better than traditional static signage. What else needs to be said? In general, digital signage hardware is simply more engaging.
It can convert more sales, increase your business’s attention and can better promote your products or services.
Customer Engagement
Signage is important to brand identity. Over two-thirds of consumers believe that a store’s signage is a direct reflection of the business’s quality.
Over 75% of people have visited a business just because of its signage, and three out of four people recommend a business to a friend based solely on its signage. In other words, the business with the best signage gets the most customer engagement.
Digital signage offers a unique benefit over static signage in that I can be completely customized at any time and with any frequency. You don’t have to wait for the printer to ship your sign out, see that the margins were messed up and send it back for alterations.
Just make up the digital format and hit submit. Your signage can be changed to tweaked instantly at any time to make sure you have the hottest signage on the block.
Reduce Cost
It might be more expensive initially to install the digital signage hardware but in the long run, digital signage can save you up to 90% on your signage costs. You won’t have to print any more flyers, banners, billboards or posters.
Just update your digital interface and send it to all the different screens. Plus, using less paper material is better for the environment.
Setting Goals
The very first thing you should think about when making a digital signage campaign is your goal. What are you trying to accomplish? This can be something like increase brand awareness, drive sales, improve your business’s image, assist with intercompany communications or a combination of a few.
Your goals will influence every other step of the process and help you decide on content, location and type of display, and what digital signage hardware to choose.
Assigning a Digital Signage Champion
Just like it’s important to have a manager who takes responsibility for a store, you need someone in your company to be responsible for implementing your digital signage campaign.
Related: How to Create a Successful Company Culture with Interactive Digital Signage Installations
This person is called the digital signage champion. Without a clear leader in charge, goals can be missed because people aren’t sure who’s supposed to be doing what task.
Assign one person that will be responsible for all digital signage for your company.
Make sure that it’s someone who has the necessary traits to keep up with the large task:
- Great communicator
- Thorough understanding of the brand
- Tech-savvy to keep up with digital signage hardware
- Flexible and can keep up with rapid changes
- Multitasker that can juggle several things at once
This person should be involved with all aspects of digital signage strategy from the setting of goals to researching the target audience.
Researching Your Target Audience
Once you have decided on your goals, it’s time to think about your audience. Who are you trying to reach? The more specific you can narrow down your audience, the better you can cater to their exact wants and needs.
An effective way to come up with your target audience is to craft a user persona. Think about the kind of person that frequents your business and literally make someone up. Make them as detailed as possible.
Include details like:
- Age
- Gender
- Background
- Goals
- Frustrations
- Motivations
- Personality
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’ll at least give you a start. Every minute detail could provide insights into what you need to include in your digital marketing campaign.
Make several user personas to make sure that you capture your entire audience. Do research into your current customer base so that nobody is left out. The more accurate your target audience, the stronger your digital signage campaign will be.
Defining a Content Strategy
Now it’s time to put all the previous steps into action. How can you use digital signage to most effectively reach your target audience? Use your user personas to think about what you could do to make your signage cater specifically to your imaginary friends.
If you decided that they’re introverted and don’t like talking to people, perhaps including a touchscreen kiosk to your digital signage hardware could provide them product information without having to go to a service desk.
Your content strategy should also consider timing. With static signage, timing would mean getting your holiday signs up after Thanksgiving.
Because digital signage hardware can update immediately, thinking about timing can become more exact.
Instead of thinking about signage month to month, you can think about it hour by hour or even minute by minute.
Content strategy could focus on adults in the morning and afternoon, but once school lets out, it could change to cater towards your younger target audience.
Content strategies should not be a static document. They should change and adapt to an evolving market landscape. Go back and review your content strategy every three months and address any changes that need to be made.
Hardware
Now that you have your content strategy, what digital signage hardware do you need to make it happen? Do you need interactive displays for a younger audience? Screens that can display sharp, bright colors consistent with your brand’s image?
How many and what size displays do you need? Do they need to be mounted on walls or have their own defined kiosks? Do you need to run interactive apps?
These are all questions you should ask yourself when deciding on purchasing hardware. Make sure your hardware can keep up with your needs not only for this campaign but in the future as well. Your digital signage hardware needs to be able to grow with your company.
Follow Up
Whether it’s monthly, quarterly, or annually, you need to follow up on your digital signage campaigns to make sure that they’re effective. If you don’t follow up, you’ll never know if you’ve gotten any return on your investment (ROI).
Your customers are the most important resource for determining how effective your signage really is. Use QR codes, social media or surveys to get a feel for what your customers think about your signage and whether it’s effective.
They might even be able to offer ideas on how to make it better in the future!
Make 2020 the best year yet. Follow these steps to really kickstart your digital signage into the new year.
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