Digital signage is a compelling way to engage, entertain, educate and communicate with your audience. These best practices can help you avoid some common pitfalls and get the most out of your digital signage solution.
1. Understand your audience
Understanding your target public is a crucial element of digital signage. What do your customers expect when they walk in your store? How do they shop?
Factors like dwell time, demographics, frequency of visits, and length of visits are important to consider when developing your technology plan and more importantly your content plan. A content scheme helps shape where you locate screens, the type of message you develop and how customers will engage with your signage.
2. Set clear goals
Start by find your business objectives. Identify why you want to use digital signage, what you want to happen as a result and how you’ll measure effectiveness. Are there changes to your business that encouraged you to use digital signage? For instance, do you want to engage, educate, entertain your audience, or reduce perceived wait time?
It’s also important to gain consensus within your organization. Digital signage is purchased, used and supported by a number of groups within your organization. Marketing, merchandising, operations and IT will likely be involved and each group may have its own goals and requirements. Establishing a common goal at the beginning of a project will help ensure a smooth roll out.
3. Create a content plan
One way to sustain good quality content is to set up a solid content plan. A established plan can provide a clear direction by taking into consideration your business goals, your audience, the physical environment and other marketing mediums that touch your customers. A content plan ensures that the type of content you use, and the frequency in which it’s updated, is always “on-point” with your business communication objectives.
It is very important to match your content to your business objectives. Depending on your goals, various types of content work better in some environments than others.
4. Provide relevant messages
Another consideration is message relevancy. Just because a message works well in one store doesn’t mean it will work well in another. Content specifically designed to appeal to a particular audience will always be more effective than a broad message to the masses. Learn about your audiences’ expectations, demographics, dwell time, purpose, frequency of visit, real or perceived needs, and the overall ambience. Is the message relevant to your audience? If the message is not important to the audience and the environment, it may not be received as intended, risking a missed the opportunity to communicate to the audience.
5. Leverage technology
Technology is an important part of digital signage. However, your goals should be the prime driver in defining what part technology plays in your overall digital signage solution.
Solution flexibility and scalability are key aspects to evaluate. Digital signage can mean creating, managing and distributing content across a couple of locations, or across numerous locations; in this instance the complexity of the network intensifies, making flexibility and scalability become critical.
6. Analyze resources
In order to make your digital signage network work smoothly, think about the resources required to manage and maintain it. Depending on the size or complexity of your network, you may opt to use your own resources or outsource it to expert hands. Any network requires the creation, scheduling, management and distribution of content, as well as the things that guarantee it is always on, for example, network monitoring, technical support and help desk.
The complexity and size of your network can often dictate which direction you take. Small or straightforward networks can be managed internally. As the number of locations increases or distribution of content gets more complex, you may not have the resources on site to administer your own solution.
7. Build in measurement guidelines
Measuring the success of your solution can help ensure greater results and impact the overall life of the network. Be clear about your goals for digital signage and be able to assess efficiency. There are a number of ways to measure the success of your solution such as conducting interviews, comparing sales data or monitoring customer behavior.
Gauging effectiveness gives you insight into what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to optimize your solution to meet your needs.
At MALER Digital Signage we offer an all-round consultancy service and project management that will help you find the best hardware and software solutions to deploy from scratch your own digital signage network. You can contact our team, by telephone +34 881 874 259, by the following form or via email sales@malerdso.com.
