By taking a walk down your local high street or through a shopping centre, you’re highly likely spot digital signage promoting a store’s offering. Similarly walk into a hotel, a gym or an airport and you’ll see digital signs aplenty providing customers with directions, important information or latest offer details.
There are numerous advantages of digital signage, including making your marketing more effective and gathering customer insight. If you’re thinking about making the switch, this guide will walk you through the steps on how to transition from traditional POS to a digital solution.
Step 1: Define your objectives
We know that in any business, introducing a new strategy has to serve a purpose in helping the company achieve its objectives. And this is very true of implementing digital signage. Is one of your business objectives to increase store footfall? Or to reduce costs when updating menu items in your takeaway chain? Maybe it’s to increase in-store basket value or provide a directory in a shared office block. Understanding what you want to achieve through digital signage will help to drive the roll-out strategy and content creation.
Step 2: Decide on screen location and type
Once you understand what your objectives are, we will then work with you to choose the perfect screens for you. Different screen locations will support different objectives. And different screen locations will require different screen requirements, which are largely driven by the environment in which they’ll be placed.
If your objective is to drive additional footfall, placing a screen in a shop window is a great idea to grab the attention of passing customers. This screen will need to be rated at least 2,500 nit brightness as it needs to cut-through the direct sunlight to ensure your message can be read at all times.
Alternatively if your objective is to serve adverts to motorists on a busy highway, you’ll need a large, IP rated waterproof screen with the correct pitch to be able to deliver a message that can be seen from the expected viewing distance. Choosing the right screen type is critical to the overall effectiveness of the solution.
Step 3: Create the roll out plan
After you’ve decided on the screens you need, the next stage is to plan the roll out. Don’t worry – we’ll work with you during every step of this journey! Each screen will need to be prepped, installed and set up by our expert Technicians so we’ll need to get access to each of the physical locations. To create the roll out plan, it’s best to have a timeframe in mind and decide whether you want to set all of the stores up at the same time or stagger the roll-out. We’ll then work together to create an installation schedule.
Step 4: Implement a content creation process
Having the screens in place is great, but the heart of any digital signage strategy lies in the content creation. This will ultimately be what helps to drive actions leading to you achieving your objectives defined in Step 1.
Firstly, you’ll need to allocate someone or a team who will be responsible for creating the content; whether you’ll be creating this in-house, using an agency or utilising manufacturer-created content. It’s then also a great idea to work out who will be managing the upload process. Our digital signage solution integrates a cloud-based Content Management System (CMS) which means that you can update the content across all your screens from one location, so we’ll provide the relevant team with training on how to use the CMS.
Content can be in the form of images, graphics, infographics, video, live feeds, animation or slides and should aim to support your overall objectives. To drive sales, we recommend simple but bold promotional messaging to grab the customer’s attention. To entertain waiting customers, such as in a doctor’s waiting room, providing useful information or Practice updates is a great idea.
We’d suggest using a mix of messages and delivery styles, especially to begin with, so that you can test what works best with your audience. In situations where the customers frequently visit you, it will also help to keep the content feeling fresh and engaging.
Want some tips on how to create content for digital signage? Here are our top 5 best practices tips.
Step 5: Monitor and test your results
Great news, you’re all set up with your digital screens and your content gone out in to the world. Now you can pop your feet up... for a little bit, that is! The best thing about digital signage is the flexibility of measuring and changing the message to ensure your marketing efforts are working hard for you. Which is why in our final Step of this guide, we recommend that you monitor your signage and make amends accordingly.
There are some straightforward results you can measure – whether you’ve seen incremental sales of the product highlighted or if you’ve experienced an increase in customers coming in your stores being two examples. However you can also include real-time audience analytics within your digital solution. By implementing a camera that anonymises your customers while it tracks demographic information and consumer behaviour, you can truly understand which pieces of content are working well for you and understand who is engaging with them.
With this kind of audience analytics, you can get insight into a plethora of variables; the viewer’s age, gender, mood, facial features, reaction as well as engagement statistics. So, if you have a piece of content that isn’t getting any attention (i.e. has a low dwell time), it may be wise to amend it, make it more sticky and test the revised message or creative.
At Fujivision, we offer a full end-to-end digital signage solution, managing and integrating all the necessary components. If you’re interested in making the switch from traditional POS to digital signage get in touch to arrange a chat!