How Can Digital Signage Benefit My Business Or Organization?
Digital Signage is All About Communication
The purpose behind creating a digital signage platform is to communicate effectively and to reach your target audiences with meaningful content. To implement, manage and scale your digital signage platform, here are some best practices and tips that will help you stay on track.
At LDI Connect, our team of Pro AV Specialists can help you leverage innovative AV technology. We are experts at designing and installing flexible solutions that bring together audio, video, cloud, and data technologies.
Define Your Digital Signage Goals
Clearly defining your signage and communication goals will be critical to your success. You need to have a firm grasp on what you hope to accomplish and how you will measure the success of your initiative. Your process and metrics will depend on the kind of business or organization, the display locations, the audience you are communicating to, and your desired effect.
Digital signage is an integral communication medium in every major industry. From corporate offices to college campuses, airports to Airbnb, retail locations to not-for-profit organizations, the uses can be very different. As an example, the digital signage that directs people at the entrance of a hospital to a specific pavilion or doctor’s office is decidedly different from the displays and messaging posted at a construction site that contains safety warnings and hazards. Understanding your digital signage goals will help you to streamline your communication and deliver an impactful solution.
Plan Content and Messaging Based on Sign Location and Purpose
To optimize your digital signage and drive better outcomes, create a journey map that includes information about your target audience and the type of experience you want them to have when they encounter your display. It’s important to tailor your content, language, and look to speak to your specific audiences, in a way that makes sense for where the signage is placed. As an example, signage in hallways should be more like billboards with short, impactful messages and no detail, while break area screens can have more detail since people are in the space longer.
Outlining your Content Strategy
Make a list of the types of messages you need to communicate, differentiating by location, department, and intended viewer. After you’ve aligned your audience, location, and goals, decide what other types of content could be useful to your audience. Things like clocks, dynamic weather, traffic information, or news feeds can be ideal in many situations and automatically updated, adding to the value of your messaging without adding additional work to your content contributors.
Know the Contributors from Across Your Organization
To get the most value out of your digital signage, content should come from every corner of your business or organization. Every department has something they’d like to communicate. Identify the stakeholders in every department and who will be responsible for content contribution. Educate them about the opportunities that digital signage presents and the formats you would like to receive information in. It is also critical to set expectations and timelines around content contribution so you can ensure your screens are always updated with relevant content.
Business Systems that Might Provide Content for Your Network
Without realizing it, many companies already have content that would be ideal for digital signage—especially applications designed for employee communications. Things like employee headshots, birthdays, and work anniversaries are all great things to display to amplify culture and celebrate your workforce. And that’s just the start!
Explore Opportunities to Digitize Messaging
Always be on the lookout for opportunities to digitize messaging as you re-acquaint people with a new way of working at your office. For companies bringing people back to the office either in a full-time capacity or in a hybrid manner, digital signage is a scalable way to communicate new policies, help people navigate new floorplans, highlight new spaces, and more, easing the transition back to the workplace.
Identify Outdated Communications Processes
In enterprise companies, there’s always a need for more streamlined communications capabilities that go beyond the original solution implemented. Be on the lookout for areas of your business where paper signage is still frequently used, important reports are generated manually, and communications efficacy is not tracked. By understanding that the digital signage platform you have in place can be integrated with other systems to solve a variety of challenges across your organization, you can maximize the impact your organization receives from digital signage.
Provide Guidelines for Consistent Communications
Provide a style guide for content creators to ensure communication consistency. Inconsistent content will erode the impact of your signage and work against the initial goals of your project. Additionally, when all content contributors understand the branding requirements and rules associated with new content, they’ll be able to increase content production and decrease the friction caused by process ambiguity. To help streamline this process, consider leveraging pre-built, ready-to-use templates, allowing contributors to edit content within an approved layout, or explore what options your digital signage provider has for full-screen content that’s easy to configure and deploy.
Include a Call-to-Action (CTA)
Where appropriate, remember to include a CTA to help drive people to places where they can find more information about the content displayed. Given the increased need to provide touchless options, many organizations are relying on QR codes to enable their audience to access additional information quickly and easily.
Selecting the Right Digital Signage Platform
The digital signage market can be difficult to navigate with so many devices and technologies to choose from. All digital signage platforms are not created equal. When selecting a platform, it’s vital to understand the way content will be created and displayed. It is also important to streamline device management so that you can easily scale your initiative, ensuring the platform you choose can grow with the future needs of your organization.
Determine the Size, Brightness, and Resolution of Your Displays
There are so many different manufacturers, models, and SKUs to choose from in display technology. In the digital signage world, using consumer or prosumer grade displays for digital signage that will likely be on most of the day, if not 24 hours, can be a costly mistake. Selecting a good commercial-grade display with the features, benefits, and connection options may carry a slightly larger price tag at the start, but will be well worth the investment down the road.
What Types of Media Players Are Needed?
There are a wide range of methods for populating displays with relevant content. Depending on the scale of your initiative and the design of your network, you can decide if it makes more sense for content to be supplied locally, from a mobile device, or centrally administered from a single, shareable dashboard. Some displays have built-in media players, SoC (System on Chip), and associated templates that make content population easy, and some require external media devices, requiring a little more planning and network infrastructure. Become familiar with the benefits and constraints of each media player to ensure that the desired content will display accurately and seamlessly.
Can I Grow The Digital Signage System?
To streamline content governance, you’ll need a centralized or cloud-based content repository that gives anyone at your company a place to upload and store rich media assets. As your network scales to include more endpoints across more locations, having the ability to immediately see device status and take real-time screenshots from those players not only provides time savings, but it also optimizes troubleshooting. Additionally, by centralizing device management, you make it easier to remotely license newly deployed devices.
Where is My Next Content Coming From?
Some of the best ideas for applications and content will come from your audience—the people that see and consume the content on your network. In addition to promoting suggestions on the signs themselves, consider including information about where to submit content ideas in other communications channels like email, collaboration tools, and Intranet.
Did I Accomplish My Digital Signage and Communication Goals?
While gaining insight into content engagement is enlightening, don’t underestimate the value of direct feedback. Where possible, conduct regular surveys to see how your target audience is receiving the communications, and this will help you understand how you can improve the effectiveness of your communication.
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