5 Key Considerations When Activating Your First Brick-and-Mortar Digital Signage Project
Investing in digital signage is no longer a nice to have for brick-and-mortar stores but a necessity.
A business-critical tool, it brings life to physical locations and gives visitors that next-level in-store experience. In fact, research shows a 46% uplift in customer satisfaction within stores that utilize digital signage and a total of 76% of customers claim that they enter stores because of them. Signage undoubtedly has a direct impact on sales and satisfaction, and retailers who fail to get on board with a more modern and digitized approach to in-location communication will be left behind.
If you are new to digital signage and are about to embark on your first digital signage project, there are several key considerations you need to think about before and after deploying any content. Here are five to get you on the right track to success:
1. Defining Your Goals
What are your digital signage goals? Do you want to reach customers and drive sales through targeted promotions? Or maybe you want to update them on the latest in-store policies on safety? Pinpointing your content goals early on is vital to ensure a smooth digital signage project as it will help govern your decisions moving forward and point you in the right direction when it comes to content; messaging, layout, and delivery.
2. Strategic Screen Placement
Deciding where to place your digital signage in-store is arguably one of the most important steps to ensure project success, even before content creation. If customers cannot see your signage then there is no point in spending time and money designing content for it. Therefore, it is essential to mark out the most advantageous viewpoints in-store that offer high visibility and high foot traffic, to give your masterful content creations the best opportunity of being seen.
3. Content Creation & Ease of Deployment
Creating content that wows your audience will depend on the tools that you have to work with and your skillset. Some digital signage solutions, such as Raydiant’s Experience Management Platform, come with pre-made templates that help to make content creation and deployment easy. They require no experience in graphic design and result in no delays from having to make content from scratch. Consistency is the key to driving effective in-store marketing and messaging, therefore having tools where you can quickly push out content and make changes on the fly will go a long way.
After deciding what content you will show you also need to make a plan for when and to who you will show your content. Audience analytics technologies are perfect for this as they enable you to automatically play dynamic and targeted content to customers in real time as they are detected in front of the screen. The technology anonymously determines the age and gender of the person in front of the screen and plays content that is deemed to be the most interesting to them. Variations of ads or promotional campaigns are set up using a rules-based setting in the CMS prior to the campaigns going live. All you have to do is set it and forget it and just let the AI tech work its magic!
4. Offline Capabilities
Does your digital signage system have offline capabilities? This is important to consider before your project kicks off as you do not want to be met with blank screens if your internet connection cuts out. Opting for a digital signage solution that allows you to deliver eye-catching visuals to your customers both offline or online is the best solution for consistency and peace of mind.
5. Monitoring Performance
After deploying content you need to have a system in place to help you measure its impact. Without content performance insights you are ultimately left in the dark with no direction on how to improve future projects. Certain types of digital signage software are available that collect audience/screen analytics data and also aggregate it onto a dashboard for easy and convenient viewing. DeepSight, our audience analytics product, can anonymously analyze metrics such as opportunity to see, attention time, number of viewers, demographic insights, mood, and more. It also can also be merged with Point of Sales data to measure the true impact of your marketing efforts on sales.
Planning For Success
Research shows that ‘39% of projects fail due to lack of planning.’ By considering these five points you can ensure you get off to a good start in making the most out of your brick-and-mortar digital signage and in achieving the highest ROI possible.
