⏱️ 10min read (10 minutes that could change your life)
Digital signage is considered the ideal replacement for traditional signage such as posters, banners, and standees. It is essentially any screen that can be used to communicate data and information.
There are many cool things that digital signage can do for your business but more importantly there are tangible benefits applicable to practically any business that uses this technology.
Here are 7 reasons why you must use digital signage for your business:
1. Helping people stay safe – now more than ever
Hand sanitisers. Public safety announcements. Weather related information.
Digital signage can play a critical role in public and staff safety which, in 2020’s COVID pandemic, is essential.
The pandemic has blind-sided most businesses but we’re all now very familiar with the impact of it and living our lives with various restrictions and the ever-changing guidelines and health messaging. With information that is changing so quickly, print just isn’t going to cut it.
Digital Signage is a key way to deliver this constantly changing messaging quickly. Be it new guidelines on upcoming lockdown restrictions, new measures around hygiene, providing the latest statistics on infections rates… digital signage provides a clear communication tool to deliver this message safely and rapidly to your staff and customers.
In the UK, it is mandatory for customers to wear face masks and for businesses to provide hand sanitising stations, so why not use hand sanitiser stations with built in digital displays so you can deliver customer health & safety notices at the point of sanitisation?
Why not use high bright window displays to display social distancing and ‘wear a face mask’ messages to customers before they reach the entrance to your stores?
Why not use digital signage inside stores, at reception areas or staff work areas to reinforce messaging about staying apart, washing hands and wearing face masks?
As a business there is an obligation to ensure customers and staff are kept as safe – digital signage can truly help deliver valuable messaging and guidance towards maintaining a safe environment for all.
Away from COVID, digital signage can also be used in other ways to stay safe. It can be used to communicate safety precautions including while ongoing emergency procedures are taking place. An efficient emergency alert notification can be configured for screens within the building. A single alert can change the content to reflect the status of the emergency and then turned off by another. This is another great tool if you want to secure the safety and well-being of valuable staff.
2. Cost
Digital Signage can reduce business costs for internal comms as well as marketing because it dramatically reduces or completely replaces print.
It practically pays for itself through the ability to change messaging and content as much as desired without any need to print/reprint.
You’re also less likely to rely on additional staff (or yourself) to physically take down/change material and replace with the new… only to then realise there is a misspelling and you need to do it all again! (hands up if you’ve done that – yep, over here!)
This doesn’t even include the potential uplift in sales (if that’s your game) from using animated marketing material to promote products or services… which, by the way, can contribute to an increase of 33% additional sales.
Using digital signage and by changing content remotely requires much less manpower (your team can focus on other areas of the business), ultimately saves money and can improve your bottom line.
If you’re not already using digital signage – why not?!
For this one reason alone, as a business you’d be foolish not to be using digital signage.
3. Flexibility
In a world where being adaptive and flexible is critical for business, digital signage offers a lifeline.
Your business is unique and you need to make sure digital signage matches your needs.
Digital signage gives complete flexibility in terms of content, scheduling and hardware.
Being able to pick and mix content types such as images, movies, weather, social feeds etc allows businesses to be creative with their communications and to explore content types vs business objectives in a measurable way – test it, refine it, repeat it.
Scheduling content is so easy and flexible. It can be as easy as choosing a time and day for content to appear and that’s it. Then, let’s imagine just before the content is about change, your circumstances have changed… time to PANIC?! Not this time!
It’s a good job you’re using digital signage.
Now, all you have to do is change the content schedule and push the change live… you can breathe easily again knowing your message is in line with your current situation.
Whatever the size or environment, there are hardware options to help your business reliably deploy digital signage. As we like to say, from pocket sized to oversized – there is something for practically everyone!
Touch tablets, high bright window displays, outdoor LED billboards, vibrant multi-screen menu boards, hand sanitiser displays and much, much more. You’ve got complete flexibility to choose the right hardware for your requirements at any stage.
4. Digital Signage makes people take action
Digital signage can be bright and dynamic and with the right content is proven to catch the attention of viewers.
It’s been reported that 80% of shoppers say that they entered a store because of the digital signage they saw.
Over 40% say that they have been influenced to make their choice of purchase leading to an overall increase in product category sales (x7).
If sales isn’t your thing, perhaps brand awareness or time on location is: digital signage has been directly attributed to 47.7% increase in brand awareness and 30% increase in time spent in stores.
These results speak for themselves – digital signage makes people take action.
It can also be used to excite viewers.
Think along the lines of presence sensors to detect someone in a certain area triggering content changes to deliver something more specific, amusing or delightful leaving the viewer transfixed and completely engaged in the experience.
How about a beautiful attraction screen with an item below it encouraging the viewer to pick it up? The person picks it up and the content changes to tell more of the product story.
Using digital signage to enhance the experience in this way can help you shape the customer journey to deliver specific measurable results, as well as reinforce + improve brand perception with the customer.
5. Operational efficiency
Let me ask you a question: You’ve got a promotional message to shout about. You’ve designed a beautiful poster to share the message, now you need to get it out to your 100 offices / stores.
Which option is more efficient?
- Option A) Send the poster to a print firm, get 100 copies printed, post one to each store / office and ask that a member of staff to put the poster up and let you know once done.
- Option B) Upload the poster to your digital signage CMS, publish the content to all screens in all stores / office locations then receive download confirmation each screen received the content, then view analytic proof of play reports to confirm the poster is playing xxxx number of times a day with a breakdown per device.
If you answered Option B – congratulations my friend, you’re a winner!
It’s clear option B is the most efficient way to distribute promotional material to physical stores / office locations and better yet, you can get proof the content is playing – you KNOW it’s up there running.
Further still, it was taken care of by you – you uploaded it, you published it, you’re viewing the analytics.
You didn’t rely on 100s of other staff members to interrupt their daily workloads to ensure the posters were put up, distracting them from other important tasks… and you didn’t then have to guess or chase for confirmation that they’ve put the posters up wasting even more precious time.
This scenario works even with small number of stores or locations… digital signage makes business operations more efficient.
6. Delivering real-time information
One of the beautiful benefits of digital signage is that you can keep it updated with real-time information automatically. Showing the current weather status or a forecast (people love looking at weather forecasts), then go a step further and customise messages that are linked to weather states, such as: if ‘Sunny’ show ‘sunshine video’ with a sunshine related message or if ‘raining’ show ‘rain video’ with a rain based message etc.
Showing news feeds either by RSS feeds, Screenfeed News or YouTube live news streams are also great ways of delivering real-time information. Not only is this useful for keeping up with world events but also it’s great in places where customers or staff dwell. It helps reduce the perceived wait times.
Further types of real-time data could include integration with third-party systems via XML, Excel, JSON or webpage sources. Data can be synced with the digital signage and then when the third-party system data updates, the digital signage does too. This could be for staff sales data, store menu pricing and stock levels, airports flight schedules – practically anything.
7. Aesthetics, ambience and WOW!
New, brings with it a sense of excitement, a sense of freshness, something modern.
Digital Signage allows you to keep changing content, keeping things fresh and keeping your audience engaged. It can also make installs look so much neater – for example getting rid of printed boards or posters taking up lots of space and condensing into a screen that allows you to rotate content and set schedules or rules for when specific content shows.
Using Digital Signage well gives you the power to create a desired ambience, help tell stories without a narrator, shape the mood, it can be in your face or subtle in the background, any which way you want. You have the power to can chop and change content to deliver a desired effect.
Digital Signage can be used as a key part of the interior design and can be used to make installs and experiences truly incredible.
When paired with great content and design, Digital Signage offers a way to WOW people – just take a look at some of these examples of installs that WOW:
Primark, Madrid:
Louis Vuitton, Istanbul:
Salesforce, San Francisco:
The Fashion Gallery, Vienna:
Conclusion
Almost every industry uses digital signage as a way to communicate and it’s easy to understand why. It is an efficient, flexible and effective tool for communication both to staff, customers and potential customers.
The benefits of using digital signage are undeniable and it’s a MUST HAVE business tool.
What’s more, IT IS EASY to get started and it can help transform your business.
So, what are you waiting for?
Take that next positive step.
Get in touch to see how we can help you with utilising digital signage.
It could be life changing.