Digital marketing strategies are employed to reach consumers through online channels, from social media platforms and search engines to individual websites. Most digital marketing strategies can be fairly effective, but you’ll get better results by supplementing with digital signage.
What is digital signage?
Generally speaking, digital signage consists of a physical monitor that displays marketing messages in the form of ads, videos, and interactive sessions. The display monitors may be mounted to walls, attached to kiosks, and sometimes POS systems.
Marketing messages displayed on the monitors are controlled by digital signage software. For example, software from Visix gives business owners the power to create and schedule content from a browser. Messages can be layered and deployed with custom graphic images.
Digital signage gives businesses a big boost
Marketing entails capturing and holding people’s attention. The faster you can capture someone’s notice, and the longer you can hold it, the better chance you have of landing a sale.
People are primarily visual; vision is the strongest of the five senses. Visual perception is so strong, it overpowers what you hear.
When you capture someone’s attention visually, it’s easier to move them along through the customer journey. If you can get them to interact, it’s even easier.
You can use displays to publish graphic or video marketing messages, but you can also use digital signage software to entice customers to interact. This is where you’ll get the biggest results.
Consumers become more committed when they start to interact with a product. Interacting with a digital display can be initiated by a motion sensor that calls to people as they walk by, or an animated screen that invites them to touch it and play a game or receive a discount code.
What content can you deliver through digital signage?
Content may include:
- Audio content
- Graphic images
- Video content
- Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents
- News and weather updates
- Streaming content
- Social media posts
- Sports events
- Inspirational quotes
- QR codes
- Flight and traffic information
- Streaming staff meetings through Zoom
- And more
Who uses digital signage?
Businesses in just about every industry use digital signage, although some industries rely on digital signage for their primary operations. For example, airlines rely on this technology fully to display flight information in real time; without it, passengers would be lost and so would crews.
When airlines suffer network outages, the result is chaos. Air carriers rely on getting up-to-date weather reports to fly their planes safely. Without that information, they have to ground flights.
How do businesses use digital signage?
Each company has unique needs, but most businesses use digital signage in similar ways. This technology is used mostly for advertising, sharing information, initiating engagement, and streamlining operations.
Here are just some of the ways that private firms implement digital signage:
- Trade shows. Digital displays are popular at trade shows because nothing catches people’s attention more than video content. As attendees roam the trade show floor, they’re naturally drawn to the booths that have video displays.
- Lobbies. A video display monitor in a lobby can be extremely useful. It can serve as a help desk with a live person stationed in the back room or at another location. It can also be used to capture email addresses from customers about to make a purchase.
- Malls. Malls use digital signage to power self-service wayfinding kiosks.
- Speed of service. Individual businesses, including hotels and restaurants, use self-serve kiosks to facilitate and/or speed up the customer service process.
- Menus. Fast food restaurants have started switching to digital menus so they can flexibly advertise seasonal menu items and promotions. For example, McDonald’s recently spent $6 billion overhauling their menu system to digital. Most locations are already using digital kiosks for self-serve ordering.
Standard restaurants like Olive Garden use digital signage on tablets stationed at each table. The tablets are used to order, pay, and call wait staff. They can also be used to play games (for a fee). Meanwhile, ads are constantly displayed on the screen.
Digital signage is the future of strong marketing
The digital signage market was already worth $5 billion in 2020. It’s expected to grow at 6% until at least 2028. For now, it remains almost a well-kept secret, but that won’t be the case for long.
In the future, more companies will install interactive digital displays to engage and educate customers while placing carefully crafted messages throughout the interaction. If you’re a business owner, consider using digital displays to engage your customers; the results will be noticeable.
Not all content management systems use widgets. You might want to change this to something like “What content can you deliver on digital signs?” More ideas here if you want them: https://www.visix.com/resources/infographics/100-digital-signage-message-ideas/