For years digital signage has been a growing force in advertising, branding, and digital communications. Every industry is upgrading to intuitive digital displays; government, healthcare, education, retail, and more. The benefits of digital signage lead to improved visitor experiences through prompting users to take action. These actions could include learning about events, providing information, and many other options. Also these displays provide unified branding and many use cases for industries that adopt it.
One of the biggest pain points that is stopping people from upgrading to digital signage is resisting change. The resistant for change comes from both sides of a company. Business owners fear that customers will not understand newer technology, and that it will lead to a decrease in sales. Moreover, owners themselves fear moving to a new system, when their current system is working.
The digital signage industry is expected to grow into a $45.30 billion market by 2030. The demand for signage is growing, and as demands increases, the products improve. Digital signage has already become faster, more secure, and easier to learn than ever. In addition, these digital signs increase sales with more views, improve customer satisfaction, and even have touch and touch-free options. Owners no longer have to worry about customers understanding or engaging with a technology, as they are surrounded by digital screens everyday.
Digital signage can do so much to improve on outdated methods of advertising, branding, and communications. Just because something is currently working, does not meant that is cannot be improved on. The smart decision is to embrace this digital option rather than resist it. Get ahead of the curve by learning about the benefits of making the upgrade to digital signage from outdated methods and technologies.
1. Upgrade to Interact with Audiences
For years companies have struggled creating a useful and meaningful customer experience. While posters, flyers, and welcome desks can provide some interaction, they often take a lot of time, money, and resources to maintain. Likewise, posters and flyers are extremely passive, and lead to a lack of customer engagement and education. Often these forms of communication are lost on walls full of other advertising, leading to an overall muddled experience. Welcome desks also come with their fair share of problems; bad first impressions, time consuming processes, and a lack of visitor independence.
Free up your staff to work elsewhere besides waiting at a desk or spending time on physical advertising that may not be noticed. Digital signage allows visitors to get where they need to, check-in, learn about your organization, and read about company values on their own. It also provides an option to access maps and information on their phones, rather than having an employee spend time walking them through processes.
Digital signage is a professional method of displaying information. Link to different menus, display time and weather, include instructions, all in one place and without losing anything in the clutter. Displays have a 400% higher rate of being seen and engaged with, which alone makes the upgrade to digital signage worth it.
2. Upgrade to Target Specific Audiences with Scheduling
Not only does digital signage prompt visitors to interact, but it also delivers catered messages to visitors at different times of day. Currently many companies put up posters, flyers, and other temporary signage to try to engage with users. This often leads to a wall full of unprofessional advertising and announcements that never truly reach the end user. Moreover this method does not have a targeted customer experience, meaning every customer has the same user journey.
In contrast some companies have switched to putting advertisements on a TV for information to scroll through. While these displays might be more engaging, they still do not lead to a meaningful user experience. Maintaining these displays can also be a hassle, as many lack the option for remote management. Both current options waste time, money, and resources and do not get the correct message to the right person.
With digital signage, content can easily be updated, and multiple presentations can be created. This means that content can be scheduled to play on displays at different times of the day, week, month, or year. Unlike their paper counterparts, this allows you to target specific audiences, leading to a better return on investment. Maintaining digital signage content is also quite easy. Updates can be easily made, and schedules can be put together months in advance. No more constant working on designing, printing, and hanging up one-off paper advertising. Simply create the content, and push it live to screens everywhere for your audience for immediate engagement.
3. Upgrade to Update Content Quickly
Posters, flyers, and brochures are beginning to largely be a promotional tool of the past. These temporary methods are clumsily pasted on a wall or crammed on a bulletin board where their messages will be lost. Not only is this not professional, but it is a large waste of resources and time. People constantly spend time creating new simple paper signage for events, promotions, health notices, and more.
Once designs are haphazardly put together, they all need to be printed, with whatever resources are available. Finally, every poster or flier needs to be manually hung up and taken down at each location where the announcement is needed. With content being created by a variety of people and departments, brand cohesion is often completely missing. This leads to a lot of time being put into messages that are hardly noticed and often left up past their time of relevance.
With digital signage it is easy to update content instantly from anywhere that has internet. Simply make the changes to your content or add a new batch of content, and then push it live. This is done without the need to visit individual locations to take down and hang up signage. No more missing the window to display time sensitive content, when updates are done with the push of a button. Additionally, making new digital content does not require any added time or money to be fed into printing and material costs. Digital signage is friendlier to the environment, and friendlier to your company’s budget.
4. Upgrade to Easily Promote Sales or Demo Products
Companies rely on newspaper ads, website ads, coupons, and in-store signage to inform visitors about products and upcoming sales. Sharing a demonstration of your products or services can be difficult to manage in limited space with limited resources. Unless in a cooking store, a live demonstration is often not an option, and website and paper ads cannot fill this gap. Paper signage also lacks an inviting format, often not being assertive enough, or too distracting. While these methods can be effective, they should not be the only source for visitors to interact with your organization.
Digital signage provides a way to bring showcases into stores rather than just having them at events or trade shows. Provide extra product information, display product showcase videos on screens, or even embed live demos. This makes explaining complex items or services simple, and gives customers an inviting learning experience. Doing this leads to higher engagement and understanding, making someone more likely to move forward with your product.
Signage software makes it is simple to create and distribute content across screens in one or many locations. Create professional sale content for customers, no more flimsy paper signage necessary. As mentioned before, easily switch digital content when new sales or promotions arrive with scheduling to cut down on paper waste.
5. Upgrade to Add Amazing Integrations
Many appliances are needed to show time, date, send alerts, display news feeds, and more. Having this many devices can make it difficult to maintain a productive work flow or a consistently branded environment. Ensuring that all devices are up to date and ready for customers or staff to use becomes tedious and time consuming.
An ever growing amount of intuitive integrations and dynamic widgets make digital signage the perfect tool to replace these outdated devices. Easily add simple widgets like weather, time and date, countdowns, news feeds, QR codes, and slideshows for informative content. Alternatively add complex integrations like websites, metrics, donor lists, Google Apps, Twitter feeds, and other options for a higher level of usage.
6. Upgrade to Access Unlimited Use Cases
Devices such as clocks and weather radios, and promotional material such as flyers and posters often only have one use. This leads to a cluttered work atmosphere, full of devices that take time to manage and keep up to date. For example, chalkboard or manual marquee signage are a slow and cumbersome method of executing menus. Printed office directories are temporary as constant staff and room changes are made, and because of this are usually out of date. Finally cork bulletin boards are a cluttered way to display messages and often announcements are lost in the shuffle. These many different physical options and so many more need to be managed daily to truly be effective.
In the previous section, the many integrations provided with using digital signage were mentioned. These widgets and integrations make digital signage a tool that can be molded to fit any need and use case. Use digital signage in healthcare settings, government agencies, schools, retail locations, corporate offices, and other areas. Likewise digital screens can display an unlimited number of these use cases all at once.
Digital signage can include digital menus that are easily updatable from any internet connected device. Moreover menus no longer have to remain simple for ease; with digital signage custom designs are easy to make. Easily create and update office directories and clearly display them in areas with high foot traffic to give visitors current information. Lastly, display updates in one place and even give messages their own slides so they will be seen and heard. The use cases for digital signage are truly endless, and only limited by your own ideas. Here is a list we made of 50 ways to use digital signage in your business to spark some more of those ideas.
7. Upgrade to Create Digital Directories and Wayfinding
Physical wayfinding and directories are critical for helping visitors navigate through buildings. Despite this, they are cluttered and confusing to guests, sometimes causing more harm than good. Also these types of signage cannot be easily updated when workers and locations are added. This leads to a constant flow of new signage being ordered and created, spending lots of time and money.
While welcome desks help fill that missing step for helping visitors, they can be costly to maintain due to labor costs. Furthermore these desks require stationed workers for full efficacy, preventing them from working on other tasks around the building.
Touchscreen digital signage allows for the usage of digital wayfinding and directories on screens throughout facilities. This creates a comprehensive navigation system that can be easily updated when offices or personnel change. Guests can easily access interactive digital signage and use it to locate people, departments, and locations in the building. Digital displays pair perfectly with physical wayfinding signs by adding an extra level of direction and affirmation. These displays also free up staff who would be directing traffic. This in turn reduces social interactions which is especially important in today’s COVID-19 world.
To go one step further, QR codes, beacon technology, and Progressive Web Apps allow visitors to view maps and directories on their phones. This means that companies can share directories with guests before their visit for clarity on parking, entrances, and a more streamlined wayfinding process.
A progressive web app or PWA is a website that looks and behaves like a native mobile app. It combines the features of web browsing with an app-like experience, without the barrier of visiting an app store and having to download an app.
8. Upgrade for Digital Donor Recognition
Aluminum and zinc donor plaques are a thoughtful way to recognize donors, but lack the ability to be updated. Over time these plaques begin to take up a significant amount of wall space, and look outdated. Plaques lack an actionable statement for collecting future donations as well. The displays are heavy, difficult to mount, and do not truly give donors with the recognition they deserve.
Donor recognition with digital signage provides solutions for these problems as well leads the way for improving donor recognition. Unlike donor plaques, digital screens can display future donation opportunities, share donor stories, and promote what donations are used for. As these screens are interactive they lead to an increased visitor engagement helping encourage more donations. Digital integrations such as Google Sheets or List-Eez make showing full donor lists clean and easy. This allows for more frequent updates to be made from anywhere helping donors know that their donations are truly valued.
Displaying content on digital signage allows for content to be shared in more than one location, giving donors the recognition they deserve. Beautiful donor wall displays can be partnered with digital signage to provide an elevated branding opportunity and donor experience. All this reduces the wall space being taken up with plaques and saves money from being funneled into these cumbersome projects.
9. Upgrade for Unified Branding and Digital Communications
Creating posters, fliers, and even physical signage can lead to disjointed branding within companies. If your company is lucky, one team might put together all marketing materials for your location. If your company is not lucky, random members create wayfinding and posters in varying styles, leading to a lack of brand cohesion. Display boards are littered with designs, and company branding guides fall by the wayside in favor of thrown together promotional materials. This disjointed branding leads to a muddled and confusing customer experience. It is important to create a cohesive brand so customers feel heard, understand your company, and become repeat customers.
Digital signage provides a simple solution to enact unified branding across one or many locations. Digital signs can cleanly display company values, share enriching stories, and even communicate usefulness of products or services in daily usage. Show guests that they share values with your company by having a consistent digital communications network. It is proven that customers who share an emotional connection with a brand are likely to have a larger lifetime value (LTV). Encourage visitors and customers to work with you time and time again with a system they understand and appreciate.
Not only does digital signage show values and trust, but it is a way to show reliability and professionalism. Having a cohesive message to display with visitors leads to an elevated user journey. This is possible to achieve even across various locations as employees can quickly update digital content from anywhere. The ability to create templates of content makes it easy for users to maintain the rules from branding guides. Altogether digital signage offers a way to manage users and a unified brand across many locations with ease.
The Reason to Upgrade to Digital Signage
Digital signage is revolutionizing the way that advertising, branding, and digital communications are conducted. The countless integrations and features allow it to be a fit for any industry. Moreover with the versatile options digital signage offers, the limitations are only constructed by the imagination of users. Create a meaningful customer experience, maintain professionalism, and manage content remotely with ease by upgrading to digital signage today. Contact us for a digital signage demo or to learn more about the many benefits and use cases of digital signage.