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    How to Use Digital Signage as Part of Your Marketing Strategy

    By Oliver Candy | 23.09.21

    Are you thinking about integrating digital signage with your marketing efforts? Well, that’s a great step. Implementing a digital signage marketing strategy is a great way to increase customer engagement and boost sales.

    In this guide, we’ll help you get the most out of using digital signage as part of your marketing strategy. So, let’s get into it!

    What Is a Marketing Strategy in Digital Marketing?

    Setting up a marketing strategy in digital marketing is all about identifying your marketing goals and the channels you’ll use to reach them, such as earned, paid, or owned media. Of course, a combination of some or all of these media types is highly encouraged too.

    Typically, a marketing strategy requires you to pinpoint your goals, understand your audience and what channels they use, and tailor your messaging based on their interests and pain points.

    When utilising digital signage, you’ll need to go through the same steps to craft your digital signage strategy. The only difference is you’ve already decided that digital signage is a potentially good way to reach your audience.

    digital signage marketing strategy

    How Does Digital Signage Increase Sales?

    Understanding the true potential of digital signage can help you drive significantly more sales than other marketing means. Here are some fantastic digital signage ideas that you can utilise to boost sales:

    • Interactive Displays: Dynamic displays can create a “wow factor” for your audience when done right. You want your customers to remember your brand and talk about it with their friends and families, but this won’t happen unless you develop unique interactive displays that’ll leave them drooling over it.
    • Promoting Products and Services: By implementing a product display strategy, you can use digital screens to recommend products and services to your customers when they need them the most.
    • In-Store Promotions: Customers love these; they probably love your products already, which is why they are in your store. But at the same time, they want to get a good deal, and there’s no better way to persuade them to buy your product than in-store promotions.
    • Interactive Catalogues: Ditch the boring paperback catalogues that restrict how you showcase your products. With digital signage, you can create attractive catalogues that your customers can interact with, learning about the benefits your products offer in an intuitive and visually appealing way.

    On-Screen Advertising: Renting your advertising space to other businesses can bring in a lot of money to your company.

    Set Goals for Your Digital Signage Marketing Campaign

    Targeting specific goals is an essential step in crafting your marketing strategy. Without clear goals, you won’t be able to define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and deciding whether your marketing campaign is going in the right direction or not would be challenging.

    You need to ask yourself what your marketing objective is. For instance, is it increasing brand awareness or driving more sales? Maybe you need to let your existing customers know about some after-sales service? These are all critical questions to keep in mind to define your marketing objective.

    And remember that your marketing objective should be based on where your audience is in the customer journey.

    Define Your Audience and Make It Specific to Them

    Tailoring your marketing efforts based on your target persona’s needs, interests, and pain points can be an excellent way to increase brand awareness and boost sales.

    If you aren’t familiar with the term “target persona”, you can think of it as a virtual profile of your ideal customer. See, when you create a product or a service, you make it based on the assumption that at least some people would be interested in it. Those people are your target audience, and a target persona is who your perfect customer is.

    There’s one critical factor to keep in mind, though: defining your target audience shouldn’t be based on assumptions. Your best bet would be to interview some of your potential customers to develop a more realistic profile of your target persona. Additionally, it would help if you asked yourself a few essential questions, such as:

    • Who are my customers?
    • Who do they trust?
    • What are their biggest challenges and problems?
    • How can I help them or improve their quality of life?

    Once you’ve done some interviews and asked yourself these questions, the rest should be a piece of cake.

    What Type of Content Will You Show?

    There are so many types of content that you can show with digital signage. However, not all of them would be relevant to your product or service.

    For instance, using a digital signage display screen in an office environment can be a great way to manage internal communications. Instead of reminding everyone about a meeting through email, they can take a quick glimpse at the calendar on the screen to know when it’ll take place.

    Similarly, you can use a digital signage display screen at the reception of your facility to showcase customer testimonials. By taking pride in what your previous customers say about your business, your potential customers will trust you more.

    digital signage strategy

    Have a Schedule. What Times Will You Show Different Content?

    Many marketers and business owners underestimate the value of scheduling the content of their digital signage properly. However, specifying the right time to show different content is just as important as the quality of the content itself, if not more important. The order of displaying different content is critical too.

    Generally speaking, there are two ways to schedule your digital signage content: micro scheduling and macro scheduling. With micro scheduling, you need to create a playlist with the creatives you want to schedule, similar to those used in music streaming services. There are various digital marketing tools out there that can help you with that.

    Then, you need to place them in the correct order and specify how long each of them will be displayed. You can also put your playlist in a loop to display it multiple times per hour or day by choosing the “recurring” option. On top of that, most tools allow you to specify whether you want your playlist to be displayed daily or weekly.

    Otherwise, maco scheduling is for scheduling content over a specific month, season, or period of the year.

    For instance, if you want to display Christmas-related content in December, you can set your playlist to be shown on every single day of that month automatically. You also need to specify a start and end date for your playlist, which, in that case, would be the 1st and 26th of December, respectively.

    How Will You Engage Your Audience?

    So, you’ve put up the perfect display ads using digital signage, but your audience doesn’t seem to be that interested in what you offer yet.

    Luckily, there are several marketing tricks that you can do to hook up your potential customers. One of the best ways is to include your customers in the ads. For example, installing a vertical display in a school or campus that shows a live feed to social media content about the facility is something both students, newcomers, and applicants would love.

    In a healthcare facility, using a digital screen to display infographics and videos that increase awareness about specific diseases or health issues would provide value to the patients and make them feel safer. It’ll also make the patients appreciate that the facility truly cares about their health and wellbeing.

    signage marketing strategies

    Designing Your Digital Signage Content

    Investing in how your digital content looks and feels is crucial for the success of your marketing campaigns. You’ve already spent money on your digital signage setup, so why not spend on well-designed content that attracts your customers? Here are some keep elements to consider when designing your digital signage content:

    Visual Contrast

    There are various ways to create visual contrast in your digital signage content. For example, you can use a light-toned background and couple it with dark text. If your content is a photograph, you can play with light composition a bit to create contrast by dimming the shadows and brightening up the highlights.

    White Space

    Increasing white space in your digital signage designs is an easy trick that you can use to get more eyes to look at what you have to offer. By placing your message at the centre of a large white canvas, you’ll be able to draw the attention of your potential customers more effectively.

    Colour

    Different colours can change how your customers perceive your ads or products entirely. For example, green signals health and wealth, while orange implies friendliness and cheerfulness.

    However, keep in mind that the colours you use must align with your brand identity. Ideally, the biggest portion of your digital signage content should contain the colours of your brand. It’d also be best to use contrasting colours in the designs for a better layout and visual appeal.

    Rule of Thirds

    The rule of thirds divides your ad into 9 equal rectangles or squares, where the essential compositional elements are close to the intersections of the vertical and horizontal lines that form the geometric shapes. The psychology behind this is that it draws attention to the important stuff and creates more tension and interest than placing your content at the centre. 

    Typography

    Using relevant, eye-catching typefaces in your content can make one hell of a difference in how your customers perceive it. For example, are you marketing a product for kids? Then, a playful typeface like Comic Sans would be ideal. Do you want your ads to look more professional and serious? Use Helvetica or Calibri.

    How Will You Measure Your Digital Signage Goals?

    “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” – Peter Drucker.

    Measuring the success of your digital signage marketing strategies is essential to get a better idea of where you stand and what you need to change or improve to reach your digital signage goals faster or more efficiently.

    If your goal is to drive sales and generate a positive ROI (Return on Investment), then your job is easy. You need to evaluate your sales performance to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

    And one way to measure the success of such a campaign is to distribute a quick survey at the end of the show to measure how satisfied your sponsors are.

    However, if increasing sales isn’t your current goal, things get a bit trickier. You’ll have to measure your ROO or Return on Objectives. For example, if you run a tradeshow, your digital signage goal would be to increase the show’s value for your sponsors.

    Test, Review, and Adjust Your Digital Signage Content

    Fine-tuning your digital signage content can significantly improve your marketing performance. One way to experiment with your digital signage content is to create a simple A/B test by displaying 2 different versions of your ads in the exact location for the same periods.

    All you have to do is change one variable that you think will have the most significant impact on the content’s performance. For example, you can run two versions of your ads with different typefaces. Then, after analysing the performance of the ads, you can run the ad that yielded better results.

    It’s also vital that you adjust your digital signage content based on your product portfolio updates. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to advertise an outdated product for your customers while your new product is hiding in the shadows.

    Plus, try to stay updated with the current trends in your industry, and think about how you can match your digital signage content with it.

    Conclusion

    So, that was our comprehensive guide on everything you need to know about using digital signage as part of your marketing strategy.

    And it’s a simple step-by-step process, despite requiring some experimentation in the initial phases. Nevertheless, if you set your goals, define your audience accurately, and measure and improve your campaigns accordingly, the results will be better than you expect.