Remember when Pepsi left a mix of shock and entertainment among its audience with the legendary “Augmented Reality Stunt” advertisement? The campaign was so successful that the “virtual reality” scenes from the commercial never left our minds to this day.
The point is digital signage is getting more and more powerful, with lots of businesses making use of its features to drive sales and improve brand recognition.
And while traditional signage hasn’t gone anywhere, digital signage can be much more effective for your marketing efforts.
Now, let’s explore the top 12 benefits of digital signage and help you understand why you should integrate it into your marketing campaigns!
What Are the Advantages of Signage?
Signage, be it digital or traditional, can have a positive impact on how you do business. Here’s a quick overview of the advantages of using signage as part of your marketing strategy:
- Cement Your Brand Identity: Signage, especially when created with consistent colouring and logos, can help you establish your brand identity and increase awareness about your company and its products or services.
- Reach Out to More Potential Customers: If your customers don’t hear about you, you won’t sell anything; it’s as straightforward as that. By using signage, you’ll let more customers learn about your services.
- Improve Your Customers’ Experience: Using signage in your store can help your customers find out more about your product or make it easier to navigate your store or menu, improving their overall experience.
- Catch Attention: Humans are visual creatures; they get attracted to images and videos quickly, which is why using signage can create more opportunities for your business.
And while traditional signage can be pretty valuable, you might want to consider using digital signage. But what is digital signage, anyway?
To put it simply, Digital signage is the use of projection, LED walls, and LCD monitors to display ads or other types of video, text, or image content. It’s widely used in a variety of settings, including restaurants, apparel shops, museums, retail stores, corporates, and clubs.
What Are the Benefits of Electronic Signs Over Traditional Signs?
There are countless advantages to using digital signage in your marketing campaigns. Compared to traditional signs, electronic signs can:
- Save you time and money
- Drive more sales
- Help you organise your ads more efficiently
- Minimise human error
- Help you update your ads quickly based on current events and trends
- Let you use various ad formats
- Give you more flexibility when it comes to where and when you can display your ads
Benefits of Digital Signage
1) Displays Can Be Changed Quickly and Automatically
One of the strongest points of digital signage is that the displays can be easily manipulated and changed with little to no effort. For example, if a company has over 500 display ads throughout the country and wants to advertise a new product or service, the ads can be switched within a few hours in all remote locations. It’s as easy as that!
Plus, you can advertise and manage various ads at the same time quite easily. If you want to change the ads over the weekend and switch them back on weekdays, you can do that at the flick of a switch.
2) Time & Cost Efficient
Digital signage costs way less than traditional signage, which is why digital signage is important. With traditional signage, you need to pay for the sign materials, printing, and installation. And if you need to replace the sign, the old one will be sent to a landfill, creating unnecessary waste.
Additionally, digital signage can save you a lot of time. You can spread your ad over the whole country within a couple of days. On the other hand, it’d take you at least a few weeks to place your ad in every location the old way.
Not to mention, digital signs last a long time since they don’t fade or deteriorate over time.
3) Show Off More Products/Services
With digital signage, the world is literally under your fingertips. If you have an extensive product portfolio, you can easily advertise them together by creating ad groups that rotate automatically.
A classic example is digital board menus in fast-food restaurants. You can let your customers see the whole menu by setting the menu pages to be changed over a specified time interval. This way, you can make sure that your customers won’t miss out on any of the items on your menu.
On the flip side, if you use traditional signage, you’ll need more space to display the whole menu or be forced to cram down the images and text in the signs, which will make it harder for your customers to read the menu.
4) Better Engagement
Think about it; would you be more thrilled looking at a static printed image or following a bright display that possibly has some animated elements with your eyes? Well, we’re pretty sure you’d choose the second option.
Digital signage is a great way to increase engagement with your customers. However, you still need to put a lot of effort into understanding your audience and creating signage content that matches their interests and needs.
For example, if your audience is teenage girls who like to listen to music, getting a rising pop star to participate in your campaign would make more sense than using a football player.
It’s not just about customers, though; employees can benefit from digital signage, too. For instance, in a corporate setting, digital signage can keep your employees engaged and help them deliver internal communication objectives.
5) Remote Management
Remotely managing your marketing campaigns can lead to better growth opportunities for your business. With digital signage, you can use a cloud-based system to handle tasks like publishing, deleting, and replacing content. All of that can be done with the click of a button right from the comfort of your office.
This way, you don’t need to limit your marketing efforts in your area or city for logistic restrictions. You can expand your business to more markets and get more customers. Plus, if a problem happens, you can fix it without even having to visit the location of the signage.
6) Show More Than Just Static Images
Digital signage gives you the luxury of showcasing your products or services in more creative ways than simply relying on static images. For example, you can use short videos in your ads or integrate animated graphics. These would be pretty handy if you want to show your customers how your product works. Digital signage also lets you display live feeds.
Per contra, traditional signage restricts you to static images only.
7) Environmentally Friendly
When you use conventional signage, you’re directly hurting the environment. Here’s how:
- Paper requires tree cutting, which damages the natural ecosystem.
- Traditional signage Increases air pollution.
- Paper factories use over 4% of the world’s total energy expenditure.
- Paper releases harmful gases into the air when it degrades.
- Businesses generate lots of paper trash that could reach up to 80% of their trash.
Opting for digital signage, on the other hand, won’t require you to use any paper, which can benefit the environment greatly.
8) Digital Signage Can Increase Sales
When it comes to boosting sales, digital signage can do wonders. With digital signage, you can provide your customers with an interactive catalogue to showcase your products in an attractive way. What’s more, you can create in-store promotions to tempt your customers to buy more of your products.
Plus, with digital signage, you can get creative with your displays by using video and graphic content, creating a “wow factor” for your customers. Of course, the more impressed your customers are, the more likely you’ll land sales.
9) Reinforce Brand Awareness and Recognition
Brand awareness and recognition are essential for the success of your business. If you’re a business owner, you need to put yourself out there and give people the chance to know who you are.
However, without a solid plan to help your brand identity evolve and mature, your efforts will be in vain. Luckily, with digital signage, increasing brand awareness is easier than ever. By unifying the way you promote your business across all displays, you can increase customer engagement and reinforce your brand identity.
10) Test Out Marketing Ideas Quickly
Got a new wild marketing idea that you want to test? Digital signage would be perfect for that. Digital signage allows you to make your ideas come to life in no time.
There’s no need to wait for your ads to get printed and distributed. All you have to do is formulate a soft copy of your idea, and you can put it on display in as many locations as you want.
11) Have Access to Analytics
Analytics is a powerful way to measure the success of your ads. Digital signage gives you access to analytics that utilise computer vision technology to analyse the number of people who see your ads and even their demographics.
Some advanced digital signage systems can measure the amount of time every single person spends standing in front of the ad. They can also capture the customer’s interests by analysing what ad elements they paid the most attention to.
With analytics, you can test out several ads and see which of them performs better, ultimately leading to more sales.
12) Additional Opportunities
Digital Signage can display more information so that employees no longer have to spend time relaying to customers. Instead, employees can focus on other important things instead of wasting their time on tasks that can be automated.
For instance, in a car showroom, a digital sign next to every car that displays its specifications, features, dimensions, and other aspects means that your customers can get much of the information they need before even talking to anyone.
Another fantastic way to make use of digital signage is to mix it with your social media campaigns. For example, you can organise a competition on social media where the post that gets the highest number of likes will be featured on the company’s electronic signage. Never underestimate the power of user-generated content!
You can even use digital signage to showcase your business’ website and persuade your audience to visit it.
Other cool digital signage ideas include:
- Live travel information
- Building directories
- Sales dashboards
- Project management charts
- Company broadcasts
- Emergency notices
- Leaderboards
Conclusion
Digital signage can create an endless river of opportunities for your business, and the more you rely on digital signage, the more you’ll realise how powerful it is.
The benefits of digital signage include efficient marketing, less waste, better engagement, and of course, more sales.
Have you used digital signage to market your business yet? Well, now is the best time to start!
