Benefits of Digital Signage for Marketers
Here at STRATACACHE we serve the world’s largest brands with their most advanced digital signage needs. Every company has a unique content strategy, with its own personas and goals. But for marketers, digital signage goals tend to fall into one of just a handfull of categories:
- Increased brand awareness: Digital signage can help increase brand awareness by getting your message in front of potential customers in high-traffic areas.
- Targeted messaging: Digital signage allows you to target your messages to specific audiences, based on factors such as age, gender, location, and time of day.
- Improved ROI: Digital signage provides an efficient and cost-effective way to reach your target market.
- Interactive content: Interactive content on digital signage can help engage customers and promote two-way communication.
- Content Analytics: Digital signage allows you to manage and track your content, so you can understand what content was displayed at what time and location. This allows savvy marketers to take a more scientific approach to their content, set more specific content strategies and even allow locations to customize their own.
- Personalized Limited Time Offers (LTOs): Digital signage can help increase sales through more compelling product promotions, or, for example, by directing customers to specific products or services with Limited Time Offers (LTOs). Programmatic LTOs can be delivered based on context, such as time of day, purchase history and weather. AI-driven LTOs can introduce a wider variety of factors that result in personalized offers for each customer.
- Customer insights: Because digital signage manage and track exactly when and where content is displayed, businesses can easily perform testing that helps them optimize their content for the right audience.
Digital signage is a powerful marketing tool that can help businesses achieve a variety of goals. From increasing brand awareness and sales to improving customer experience and loyalty, digital signage can make a big impact. In fact, many businesses can see impact on the sales resulting from the content and ad placements on their digital signage campaigns.
Ultimately, digital signage is an extremely versatile marketing tool that can be customized to achieve any number of specific goals. By carefully planning and executing a digital signage campaign, businesses can reap the many rewards that this powerful marketing tool has to offer.
Where (and How) to use Digital Signage
Digital signage marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach consumers in a variety of settings. By using digital hardware to display real-time marketing messages, businesses can reach customers where they are most likely to be receptive.
For example, digital signage can be used in retail stores to promote sales and special offers, or in office buildings to provide directions and information about services. And because digital signage is interactive, it can also be used to gather customer feedback or engage in two-way conversations.
Digital signage provides an extremely versatile marketing tool that can be used in almost any direct-to-consumer vertical. Marketers who are not already using digital signage should consider doing so to reap the many benefits it has to offer.
Some examples of where marketers deploy digital signage include:
- In retail stores, to promote sales and special offers
- In corporate office environments, to display directory information or company announcements
- In banking branch locations, to manage queue times, communicate services, and increase customer trust and brand reputation
- In restaurants, to showcase menus or specials of the day
- At trade shows, conventions or stadiums, to provide information about products or services
- In hospitals and healthcare facilities, to communicate with patients and improve satisfaction and loyalty
Once customers are on location, it’s important to make sure they have a positive commercial experience with your brand. That’s where digital signage comes in. Digital signage marketing helps to enhance the customer experience by providing real-time information and updates. The medium is also incredibly important, as signage allows you to communicate through the most compelling and impactful way possible: images and video.
There has been a significant change in the manner that customers want to get information from businesses. While text-based content is still important, more and more consumers are gravitating towards visual content in the form of images and video. This is likely due to the ever-increasing amount of digital content that we are exposed to on a daily basis. With so much competition for our attention, it’s no wonder that we prefer content that is easy to consume and doesn’t require a lot of effort to understand. As a result, businesses who want to reach their target audience should consider incorporating more visual content into their marketing strategy. By doing so, they will be able to better capture the attention of their audience and convey their message in a way that is more likely to resonate.
Businesses can capitalize on this changing expectation by deploying digital signage. Digital signage gives marketers every aspect of content that is available online. Since web applications are largely responsible for changing consumer expectations, businesses will need to have the same digital canvas at their disposal.
Supporting interactivity, responsiveness and personalization
Personalization has already taken center stage in the world’s largest brands. In a late 2021 consumer study,McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn’t happen (“The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying”). Achieving personalization is difficult in any venue, but it is impossible to achieve in stores without digital signage.
But to achieve personalization in a commercial location, we need a few elements above and beyond a traditional digital signage deployment.
- An interactive digital signage solution
- Responsive design and content
- Data about consumers
Interactivity is the digital signage game-changer. It turns a one-way street into a two-way conversation, so as much as we focus on video today, interactivity will come into focus more and more. We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s not about what you say, it’s about how you make them feel.”
In order to make customers feel something, we need to give digital signage the ability to listen and react. We do this through interactivity.
It is important, as marketers, for us to think through interactivity as a piece of our digital signage capability because the decision to support future upgrades will influence the longevity of the digital signage that we deploy.
Building the 3 Pieces of Digital Signage Marketing
Digital signage marketing needs to be strategy-driven, but often, that marketing strategy ends up with a bottleneck in software, hardware or services. That’s why it is incredibly important for marketers to understand on a high level some of the different components of digital signage and what they can do for your brand.
Digital Signage Hardware
Without getting too far into the weeds, there are two things that marketers need to know about the hardware and infrastructure they choose for their digital signage network.
For hardware, the first strategic choice to make is, do you buy a dedicated media player for your displays, or host your CMS and content “in the cloud.”
Media players are edge hardware, located on site, which tells the display what to show and when. Many small businesses choose to simplify their digital signage by hosting their CMS and content in the cloud, which allows them to use System on a Chip (SoC) displays instead of a media player/display combination.
This is an incredibly important choice that sets the capabilities of your digital signage. Media players:
- Serve content even when Internet connectivity is down
- Provide more long-term flexibility, since you can replace the media player only without buying new displays
- Deliver faster response times, more storage and better processing, allowing you to deliver smart features, like personalization
- Might be necessary depending on the nature of your content distribution needs
Hardware and infrastructure is an incredibly important choice.
Read more about cloud versus edge for digital signage here >
Beyond infrastructure, you also have a variety of digital signage display types available, for multiple use cases. Retailers might want to incorporate touchscreens, digital shelf edge and displays to build entirely new ways of shopping. Every industry is different.
Read more about digital signage >
Digital Signage Software
Software is another key component of digital signage, and although in some ways the software you choose is more flexible than hardware, you would prefer to make the right choice not only for now, but for the years to come.
The main elements of digital signage software are:
- Content Management
- Hardware management
- Content Distribution
- Integrations and custom scripts
STRATACACHE develops each of these software packages in-house, so you do not need to manage multiple vendors. Each piece of software needs to work together to ensure your digital signage runs reliably and can be maintained easily.
Read Digital Signage Software for a deeper dive into the different components and features of digital signage.
Digital Signage Services
Digital signage is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. It is like building your own television network, or a unique web application specifically for the use cases in your business locations. The only limit is your creativity.
At STRATACACHE, we work under a variety of service levels, but in our experience Marketing works best when you have a single digital signage partner who can execute your brand strategy and vision with a single platform of known tools. That is the STRATACACHE Family of Companies.
STRATACACHE Amplifies Your Marketing Strategy
Digital signage has the potential to transform the way your business attracts, compels, and interacts with customers. As a digital signage technology partner to 8 of the top 10 quick service brands and 7 of the top 10 retailers in the United States, we know what it takes to execute signage at scale. Achieving that Marketing ROI requires an understanding of what the finished system and process will look like.
Many digital signage vendors will sell parts of the solution. They will sell the displays, or the digital signage software. But they don’t do it all. That seems OK when you are building the infrastructure, but then the question becomes, who supports it? Who has a vested interest in your success? STRATACACHE is a one-stop shop for digital signage hardware, software and services. We work with brands in the simplest way possible. You are always one phone call away from the solution.
We believe that choosing one digital signage partner is the best way for global brands to approach digital signage. This keeps you in control of the brand and content, and it lets us worry about bringing your vision to life.
