Digital signage can boost sales, communicates with your audiences, and enhance the overall image of your company, facility, or organization. Here are five reasons to invest now:
1. Build visibility that translates into sales and brand loyalty. Studies show increased information equals increased sales. Digital signage helps you enliven your presentation of information so it's noticeable and memorable. Create brand awareness in and outside your business, at trade shows, in transportation hubs, or along a commercial thoroughfare. Accentuate your value proposition and how you differ from your competition. Highlight special prices, upsell and cross-sell products and services, and drive purchase shifts that, in turn, give you margins. And keep them coming back for more. It's all about building relationships for the long term, not just using discounts and other promotions to move products off shelves. Done right, digital signage enables you to create a truly branded experience, an emotional bond between you and customers.
2. Manage, fine-tune displays for current and relevant marketing. Posters, flyers, and other static signage and collateral can take hours or even days to replace. Digital signage, however, enables you to easily add, remove, and refine content—often in a matter of seconds. Stream information in real-time, mix it with recorded media and boilerplate, and tailor it to who's on hand, the time of day, and even local weather conditions. It's advertising that's more intelligent and intent on pleasing the individual, not a wide swath of “consumers.” The flexibility enables you to fashion multimedia presentations for specific demographics. Studies of customer buying habits find that most buying decisions are made at the point of sale. Don't squander the opportunity with a paper sign, not when you can drive impulse buys with compelling, dazzling digital signage.
3. Scale the message to match the venue and your imagination. Whether you're indoors or out, in bustling nightspots, in a strip mall suite, or staid government corridors, you'll find a digital signage solution that suits your space, clientele, and the image you want to project. Large, established corporations can use interactive kiosks to connect with customers on a more personal level. Small, growing firms can use large screens to cast themselves as major players—even on a limited budget. Plasma and LCDs are coming down in price, and new turnkey solutions make it easy to deploy professional-looking signage no matter the scale: on small monitors in small foyers, on video walls in wide airport concourses, or on bright LED billboards that illuminate in the night.
4. Grab attention to broadcast and narrowcast information. Digital signage isn't just a sales and merchandising tool. It's a communications tool that can be adapted for endless uses outside of commerce. Use it for internal corporate messaging to boost morale and to recognize achievements. And in the manufacturing setting, where loud machinery drowns out a voice over a PA system, you can use large screens above an assembly line to communicate with workers more effectively. School campuses, large medical centers, and government installations use dynamic signage for emergency broadcasting systems, posting cafeteria menus, and digitally extending the classroom environment to reach more students. Digital signage can also keep people entertained and informed of the schedules, weather, and news wherever they're forced to wait. And it can keep them moving, connected with the services they need with wayfinding visitor centers and kiosks in town centers. What's really nice is you can quickly cater to any audience at any hour with dayparting scheduling and other custom content delivery tools.
5. Enhance your ROI by selling advertising space. Generate additional income by letting others advertise through your digital signage system. Mix content paid for by others in with your own. This can be done directly with local merchants or, if your signage sits in a highly coveted space in front of the right people, you can lease space to national, high-profile companies by going through third-party companies or media buyers who are contracted to buy space on behalf of these companies. Partner with reputable, established advertisers to lend credibility to your brand. If the location is right, you can build the digital signage system, then sit back and let others run it, selling advertising, managing the delivery of content, and maintaining components and connections, all for just a slice of the advertising revenue pie. Or don't sell advertising, but offer digital space to local charitable or nonprofit organizations as a public service and a best practice for better public relations.
