Personalised messaging and targeted advertising are different sides of the same coin. They help businesses advertise and communicate with customers more effectively. Data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and other reputable entities show that customers prefer a more personalised experience.
Personalised messaging involves communication that considers the recipient’s preferences, interests, behaviours, or characteristics. For example, using a customer’s name and displaying content based on their previous purchases fall under this category.
Conversely, targeted advertising delivers marketing and promotional content to a targeted group based on specific demographic, psychographic, behavioural, or contextual factors.
For example, a restaurant may target vegans as part of a menu and brand awareness campaign or revamp.
While personalised messaging and targeted advertising are easier in the digital space, brick-and-mortar stores can use digital signage to achieve the same result.
In this article, we explore different ways businesses of all kinds and sizes can use digital signage to display targeted ads and personalised messaging.
How digital signage can be used for targeted advertising and personalised messaging
Here are some examples of how you can infuse your digital signage with targeted advertising and personalised messaging.
Leverage demographic and psychographic data
Leveraging demographic and psychographic data is one of the most straightforward ways to incorporate personalised messaging and targeting with digital signs.
Age, family size, and marital status are examples of demographic data. Values, interests, lifestyles, and habits are examples of psychographic data.
Naturally, certain stores or businesses already self-filter customers based on the nature of their products and services.
A children’s clothing store will mainly attract parents, so it’ll be wiser to target this group as opposed to aunties and uncles looking to get their nieces and nephews gifts, even though the latter is also a viable target audience.
However, for certain stores with diverse products, this isn’t always straightforward and will often require high-end analytics systems to track and implement demographic-specific targeting.
Such sophisticated systems, usually interactive kiosks or displays, can use a customer’s age and gender to show product catalogues and promotions tailored to them.
That said, even without sophisticated systems, digital signage content can still be effectively utilised based on the sections you have or specific demographic groups that visit your establishment.
For example, signage in a paediatric waiting area can display ads for children’s entertainment or educational content for parents.
In the lobby of a unit catering to seniors, the signage may feature ads for senior wellness programs or healthcare services tailored to older adults.
Use location-based targeting
Location-based targeting involves using GPS or beacon technology to display relevant ads based on the location of the screen. Digital signage displays inside aeroplanes can automatically switch content based on the plane’s location.
This is helpful because it provides contextually relevant information about local airport transfer, baggage collection, and other essential details about how to open a new bank account in the host country or access the internet.
Or consider a city’s tourism board using location-based digital signage campaigns to provide wayfinding and relevant information about local events and attractions.
Location-based targeting is not also limited to geographic placing. Events like concerts, conferences, and sports games can use digital signage for location-based targeting to enhance attendee engagement.
For instance, if a participant is near the food court area, the signage can display ads for food and beverage vendors, highlighting special offers or nearby menu items.
Likewise, attendees exiting the event can be asked to scan a QR code to provide feedback about the event.
Explore time-based targeting
Time-based targeting in digital signage refers to strategically scheduling relevant content to align with specific times of the day, days of the week, or recurring events.
Time and day can determine customer behaviour. Explore using time to optimise your content and messaging.
For example, people are much more in a hurry in the morning because they’re headed to work, school, or other meaningful engagements. Showing content asking them to fill out a survey or register for an event may not be the most prudent option.
However, promotions for quick breakfast options or mobile ordering apps that allow users to grab a coffee or breakfast sandwich on their way to work will more likely align with their morning behaviour.
Weekends, on the other hand, offer consumers the opportunities to unwind through leisure, recreation, and social gatherings. From Friday, share weekend special promotions and highlight events or activities for families, couples, or groups of friends.
Luna Screens’ advanced scheduling makes dayparting possible. You can schedule content to display at specific times of the day and set rules for how often they’re repeated.
Utilise weather-based targeting
Weather can also play an essential role in shaping customer behaviour, including shaping their purchasing decisions and preferences. Digital signage advertising campaigns can factor in temporal weather changes and seasonal changes, like spring and winter.
For example, during the winter months or in the build-up to this season, you can highlight the warmth and functionality of your product(s) to appeal to customers seeking comfort and protection against the cold.
During extremely sunny days, a skincare store can highlight the range of sunscreen products it stocks. You can also adopt a theme based on the season for all the content you produce for the displays in your digital signage network.
Integrate with a loyalty program
You can incorporate data and features from loyalty programs to deliver personalised content and customer offers. A customer’s loyalty status and preferences can be used to enhance personalisation and increase their engagement with loyalty programs, ultimately improving customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Per this Harvard Business Review article, “As the loyalty life cycle plays out, loyal customers even become business builders: buying more, paying premium prices, and bringing in new customers through referrals.”
You can publish digital signage content encouraging customers to redeem their loyalty points for discounts, freebies, or special perks.
Customers can also scan specified QR codes in-store to join your loyalty program and begin to receive exclusive deals.
Incorporate social media
Tools such as social media walls and live feeds can encourage customer participation and audience engagement. Integrating social media enhances the interactivity and relevance of digital signage content by banking on the popularity and influence of social media platforms.
You can generate authentic user-generated content to serve as social proof and testimonials for your business.
You can then display user-generated content on digital displays even while the customer is in the store.
Customers who participate in social media-related activities can earn rewards in addition to the personal satisfaction they get from seeing their faces on digital displays.
Businesses with the means can also use a customer’s social media activity, such as Facebook likes, to deliver personalised content and messaging while the customer shops.
Install interactive digital displays
Another way to deliver targeted advertising is through interactive digital displays that allow users to participate and provide input actively. You can then use such inputs to provide bespoke recommendations or promotions.
One of the additional benefits of using interactive displays is that they’re a fantastic way to gather data on customer preferences and behaviours. This data can then be used to craft future digital signage marketing and content strategies.
For example, McDonald’s launched the “Create Your Taste” burger kiosk, which featured interactive elements. Customers could design their own burgers, no matter how ridiculous or big they were.
While McDonald’s can gain valuable insights into customer burger preferences to craft new menus and inform supply chain choices, the company can also funnel personalised ads to each customer based on their burger design choices.
For instance, a giant burger likely requires more drinks. The system can offer customers a custom deal to upgrade their drink options.
Make on-the-fly changes
Sometimes, targeted advertising requires on-the-spur messaging. Opportunities can come from trending topics on social media, breaking news, weather alerts, new government policies, etc. Leveraging these sources as inspiration to reach customers keeps content fresh, engaging, and contextually relevant.
For example, there was an eclipse on April 8, 2024. Retailers or stores could have used such a trending topic to generate sales for products like solar eclipse glasses, stressing their benefits in reducing the light to safe levels.
Moreover, dates for eclipses are known in advance, and stores that stock glasses can create promotional, informational, and educational content on the subject building up to that date.
Businesses can also use what’s happening around them for personalised advertising.
For example, say your store is close to an events centre, and you get a load of traffic when there’s an event. You can tailor content to target the primary audience of such events, assuming they change, say, parents, technology enthusiasts, college educators, etc.
Best practices for creating effective targeted advertising and personalised messaging with digital signage
Implementing digital signage advertising tailored to your customers requires following some best practices. We’ve outlined these best practices below:
Personalisation must be based on data
Data is the fundamental component of effective targeted advertising and personalised messaging. You can only produce tailored content when you understand the characteristics, behaviours, and preferences of the different segments within your customer base.
We recommend anchoring your personalisation efforts on first-party data that you generated because they’re the most accurate.
First-party data sources include sales data, demographic and psychographic data extracted from surveys, customer feedback, interaction and engagement with loyalty programs, and social media data.
You can then augment primary data with data from other sources, like government data on local demography, to gain more context. Based on your data, you can segment your customers into different buckets, such as environmentally conscious, young adults, married boomers, etc.
Utilise technology
Technologies like QR codes, beacon technology, advanced digital signage software, interactive kiosks and displays, and other advanced tools can help deliver personalised messaging based on different factors and contexts.
We’ve already highlighted how tourism boards can use location-based digital signage campaigns to provide tourists and travellers with relevant information about local events and attractions.
QR code is especially important for small businesses that may not have the funds to invest in some of the advanced tools we listed above.
You can generate personalised QR codes that deliver different content and offers based on the customer’s location, time, and date.
Additionally, digital signage software like Luna Screens, with an expansive set of features like advanced scheduling, makes targeted advertising more seamless.
Design visually appealing and engaging content
By designing visually appealing and engaging content, you can capture your customers’ attention and communicate your message more effectively.
Some of the points to keep in mind while designing for digital signage include:
Use eye-catching and high-quality graphics, images, and animations.
Ensure all content elements are relevant to the message and consistent with your brand identity.
Choose legible fonts and styles that are easy to read from a distance.
Establish a visual hierarchy and highlight essential messages with font sizes, colours, and contrast.
Organise content in a clear and intuitive layout that guides viewers’ attention.
Add strong and persuasive call-to-action
Incorporate interactive elements like QR codes.
Need help with content ideas? Browse high-quality digital signage templates on Luna Screens. More importantly, you can edit them to suit your business’s needs and brand style.
Integrate real-time data
When applicable, display dynamic content feeds to deliver live updates, real-time data, or user-generated content.
Weather updates, social media feeds, or traffic information are examples of real-time data you can incorporate into your digital signage content to provide timely information to your customers.
Test, measure, and optimise digital content
Whether for a whole campaign or an isolated instance, it’s essential to assess the effectiveness of digital signage content.
For bigger campaigns, it’s imperative to set and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to help identify whether you’re meeting your objectives. The data insights from measuring the impact of the content or campaign can be funnelled into refining your strategies.
Some of the key metrics you can measure include:
Dwell time
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
A/B testing is a popular way to optimise content. You can roll out two visuals with the same end goal to track which performs better, experimenting with features like colours, call-to-action buttons, layouts, and font.
Lastly, content creation should be an iterative process. Continuously refine content based on data insights and customer feedback to achieve greater impact.
You may also like: 9 Ways Digital Signage Analytics Can Reveal Key Insights into Customer Behaviour.
Prioritise compliance and user data privacy
We’ve talked about the importance of data to the personalisation and targeting process. Some of this data may include personally identifiable information and personal details.
Implementing safety measures to protect customer data and ensure transparency in data collection processes is essential.
Furthermore, different countries have separate laws that drive data privacy regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA, so it’s equally essential to ensure you comply with these laws.
Ensure that you obtain customer consent for data collection and use and provide options for them to control how much data you collect and how you can use it.
Importance of targeted advertising and personalised messaging
Targeted advertising and personalised messaging enable commerce. Businesses around the globe spend billions yearly to ensure they funnel relevant ads and messaging to the right target audience.
Here are the critical reasons targeted ads continue to grow and evolve:
Enhanced relevance
Imagine playing videos promoting animal proteins on a digital sign in a vegan section. The promotional content should relate more to the group that usually shops in that section.
You’ll only showcase products that align more closely with what individual consumers will likely find relevant or appealing by matching products and services to consumer preferences.
Enhanced relevance increases the chance that the customer will engage with your content and likely make a purchase later.
In research carried out in Europe, the conversion rate for customers who were shown personalised content was 5.3 times higher than that for those who were shown random ad content.
Additionally, constantly showing relevant ads reduces ad fatigue. Ad fatigue is a situation where customers stop paying attention to your ads because they know the content never applies to them.
You can maintain your customers’ attention and engagement over time by minimising ad fatigue.
Marketing budget and cost efficiency
Another benefit of targeted messaging is cost efficiency. Instead of a “spray and pray” strategy that may not convert or engage customers, it allows you to focus resources and efforts on reaching only specific audience segments or groups more likely to convert.
With targeted advertising, you’ll target streamlined, niche, and relevant audiences that’ll likely yield higher returns on investment (ROI).
In essence, in terms of cost efficiency, tailoring your marketing to customer needs and preferences will:
Improve ROI on marketing spend
Minimise ad spend wastage
Help optimise marketing budgets for effectiveness
Improved customer experiences
Imagine providing the exact information a customer needs at a critical point in their buying journey. Of course, this would make their experience with your brand or business more enjoyable.
Personalisation and targeting show the customer that you understand and value them. Generally, receiving valuable and meaningful content is more pleasing.
About 71% of customers demand personalisation in their interactions with you, and 76% become frustrated when businesses fail.
Remember that cold email you received and replied to because it was personalised (added your name, business, and personal angle), and the solution proposed was exactly what your business needed.
But for that one good cold email, you’ve probably endured numerous poor attempts that you immediately deleted and blocked the sending address. The poor, cold emails probably left you irritated, too.
The same applies to your business: customers are more likely to interact with and respond to targeted messages or promotional content tailored to their interests, preferences, and needs, leading to higher engagement levels.
Strengthened customer relationships
Addressing customers on a personal level can establish a personal connection with them. Using customers' names and referencing their past interactions with your business can make customers feel valued and understood.
Targeted recommendations, promotions, or informational content can also enhance customer loyalty when you consistently meet and exceed the customer's expectations regarding personalisation.
Furthermore, when you meet customer expectations on personalisation, they develop a strong affinity for your business and brand and effectively champion your brand to others.
Facilitates the customer journey
As customers move through the sales funnel, they’ll typically need a nudge at different junctures. Personalised messaging guides recipients through the customer journey, providing relevant information and assistance when needed.
You can remove friction, help customers make decisions, and encourage them to upgrade their purchases, increasing conversion and leading to more sales.
For example, reminding your customers that all your clothes are made in your home country or that all ingredients are sourced locally may be the deciding factor in a customer choosing you over your competitors.
Takeaway: Revolutionise your marketing with personalised messaging and targeted ads on digital signage
Today, personalised messaging and targeted advertising are more crucial than ever. Customers crave and demand it!
Leveraging digital signage, you can engage your customers with tailored content based on demographic, psychographic, and contextual factors.
The possibilities are endless, from location-based targeting to integrating social media. This approach enhances relevance and improves ROI, fosters stronger customer relationships, and guides customers through the purchasing journey.
With the right strategies in place, you can maximise the potential of digital signage to drive engagement, encourage repeat purchases, and boost sales, ultimately increasing the long-term value of each customer relationship.
Improving your marketing with personalised messaging and targeted ads on digital signage starts with choosing reliable digital signage software like Luna Screens. It is a cloud-based solution that turns any digital screen into captivating digital signs. Get Started with Luna Screens today!