Digital signage offers many amazing benefits, including inducing impulse purchases, flexibility, enhanced engagement, increased brand recall, more sales, long-term marketing cost savings, and more.
However, many businesses fail to maximize their return on investment (ROI) or only reap a fraction of these benefits for different reasons.
Some of these reasons include engaging inferior vendors, failing to create compelling content, not being nimble enough to change, poor attention to detail, and more.
So, how do you maximize ROI with self-managed digital signage?
In this article, we expound on these strategies and share how to extract the most returns from turning your screens into digital signage.
How to maximize ROI with self-managed digital signage
The strategies to improve business outcomes and maximize digital signage ROI include:
Identify what your goal is
We believe that the foundation of profiting from self-managed digital signage is creating a strategic objective for installing one. What do you seek to achieve from these screens? The purpose is to create a baseline to gauge if you’re successful or not.
It’s as simple as saying: “We’ve observed a lot of stalled traffic at X point of the gym and want to install some screens there to create awareness about our ongoing promotions.”
It’s easy to measure whether they increase or not if the goal is to increase signups for your promotions. As the saying goes, “When purpose is unknown, abuse is inevitable.”
Define your audience
Defining who your average customer is is an essential part of extracting the most returns from digital signage. You can use this information to create and personalize your content and messaging for different customer groups.
What works for company A may not work for your company or company B.
For example, you may need to produce different content for different parts of the day. Your audience in the morning may consist of office workers, while your evening customers may consist more of students and residents. You can’t market beer to underage students, can you?
Identifying your audience may also help you choose what to promote to boost sales. You can advertise sandwiches or coffee in the morning but market dessert in the evening.
You can create buyer personas to define your audience.
Use an excellent and feature-rich self-managed digital signage system
Another strategy to ensure maximum returns on your self-managed digital signage is to use a cloud-based digital signage system that’s seamless to integrate and quick to start up.
As a business owner, adding a time-consuming system to your burdens is not prudent. That’s why it’s essential to choose a system that has the following characteristics:
Minimizes startup cost by turning already-available screens into digital signages
Easy to use
Guarantees 99.99999% uptime
Promotes flexibility and you can control it from anywhere
Affordable enough for small businesses
No technical coding skill required
Templates for quick digital signage deployment
Supports multiple media players
Your digital signage experience will be smooth and yield amazing rewards for your business if you have a system that ticks all these boxes.
Luna Screens is an ideal software for your digital signage needs. It’s affordable, easy to use, requires no technical skills, and you can be up and running with the screens you already have.
Develop a content strategy
After identifying the purpose(s) you want to pursue and defining your audience personas, it’s time to develop a content strategy. You can begin with creating a plan for a month, and when you find what works, you can make a more long-term content strategy.
One of the benefits of developing a content strategy is you can create the content ahead of time and schedule it. This frees you up to focus and concentrate on other aspects of your business.
Some companies outsource this task, but if you have a little time, you can convert the templates provided by your digital signage system into excellent media assets.
Digital signage systems like Luna Screens come with visually appealing templates that you can easily repurpose for your unique needs.
Moreover, as necessary, you can create content to inform customers as the news unfolds. You can create a template you can always repurpose for dynamic content like news updates.
That’s why it’s vital to think through your digital signage system upfront before implementation.
Assign responsibility to a staff member or team
From our experience, having a dedicated team or staff responsible for the digital signage helps in multiple folds. They can help consistently create compelling content to refresh your customers’ experience.
Aside from digital signage content creation, they can decide what to show on different screens depending on the screen location and business needs.
You don’t have to show the same content on all your digital displays. This makes for a more flexible approach that maximizes digital signage ROI.
Also, they can swiftly deal with technical or non-technical issues affecting the signages. This minimizes downtime and ensures your installed digital displays run when they should.
Location, location, location
The location of each digital display matters. For some use cases, the location is self-fulfilling.
Quick-service restaurants that want digital menu boards will surely place one where customers queue to order their food. However, you must put more thought into it for other use cases.
For example, the screen at the reception is more apt for displaying news like upcoming closure dates and promotions, while displays showing your history and services are best for a waiting room.
For internal-facing screens, places like the canteen and break rooms are great options for engaging employees.
In deciding where to place a signage, consider the following:
The purpose of the digital screen
High-traffic area
Areas with high wait times or queues
How close the users will be to the screen. Very important!
The average time your audience spends in front of the screen. This will also determine the type of content you create.
Always include a call to action (CTA)
This is where you should emphasize the purpose of your content. Even if it’s just news, always encourage customers to act, like getting more information from the reception desk. Don’t just add a QR code without asking customers to scan the QR code.
Make your call to action very obvious from afar. Keep the text simple and straight to the point, and make sure the font and color of the CTA are easily distinguishable from the other elements on the screen.
Add some urgency or sweetener, depending on your goals. Get them to act now rather than later.
Like adding a digital clock and “only 12 more hours to claim a 20% discount” text to spur urgency. Make sure you include trigger words like win, save, discount, today, etc.
Another thing to note is to keep your call to action tailored to the time of the day and your audience. For example, asking workers heading to the office to fill out a survey in the morning won’t fly, and you’ll record poor results.
But asking customers who walk into your clothing store to scan the QR code to view your latest collection sounds more appropriate for the occasion.
Add QR codes for more action
Adding a QR code to your digital signs is a cheat code. Use QR codes to bridge the divide between your digital and physical spaces. It has many practical use cases across multiple industries.
QR codes can serve as product brochures in a retail store or to display restaurant menu items on a mobile device. You can use QR for signups or to send customers to a page on your website.
In addition to the benefits above, you can easily track performance with QR codes, making it easy to see which content version performs better.
Use high-resolution screens
Blurry images defeat the purpose of digital signs. This is especially important for signage in areas where people usually do not wait or pause.
High-resolution screens make your effort count. After spending hours ideating and creating content, it’ll be a waste of time if it fails to achieve its purpose.
High-resolution screens make the colors pop and catch people’s attention much quicker. It also makes the content clearer and more legible.
The screen quality we think you should use is LED and upwards.
Don’t be afraid to be radical and post attention-grabbing content
Don’t be afraid to play with themes based on your audience, especially if you’re a small business creatively unrestricted. However, it should always cater to your business.
Are your customers the Wall Street type? Play around with themes inspired by the Wolf of Wall Street movie.
In also trying to be clever or creative, do not lose sight of the purpose of the content. You want to grab attention, but you also want to pass a message. Strike a good balance between functionality, aesthetics, engagement, and interaction.
Use a lot of (white) space and use a lot of high-contrasting colors. Don’t muddle up much information into your content. You can always create different slides.
While you may want to repurpose social media posts, note that this may not always work. Digital signage is different from TV, social, print, or web.
Do A/B testing and regular testing
We recommend testing your content first before publishing and after publishing. For the former, it’s as easy as showing a few people and asking their opinion. You can ask your staff and customers to gain perspective from both sides.
Testing after publishing requires split testing. The idea is simple: it means publishing the two content versions to compare which one resonates better with your audience.
One of the tips for split or A/B testing is running the process one week at a time. As a business, you likely have peak days.
Maybe you run happy hours on Wednesday. Testing one content on that Wednesday and another version on Thursday (a regular day) is not exactly fair. As such, you don’t want certain days to skew the result of your test.
Takeaway: Squeeze every penny out of your digital signage investment by utilizing effective strategies
Devoting some of your scarce business resources to digital signages has the potential for incredible ROI, but only if you employ the strategies we shared above.
Maximizing ROI with self-managed digital signage starts with finding a purpose for using digital signage and defining your audience personas before tying the two together with a unique content strategy.
Other essential strategies include assigning responsibility, testing different content versions, placing your digital screens at optimal locations, and more.
With these strategies, you’ll enjoy maximum ROI on digital signage investments.
Are you searching for the best software or system to deploy digital signage at your store or business? Look no further than Luna Screens, designed for all business types and sizes with its intuitive and easy-to-use interface and amazing features. Get started for free today!