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3 tips for successful indoor digital signage

It is one thing to understand the nuts and bolts of digital signage, such as the individual displays, media players and software packages, but it is another to understand how to make it work well with your business. When you deploy digital signage indoors, you have to consider a lot of factors such as space, branding and messaging.

April 16, 2019 by Bradley Cooper — Editor, ATM Marketplace & Food Truck Operator

This is part one of a series examining successful digital signage in various environments

Almost everyone wants to stay on top of digital trends in business, such as digital signage. It is one thing to understand the nuts and bolts of digital signage, such as the individual displays, media players and software packages, but it is another to understand how to make it work well with your business. When you deploy digital signage indoors, you have to consider a lot of factors such as space, branding and messaging.

If you want to be successful with indoor digital signage, you need to have key strategies in place for all three factors.

Maximizing space

Retailers know space is a precious resource. If they use it well, they can maximize profits. With digital signage, retailers and other businesses need to have a clear plan in place on where to deploy it, and to do that, they will need to answer several questions such as:

Where do customers walk?
Will customers see the display?
Will the display be distracting in any part of the store?

Retailers should also consider using IoT tools, such as sensors, to maximize digital signage space. Sensors can detect customer movement and help retailers get a firm grasp on how customers move throughout the store. Retailers can then use this data to target customers more efficiently with digital signage messages.

Branding

Digital signage should integrate with your brand and help boost its image. You shouldn't just throw up a display with basic content and hope for the best. For example, one mall I visited just deployed a display near the bathrooms with poor content and a copy of a physical banner that was placed literally a few feet away.

Instead, you should look at examples such as Nordiska, a luxury retailer in Stockholm, which worked with Visual Arts to deploy digital signage. The retailer used displays that came with bands made of tanned leather that hung from the walls. This helped create the illusion of the display hanging from the wall, which fit the retailer's sober brand image.

When making digital signage work well with your brand, you should answer a few questions:

How would you describe your brand?
What should your display look like to fit with the brand?
What should the content look like?
How will you use a display to push your brand?

Messaging

Finally, we come to the most important aspect of digital signage: content. Many users often get lost in the sea of hardware and software choices, so they forget the importance of good content development.

Good content starts with a few simple questions such as:

Who is my target audience?
What messages resonate with my audience?
How will I develop content?
Who will handle the content?

The best content connects with audiences and prods them to action, if it is actively updated and managed. Poor content management can make any display a useless piece of hardware.

By combining good messaging and branding with the right location, you can make your indoor digital signage a roaring success.

Stay tuned for part two where we will discuss tips for outdoor digital signage.

Image via Istock.com.

About Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper is the editor of ATM Marketplace and Food Truck Operator. He was previously the editor of Digital Signage Today. His background is in information technology, advertising, and writing.

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