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Digital signage is a proven way to boost engagement and customer recall, which ultimately leads to sales. More businesses are installing digital displays than ever before. Here are some encouraging statistics:

• 47% of consumers remember seeing a specific ad or message. Recall increases to 55% with outdoor digital billboards.
• 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.

How does developing an effective digital content strategy result in increased sales? Increase sales by:

• Capturing the attention of potential customers, with messages that catch your target audience’s attention
• Building brand awareness and creating an emotional connection with potential customers
• Informing and educating potential customers about your products or services (or dispelling misconceptions).
• Driving more traffic to your website, online store, and/or physical store
• Increasing average order values for each sale by including discounts and special offers that motivate customers to purchase additional items
• Generating repeat business and building brand loyalty by including product reviews and customer testimonials

Digital signage is an effective marketing tool, so it’s important to utilize your digital signage so that it works for your business. In this article, we discuss the creative process for generating compelling content and ways to create captivating content for digital screens that capture consumers’ attention and drive sales.

Developing a content strategy    

Digital signage strategies are different for every brand and location. Just putting up an initial motion display ad on your digital sign works for awhile to advertise your brand, but you must ensure the design is appealing. Additionally, digital signage messages should be updated regularly in order to keep passers-by engaged and looking for your next message. Developing an effective digital content strategy depends on a few of the following factors:

Who is your target audience?

With so much competition for consumers’ attention, your content needs to speak to your target audiences’ interests and grab their interest instantly.

What message do you want to communicate?

The message you want to convey to your customers might involve displaying products along with catchy phrases that entice consumers to engage further with your company. It could also involve educating customers about your service or products, or piquing customers’ curiosity, so they perform a call-to-action, such as taking advantage of sales offers.

What is the best way to deliver your message?

Digital signage content strategies should inform, educate, and/or entertain, depending on the industry.

Strategies by Industry

Retail

In retail environments, insightful content strategies can:

• Draw attention to information about your brand
• Promote sales and special events
• Introduce customers to new products
• Display videos that focus on your brand’s core values
• Offer discounts on products
• Display your interactive product catalog
• Show videos of models wearing your apparel
• Show customer testimonials
• Show videos of customers using your products
• Create contests and quizzes to entertain customers

Restaurants & Hospitality

The restaurants and hospitality industry can benefit from digital content strategies by:

• Displaying brightly lit menus and specials that can be updated daily
• Promoting special menus
• Offering daily or weekly specials at discounted prices
• Using interactive maps to direct resort guests to their rooms and other areas of interest

Healthcare

In healthcare settings, digital content strategies can include:

• Displaying information about services and procedures that provide education and insights to patients and caregivers waiting in healthcare facilities
• Spotlighting dentists, doctors, and staff 
• Presenting contests and quizzes about healthcare issues
• Running news feeds and weather reports
• Running short patient testimonial videos
• Showing videos of outreach work your practice performs at home or in other countries

Corporate

In the corporate world, internal communications using content strategies for digital signage can:

• Keep employees in the loop about upcoming events and emergency procedures
• Inspire and motivate staff to perform at higher levels
• Increase employee retention as employees say they would stay longer at a company that listens to and addresses their concerns

Education

Educational facilities using creative content strategies for digital signage stand to improve student performance and outcomes as well as:

• Direct students to their classrooms with colorful and fun graphics and videos
• Welcome students and parents to schools with messages that promote school spirit and community
• Build confidence and motivate students with shout-outs for student accomplishments and milestones achieved
• Provide spaces for pertinent emergency messages and pre-approved action to deal with various situations

A few tips to keep in mind when creating successful content

Keep it simple— less is more with digital signage. With only seconds to get your point across with digital billboards, pylon signs, monument signs and other digital signage in high traffic areas, you should use:

• Straightforward, concise, and to-the-point messages with short sentences and bulleted lists
• High-quality, images and videos that will make your digital displays pop 
• Brand-coordinating fonts, contrasting color combinations, interesting compositions, and clear calls-to-action
• Use interactivity sparingly in the way of quizzes, games, and polls
• QR codes to launch interactive catalogs and links to your web store or website

Tracking your data

Use your digital signage data as a valuable tool for developing hyper-targeted content that resonates with your audience. By tracking dwell times and interaction rates you can understand your target audience and their interests, developing content that resonates with them.

Testing your data

Testing your content before launching a huge rollout helps you to understand what works and what improvements need to be made to your content before widespread content reaches the majority of your potential customers. 

Now, with all these tips in hand, just how do you create outstanding, effective content?

Generating creative content

Developing a creative content strategy for your digital signage is one thing, but generating creative content presents a unique challenge. Most larger companies generate creative content through their art or marketing departments. However, smaller companies who may not have a budget for advertising still have many options for creating content for their digital signage. AI Screen offers a multi-pronged content creation platform with versatile tools and templates that can help you create professional signage with a myriad of fonts, backgrounds, and video capabilities to create effective content with. Some of these tools include:

• Canvas App— the ultimate image creation and editing tool for digital signage content creators
• Digital Memory Boards—the solution to washed-out printed menus at your restaurant or cafe; Visually stunning, dynamic menus allow you to easily manage and update your items, showcase specials, and encourage customers try more items
• Quotes—adds personality and charm to your digital signage with inspirational quotes, quirky facts, and social media updates
• Google Slides— awesome integration offers a user-friendly design experience that lets you create stunning visual presentations, with or without design skills
• Content management tools that allow you to program your digital content

At YESCO, our Creative Services team of experienced designers make managing your sign easy. From creating compelling content to programming your display for you, all at an affordable cost. Contact Creative Services at 1-801-413-1130, to find out more!

There are three primary ways to use your retail signage to grow your business and increase revenue: 1) attracting customers and foot traffic with eye-catching designs or digital content, 2) guiding customers throughout your store to help them find products easily, and 3) sharing promotional content to inform and encourage customers to make a purchase.

Retailers should treat each as an opportunity to enhance branding opportunities that strengthen customer trust and boost the lifetime value of your relationship. According to a study by the Small Business Administration (SBA), effective signs can increase business by as much as 150%.

Customers pick up important visual cues about your business during brief interactions as they pass your signage on a highway, along a street, or in a mall concourse. The competition for their attention can be intense. Inside your store, they’re making judgements about whether or how much of their money to spend at your establishment. Appealing, well-planned, and strategically deployed signs can encourage them to make purchases.

Digital or Static Signage: Which Type is Right for Your Business?

You’ll have to determine whether static or digital signage align best with your budget and revenue goals. Both have advantages and disadvantages. While digital signs are becoming more affordable and prevalent, traditional static indoor and outdoor signage still delivers consistent, cost-effective, and low-maintenance advertising results.

Static signs are favored for their ability to be placed practically anywhere and be any size or shape. Your static sign can be customized to conform to your branding and fabricated with eco-friendly materials that are durable and can withstand the weather and change of seasons and handling. You can even extend the lifetime of your sign, keep messaging relevant, and reduce print costs by incorporating QR codes into your sign’s design to bridge the gap between print and digital content that you can share with your audience.

Digital signage allows you to keep your messaging dynamic and fresh, offering versatility in the ways you connect to your customers, and in the case of digital touchscreens, they connect with you. You can engage your audience more fully by incorporating streaming media, animation, and brilliant visuals. After an initial investment, digital signs can be more cost effective than static signs and have been shown to increase revenue. According to Digital Signage Today, digital signage bumps up the average purchase amount by 29.5%

Your choices don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and a well-coordinated advertising and promotion campaign can use both static and digital signage to increase sales. Remember, however, that regardless of the type of sign you deploy, it must look good. According to a Shopify survey, 34% of shoppers associate sign quality with store and product quality, and 29% of shoppers make choices based on information communicated by store signs. 

Outdoor Signs That Drive Revenue

You can place your outdoor signage on practically any exterior surface, from sidewalks to the side of a building. You don’t have a lot of time to get your customer’s attention, so your messaging must be clean, crisp, and easy to read. Your goal is to create a compelling sign that piques their interest enough to get them to walk into your store.

Your outdoor sign may be your very first chance to introduce yourself to your customers, or, with strategic deployment, become a fixture on their daily commute or when shopping. Above all else, you want your brand and the information you share to be remembered when your customer needs what you offer.

Here a few types of outdoor signage that have proven effective for increasing awareness and sales.

Architectural Signage – Your customers should have no trouble remembering or finding you when your outdoor signage takes up the entire side of your building or rooftop or is placed strategically on your property along a busy thoroughfare. In a study of auto dealerships, 68% of respondents confirmed the sign was important in locating the dealer.

Outdoor Neon Signage – Light up the night with a captivating, customizable neon sign that captures attention, creates memorable branding experiences for your customers, and makes your business stand out. Neon signage has seemingly been around forever, and there’s a reason. Your neon sign be any size, shape and combination of brilliant colors. According to Custom Neon, 85% of consumers indicated that they found themselves drawn to bright and colorful signage.

Digital Message Centers – Blending the beauty and elegance of monument signage with digital content flexibility, your digital message center helps your business stand out with consistent branding and dynamic advertising opportunities to get customers to stop and learn more. According to Digital Signage Today, 76% of American consumers enter stores they have never visited simply because of the signage and that 59% of those who see digital signage content want to learn more about the product or topic.

Billboards – You have a wide degree of flexibility when deciding where and how to use billboard advertising to increase sales. Location is a primary factor, and understanding where, when, and how often your customer will pass your sign will make all the difference in your billboard’s effectiveness. A US National In-Car study found that 72% of billboard viewers frequently or sometimes shop on their way home, and 24% say they were encouraged to visit a particular store that day by a billboard along their journey.

Indoor Signs that Boost Sales

Use your indoor signage to transition your outdoor sign messaging from being about you to focusing your attention on your customer instead. Your signs should meet their expectations and create an experience they’ll want to repeat again and again.

Now that you have their attention, you can drive sales with attractive, attention-grabbing signs to promote products and services and drive impulse buying. Indoor signage can be especially effective as a component of point of purchase strategies, with displays that target and are tailored to the needs of your customers with attractive, educational, or entertaining information. An in-store shopper engagement study that interviewed 3,000 mass merchant shoppers revealed that 82% of purchasing decisions are made while in a store, 62% of shoppers make an impulse buy while shopping, and 16% of unplanned purchases are driven by in-store promotions.

Here are a few types of indoor signage that have proven effective in increasing awareness and sales.

Interior Video Walls – Create visually engaging experiences with video walls for your customers with bold statements and vivid advertising that turn your promotions into larger than life, iconic brand displays. You can mix dynamic up-to-date content and easily keep your information fresh, relevant, and personalized to your customers’ shopping experience. Research by the Economic Center, University of Cincinnati found that roughly 60% of businesses reported that changing the design or enhancing the visibility of their signage had a positive impact on sales, number of transactions and profits, with an average increase of about 10%.

Indoor LED Screens – High-resolution LED screens and displays can breathe life into your retail promotions with signage that is distinctive and captures the attention of your customers. Your LED screens can be customized to transform your retail space into a theatre of promotions and increase the amount of money customers spend when in your store. According to a survey by QRIUS, digital signage has been shown to increase average purchases by up to 29.5%.

Digital Menu Boards – You can vastly improve your customers’ experiences and see increases in sales revenue with digital menu boards that make it easy, efficient, and convenient for them to place orders without waiting for a server. According to a report from AI Screen, digital menu boards can boost sales by up to 38%.

Floor and Wall Graphics – Surround your customers with large interior floor, focal wall, and ceiling graphics that offer fun and new ways to direct and engage them. Captivating visual designs can transform your space into a more immersive environment and can be used for wayfinding, to present important information, and propel your customer to a purchase.

Regardless of the where you use your signage, it should be the perfect source of information that your customer needs at that moment in their buying journey. Importantly, it should be part of a coordinated branding effort.  Your indoor signs must maintain consistency in look and language with your outdoor signage while also capitalizing on opportunities for personalized connections and sales once your outdoor sign has driven your customers through your door. You can trust YESCO to help you determine the perfect signage solution to draw shoppers into your store and boost sales. Give us a call today.

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YESCO recently completed a retrofit of Thanksgiving Point’s freeway display in Lehi, Utah. More than 75 feet tall and 46 feet wide, Thanksgiving Point’s freeway display has been updated with a new 19-foot-by-39-foot wide-screen, high-definition, 19-millimeter WatchFire XVS electronic message center. This technology was installed to increase the graphic capability of the EMC content. In addition, the signage also includes internally illuminated pan channel letters and logo cabinets with Thanksgiving Point’s brand colors as well as aluminum channels with white LED cove lighting. This update provides the sign with a much more vibrant look.

“We are elated to help Thanksgiving Point reach their desired target audience through this eye-catching display so they can continue to achieve their mission,” said Jeff Krantz, senior account executive, YESCO.

ABOUT THANKSGIVING POINT
Thanksgiving Point is a community-owned nonprofit with the mission to bring the joy of learning and the wonders of the natural world to life through world-class experiences that engage, delight and inspire. Created in 1995 by Alan and Karen Ashton, Thanksgiving Point is a center of community engagement and welcomes more than two million visitors to visit, dine, play and explore together. Thanksgiving Point is located at 3003 North Thanksgiving Way in Lehi, Utah. For more information, call 801.768.2300 or visit thanksgivingpoint.org.