Here is a simple checklist of 10 things you can do to make your Digital Signage rock.
If you have all these in place, then your signage media will most certainly be headed for success.
The important message here is about having all the pieces in place: plan, process, system and content.
1. Set a clear goal
What do you want to accomplish with your digital signage this year? Get started? Improve your content? Streamline your operations? Setting a clear goal sets you on a path toward it. If you don’t state your goal, how will you know when you get there?
2. Go Cloud
If you are not using cloud-based signage, then why not? Automatically receive all updates and enhancements to the service. Better efficiency and lower operations costs – especially the biggest hidden cost… people using manual, error-prone processes.
3. Delight your viewers
No matter what content you are showing, you would like your viewers to watch more. People watch what they like. Find out what your viewers like about your content and give them more of it. How do you find out? That’s easy. Ask them!
4. Showcase your viewers
What do viewers like to see on screens more than any other content? Themselves! Which really means themselves or anyone closely connect to them; grandchildren, children, other family, friends or colleagues. Find a way to shout out viewers – customer birthday party, winner of an award, top sales person of the month. Or, tie in to a Social Media campaign where customers send in photos of themselves enjoying your shop or product. You can kill two birds with one stone. Create content your audience loves to watch, and solve the problem of how to make great content – your audience does it for you.
5. Follow a content schedule
There is nothing worse than a media that never gets updated. Setting a schedule for updating your content helps in several ways. It helps you establish a regular rhythm for updates. It lets you plan the resources you need to keep your updating happening, as well as keeping within your budget. It also lets your audience get a feel for what changes on the media and how often. Set this expectation and delivering on it can be a key factor in keeping your audience looking again and again. Bonus points for coordinating this with all your other web and SNS content updates.
6. Use templates
Creating great content can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. Once you have a content plan, you can figure out how you want to distribute your content budget. Using templates can be a great way to extend your budget, while giving you the flexibility to easily add lots of fresh content. Sometimes a template can be as simple as a well designed power point slide where you change a bit of text or swap in a photo. Save it to a graphic or a video and you have great looking content with current information created and playing on your signage in minutes. This lets you save your content budget for the key pieces of content where you really want to impress.
7. Get rid of bottlenecks
The biggest bottleneck is usually gather all the content in one central location and having one person (or team) updating the content. This is expensive, slow and error prone. Get the people making, curating or providing you with your content to put it straight on to the meeting. You can still have all the checking you want in place, but there is no need give useless, repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks to skilled employees.
8. Automate
Anything that gets done over and over again can probably be automated. Look for processes that take a long time, struggle to meet deadlines, and have a high risk of errors. With digital signage this is usually related to how the program scheduling gets done (see 8).
9. Simplify
The best processes are usually the simplest ones. It’s so common for processes to get more and more complicated as we try and work around the limitations of software and technology. This is not good. We need to work with technology that is on our side, giving us the tools we need to simplify.
10. Test and Track
Finally, don’t forget to keep testing ways to make your signage better. Change one thing and measure the difference. If it improved keep the change. If not, move on to the next idea.
11. Bonus Tip – Get Started
If you are not using Digital Signage yet then now is definitely the time to start. You just read this whole article, so you must be thinking about it. Stop studying it, and get going. Learning by doing is the best way!
And if you are looking for a cloud-based digital signage service that will give you great cost-performance, helps you simplify your content management, offers powerful template options, is a leader in automation, then give us a shout. Let us show you what Otegaru net can do for you.
