Do you have a digital sign in your waiting room, showroom, or office? Has it been playing on repeat for months, maybe even years? Are you seeing stagnant results and wishing you could get better engagement and additional benefits from your content?
If you are utilizing digital signage in your business but finding that your messages aren’t resonating with your audience or creating results, you may have a problem with your digital signage content playlist.
Use these tips to identify your problems, improve your content, and start making content that audiences want to see and will help you reach your goals.
Know Your Audience
Before you take even one step toward creating content for a digital sign, you need to ask yourself a vital question, “Who is my audience.”
Knowing your audience and creating content that aligns with their needs, interests, and attention spans will be vital in creating a great playlist for your screen.
Start by asking yourself the following questions to define your target audience:
- Which category best describes my audience? Are they employees, current customers, potential clients, casual passerbyers, a mixture of both?
- What is the demographic of my target audience?
- What does my target audience need or want?
Answering these basic questions will direct the context and style of your content.
The answers will help you identify the words to use to communicate with your audience as well as the ideal content formats.
For example, if you are managing a dentist office for children, the content will be geared toward kids. You may use colorful imagery, upbeat music, and quick segments. But if you are running a dentist office for adults only, the content may include mellow music, detailed health tips, and longer spans of content blocks.
Create the Perfect Digital Signage Content Playlist Formula
Once you identify your audience, you can establish a plan of action for your content.
Identify the type of content you want to use throughout your playlist. We recommend using the following formula.
- 30% of Content to Educate
- 40% of Content to Entertain
- 20% of Content to Encourage
- 10% of Content to Create Emotion
With this formula, you create content that connects with the audience and holds their attention, while utilizing messaging that promotes your business.
Take a look at how this formula is applied to the content playlist of an auto repair shop.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to tip this formula too far in the direction of promotional content. If your audience feels the content is all about encouraging them to purchase a service or do more business with your company, they will tune out the messaging.
Make Sure the Content Matches Your Goals
You are creating content with your audience at the forefront of your planning, but you can’t forget about your business objectives.
You don’t want to create content just for the sake of having content.
You want to identify clear goals and results that you would like to see from your digital signage content. Goals may include:
- improving customer satisfaction
- increasing sales of a certain product or service
- improving customer knowledge
- shortening customer ordering lines
- bringing in additional revenue
- decreasing perceived wait-time
When you identify goals, you can create a content strategy that allows you to review and measure the results of your efforts. By examining these results, you can see what’s working and what’s not, find the ROI of your investment, and make plans to improve based on what you discover.
Use the Right Content Loop Length
One way to unwittingly get your audience to tune out your content and directly decrease audience engagement is replaying the same message over and over.
You want to share fresh content with your audience during their entire duration of time in front of your digital sign.
Be sure that the content playlist loop is long enough that you audience won’t see repeat content while watching your programming in one sitting.
Update Your Content Playlist Often
Just as you don’t want your audience to see repeat content during their visit, you don’t want them to see repeat content during their next visit.
You want your audience to find new content on your screen each time they return to your location. This will keep audiences interested in your programming and prevent them from turning it out.
By regularly updating your digital signage content playlist, you provide your audience with fresh content they will be more interested in and more likely to respond to.
Always Use Call-to-Actions
If you aren’t seeing results from your digital signage plans, you may be missing one very important element in your content — call-to-actions.
Call-to-actions are the language you use to advise you audience to take the next step in a process.
With a clear call-to-action, you tell your audience exactly what they need to do to achieve a specific result. This may include language such as, “Ask an associate about our new loyalty program,” or “Visit our website to sign up for our newsletter.”
You need to use this encouraging language to tell you audience how to move forward or perform an action that benefits your business. Without clear directions on what to do, your audience is more likely to fail to take the next step and not create your intended result.
From talking to the wrong audience and failing to set goals or use call-to-actions, there are a variety of factors that may be preventing your digital signage content strategy from working.
So if you are failing to reach your goals, find out what you could be doing wrong with a free, no-obligation consultation with a Spectrio digital signage expert.
Our specialist will discuss your goals and current setup and identify how a new digital signage plans can bring benefits — such as increased customer satisfaction, improved audience engagement, and additional revenue streams — to your business.