Outdoor advertising and digital signage has been on a consistent rise—if we ignore the pandemic. Even with the pandemic in mind, the industry is making an impressive recovery! Once upon a time, digital signage software was just a tool within this field used by those who wanted to take on massive projects. You know, hundreds of displays, thousands of campaigns, and a colossal budget to tap into the biggest advantages of digital signage. But today, the story is a little bit different.
Digital signage software is no longer just a preference or some big investment. It has become affordable, accessible, and usable by both the pro and the beginner. Most importantly, it has become mandatory for success: if you’re not using it, you’re at a disadvantage! The points below will paint a clear picture of why that is. Simply imagine your competitors possessing these advantages, and you’ll quickly see your perspective change.
Dynamic content scheduling
Manually playing content each day for each individual campaign is absolutely out of the question! In no way is it a wise use of your time: all the hours spent daily tweaking and managing it could be spent doing something more productive. Even if you rely on some way to just auto-play content—you could do so through a playlist, for example—you’ll quickly realize the flaw of handling content that way.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest advantages of digital signage software you’re missing out on is scheduling content, weeks, months, and even years in advance! If you have specific templates, promotions, or advertisements, simply schedule them. If you plan on using relatively similar content at repeated times annually, you can get on creating and scheduling campaigns for each big event or holiday in the year at your own time. This will take a huge load off during those events, as they are busy enough on their own.
Effortless content updates
You’ve decided to really take your digital signage content creation seriously. Excellent! You set out to create a week’s worth of content, but you quickly find yourself exhausted at managing all your files to consistently update to keep the content fresh. This can include menu board updates, promotional offers, and branding information.
Using digital signage software, you can create compositions which act as templates. You don’t need to render or upload anything from scratch. It’s done right in the software. In a menu composition, for instance, you can directly edit the composition and change the pricing. This will be automatically updated everywhere that composition is used. This approach is excellent for creating a variation of existing content. It’s a clear path for easy updates as well as creation of content while keeping it fresh and interesting. With that said, if you’ve attempted to do this without compositions and digital signage software, you know this surely proves to be one of the biggest advantages of digital signage you might be missing!
Data collection
Reports and feedback information are ingredients critical for growth. How will you know your content is successful if you don’t pay attention to the results of its deployment?
Of course, you can track data and analytics even manually, without the use of digital signage software. But be ready for the work ahead because you’re in for plenty of matching up measurements, as well as guesses, presumptions, and prognoses. In terms of data collection, one of the biggest advantages of digital signage you’re missing out on are reports! The reason they’re so important is because their use extends beyond the display. They can provide you with some very useful information from a business standpoint.
Reports tell you everything you need to know about content playback across your players. With reports, you’ll know exactly when, where, and how long a certain campaign has run. Also, if you have content elements which are present in multiple campaigns, you can track those individual elements. Cross-referencing report data with your sales and profit can paint you a clear picture of how successful a specific piece of content was. Not only that, it will give you an insight on when throughout the day/week that content was most successful. With this information, you can optimize your weekly schedule by having it deploy content when it’s most likely to work.
Content creation support
We saved the best for last. One of the biggest advantages of digital signage software you’re missing, if not the biggest, are apps. With probably less than a dozen clicks and a few dozen keyboard strokes, you can build content through apps.
Dig for a good RSS feed your consumers might like, then simply deploy it through an app for that visual kick (hint: you can opt to include a QR-code within). Bring special days and schedules to everyone’s attention. Connect to your social media accounts. If you’re a walls.io user, you can integrate your account for awesome user-generated content. Apart from content specific to your consumer base, you can include generally useful information. For instance, weather apps are welcome in any context. There’s always time for a 30- or 40-second recap of what the weather has in store for the day. If you are at a loss for ideas, OnSign TV’s content channels are filled with fun facts from different fields. Undoubtedly the most versatile one is Today-in-History, which shows historical facts on any given day—a neat way to fill in the gaps in your content!
That’s just scratching the surface on apps. Take a look at them yourself, alongside everything else mentioned in this article and more with our 14-day free trial, no credit card required! Lastly, if you’re still unsure about your choice of digital signage software, at least ensure it has the appropriate features to get you started!
