For some time now, the purpose of digital signage has been a lot more than merely informing people about pricing or the advantages of the latest product. Rather, one of the most important uses for digital displays is engagement. With its importance, the challenges of engaging new consumers, too, grow each day. Today, digital signage campaigns must be well thought-out and designed to attract a specific audience and push them to take action.
It sounds like a major challenge, but we have your back with some handy guidelines you can use to successfully engage new and existing customers alike.
1. Set goals for your campaign
This first and prime step ensures each following digital signage campaign becomes more effective and engaging than the last, and here’s why.
Before you even start conceptioning, fine tuning and implementing the ways your campaign will influence the audience, you need to establish what you want to achieve with the customer being engaged. You should specify and track the progression of your goals as the campaign unfolds.
Not only does this help creating more effective campaigns, you can strategize better. You can see what works well, what has no impact, and adjust your future campaigns accordingly. If your goal is to engage customers in hopes of raising brand awareness, understanding what makes people talk about your brand is essential.
2. Identify the audience
Albeit an obvious part of any business strategy, it’s doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the importance of knowing one’s audience. Every step you take towards engaging your potential customer is affected by how well you know who they are. Not knowing who your audience, if ignored, indicates the demise of every campaign. It’s not even a gamble, it’s plainly wrong.
If you wish to engage people who use social media, use hashtags, for instance. If you want to engage millennials, use queues and trends which appeal to their generation. What’s better, having a hundred people think your ad is okay, or having ten who love it? Find out who your customer is and create content which draws your ideal customer to you.
3. Ensure interaction with your audience
Now that you have solid ground under your feet and know what you want to achieve, let’s take a look at what physically makes a customer engage with your digital signage campaign.
Interaction isn’t a must in order to engage with your audience, but having it can boost your campaigns. The obvious choice for this is touch screen interactivity. However, your customers could also interact with the display through different methods. Setting up a network where a user can send a message, connect through Wi-Fi or create social media posts directly on the display are all highly engaging options.
One example of such engagement can be seen in Singapore where JCDecaux Singapore recently used a live social feed at Changi Airport. It allowed users to upload selfies along with their personalized travel tips. The campaign featured the photos on 57 displays at the airport. These massive displays gave viewers the ability to share their recommendations for drinking, eating and staying in the city.
4. Make your campaign fun, yet clear
There are many things in this world that nudge people to act. Provoking a strong emotion promises a response, and although you are free to experiment with the entire spectrum of emotions, the safest bet you can go for is happiness.
If you can make a customer smile, you can rest assured your digital signage campaign is on its way to succeed. It’s rather simple. People feel happy, and they want to maintain this emotion. Whether a discount, special offer or even a joke makes them happy, it matters not. If you open the doors to a simple call to action, people are that much more likely to respond if they’re happy when they see it.
The feeling of happiness and fun is not going to raise your sales by itself, though. You have to communicate your message clearly during this emotional state. Without a call to action, people won’t know how to act. Easy access to perform an action is a big plus. Games and interactive selfie displays are among the most effective at engaging customers through fun, but there are plenty more you should check out.
5. Stay current and relevant
Trends are shifting frighteningly fast in this day and age. It’s important to stay on top of them. A few years ago, public touch screen displays made minds explode across the globe. Today, they must have fun, intriguing and never-before-seen content to have the same effect. Audiences are growing spoiled and it’s important to keep up with their tastes and preferences if there is any hope to influence them.
If you’re aiming to engage customers in hopes of raising their satisfaction, you can do so by using software and tools they will want to interact with. Allowing your customer to browse through all available products or even make pre-orders is a sure way of engaging existing as well as new customers.
6. Choose your tools wisely
The type of digital signage campaign you wish to create certainly influences the tools required. Want to let people take selfies with your interactive display and share it on social media? You won’t choose a video wall for that purpose. If you want to increase foot traffic and get people to talk about your brand, then you might go for a larger color-packed display. Outdoor displays can be highly engaging if they’re easy to see, thus high brightness matters a lot. The hardware side isn’t too complex to figure out, yet it can significantly sway the success of your campaign in engaging customers.
On the software side of things, adjusting the content to the environment can make a strong impact. Choosing the right software and adjusting campaigns to fit a certain location, for instance, is a sure way to make the content more relatable.
7. Analyze your success; rinse and repeat
As we have already mentioned, establishing your goals is the most important step of any digital signage campaign. Once your campaign has been adjusted to fit all of the guidelines we’ve mentioned so far, it can be deployed, and your analysis can begin.
You will be far wiser at the end of the digital signage campaign than at its beginning. You will be able to see which parts of the campaign yield the best results, which need adjustment, and which are completely without effect. This helps you learn more about your audience and what provokes a response from them. Learning about the motivation of your customer is the most important component in any business. Possessing that knowledge promises that each campaign in the future is better, more effective and engaging than the last.
