As any investment, digital signage impacts your profit in multiple ways. For a start, there are fixed costs at the investment stage, such as the hardware and software components. Then, there are continuous costs of maintenance, power consumption, and recurring payments for software.
In this article, we’ll focus on all of these ways and how your overall revenue and profit are affected by digital signage, in both the positive and negative sense. We’ll discuss the costs in detail, along with the beneficial sides of having professional-grade digital signage. Of course, there is no question that it’s worth the investment, but this discussion will help you if you’re on the fence about taking that first step or if you’re considering expanding your digital signage setup.
Increased sales revenue
Digital signage yields various revenue streams which pour in from multiple sides. Firstly, promoting products and services makes customers aware, leading to more purchases. Digital signage also makes an impact on brand awareness, leading to customer loyalty and increased foot traffic. These uses are specifically aiming at generating profit directly through boosting sales. It’s easy to track by cross-referencing your content playback data with sales to see how successful these efforts are.
It is also important to note that in this view revenue comes indirectly. Customer satisfaction ensures consumers keep coming back, spend more time in the business, and are more open to upselling opportunities. Consumers may also be more open to providing feedback and will respond to their opinion being taken seriously. Digital signage can help not only collect it, but also share with the consumer what changes and updates have been made as a result of their feedback.
Profit derived from these indirect ways is more difficult to track, but do not disregard it! It is real and makes a notable impact on the business as a whole.
Lowering costs and boosting efficiency
Your end profit is affected by digital signage steadily helping to reduce expenses. For instance, in replacing traditional media, digital signage reduces the need for printing content, as well as purchasing and using up materials for this purpose. This is especially important for larger designs provided by a third party, eliminating the need for shipping. While digital signage has costs of its own which replace these, they are less impacting, easier to predict, and easier to compensate for.
Furthermore, if used for communication and keeping staff and customers up to speed with up-to-date information, efficiency increases. This in itself indirectly affects the overall productivity and end result.
Saving time and hours of work
As you know, traditional digital signage is a powerful tool. It still dominates the Out-of-Home industry over its digital counterpart. Don’t let this fool you, as it has its flaws. It takes time to set up and it’s a long process to lay out a design, have it printed, and regularly updated. Real-time data is not an option with traditional signage.
With digital signage and an underlying software in play, the process becomes automated through scheduling. Once you get your ducks in a row, prepare your visual templates, and schedule content windows ahead of time, you will quite literally only spend a few seconds at a time to make updates. Templates are easy to update and deploy, after all. If you don’t like something, be it the way a color looks on the display as opposed to the software preview, you can tweak it immediately to your liking. You may even do it from your smartphone!
The cost of digital signage
Now that we covered the main income generated by digital signage, let’s go over its costs. The fixed costs for digital signage are the hardware components. This includes a digital display and a player which broadcasts content to this display. Smart devices such as phones, tablets, and dedicated signage TVs cover both of these bases. You pay them once, and you’re good to go!
When it comes to variable costs, they include the power used by the display, as well as any maintenance costs which may be required later down the road. Internet and software are other costs which are typically incurred on a monthly basis. Digital signage software providers such as OnSign TV offer the ability to create, design, and manage content tailored for digital displays. They come with a plethora of apps, tools, templates, and management features which will save hours of work and enable that ease of use we mentioned earlier.
The impact of digital signage software on profit
Software has come so far where its benefits easily outweigh the costs. Scalability is a critical topic here. The greater the number of displays, the more work it takes to manage them as a whole, but less on the unit level. At a point, it becomes necessary to assign an employee for this purpose alone. Of course, this is if you’re planning on using digital signage to its full potential!
The pricing of software typically scales per player, but you’ll be able to make use of quantity discounts. This absolute cost increase sounds intimidating at first, but only if you aren’t entirely aware of the potential you unlock by investing in it. You will get more visibility while economizing on your input. Second, with flawless automated content deployment, for instance, selling advertising space or pushing sponsored content is very easy. Schedule to repeat at key times during the day/week, and forget about it, successfully generating another revenue stream. Software also provides proof-of-play. With OnSign TV, this is achieved through Reports, which tell you what has been played in as much detail as you require.
Furthermore, precisely tailored digital signage software campaigns boost employee efficiency, consumer knowledge and awareness, and overall an entirely new channel of communication towards your employees and customers. It also provides a competitive advantage by delivering dynamic and engaging content. All the features and benefits we mentioned above are yours to try out for free, with OnSign TV.
Cover image by Wance Paleri.
