Digital signage is powerful tool which helps influence customer thinking and behaviour. It helps pull in your audience, but there is a great deal of work required for it.
A digital display with fun content can engage people, but you’ll have to do a lot more if you want to draw an entire audience of people to you. For this, we turn to digital marketing and how to utilized it to help your business grow. Keep in mind that, in a way, digital signage is a conduit for your digital marketing efforts.
On its own, a digital display doesn’t hold as much power. It used to, back when just having a digital display made you one of the “cooler” crowd. However, today you have to sweat a little to be ahead of the standard, and here are a few digital marketing tips to do just that!
1. Take social media seriously
Social media is very important these days. If you’re not doing social media as a part of your marketing strategy, you are lagging behind the competition.
We’ve already covered in detail how to use social media with digital signage, mentioning various useful techniques and methods. However, keep in mind that one of the basic ways to start and maintain a healthy social media strategy is to simply be active!
Share opinions and do more than just schedule random posts and vague responses. Retweet, share content related to your brand, and comment on other posts.
The reason social media is so frequently mentioned is because of its power. Most business strategies can be enhanced through the use of social media, many of which will be mentioned below.
2. Optimize for mobile
Your digital signage campaigns are doing the best they can to attract new customers and captivate people. To take it a level further, those campaigns can be expanded if optimized for mobile interaction.
While there are ways to make a user interact with a digital display through mobile, be it for games or specific commands, there is also the option of providing free Wi-Fi to users on every digital signage location. This way you can gather data and also via push notifications, send special offers and more.
3. Build a fully functional business website
When it comes to your website design, these are some of the fundamental steps you need to take for your site to be successful.
- Use the right web design. Create a clean, easy to read page people can read and understand easily. Of course, as we talked in the previous step, your site should be mobile friendly.
- Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This involves a smart use of keywords in your content, among other things, to help people find your offers online.
- Perfect your email marketing strategy. Although an old method, this method works! Create smart email strategies to maintain customer loyalty. Here are some pointers to get you started.
- See a coach or a consultant, if you’re new to digital marketing. This can help you learn the ropes quickly and efficiently. This is a wise choice if you’re a small business owner and want to move forward quickly.
- Maintain a blog. This doesn’t only provide a flow of information to your audience, it also helps you utilize your SEO and keyword strategies to help people find your site.
4. Use ephemeral content
Ephemeral content refers to content which is very temporary and vanishes after a specific timeframe, for instance 24 hours. Snapchat’s primary function is to provide ephemeral content. Be it on social media platforms like Snapchat or within your digital signage network, ephemeral content can be useful for providing small bite-sized chunks of content to the viewers.
As most ephemeral content, yours shouldn’t be clinical or overly professionally made, but rather a quick behind-the-scenes view of your business to show people that there are fun, charismatic humans behind the brand.
With this in mind, Snapchat advertising isn’t a bad idea to use as an extension of your digital signage advertising.
5. Cross promote
Cross promotion involves offering your product or service to customers of a different brand. Naturally, cross promotion shouldn’t be done with a competitor, but it can open up new opportunities for your business by reaching out to a different audience through a partnership with another brand.
Cross promotion then can be taken in reverse, too, with you promoting other services to your audience. This can show that your customer’s interests are important to you and that you’re doing your best to provide them with information they’d appreciate. And it can be a side revenue based on what you and your partners agree on.
6. Have a “viral” perspective
If you want to provoke a response or send a wave of reactions out into the world, you should on occasion refrain from creating generic content. Sure, it’s great to offer your products or services through individual advertisements, but one potential idea to have in mind is to try creating and sharing viral content.
Primarily you should share helpful and insightful content. But you should also, on occasion, create content interesting enough for a vast amount of people to share on their social media profiles. If you succeed in creating something people can’t help but share, be it funny, scary or plain interesting, your brand awareness will grow significantly.
Now, you’re probably asking yourself how viral content is created? Here are a few components every piece of viral content has:
- Keep it short! If it’s a video, keep it under a minute long, and if it’s an image, make sure it’s quick and easy to process.
- Your content must be reletable in some way. Funny accidents or jokes go viral because people relate to them which immediately makes the content more personal.
- Make it unique. This one is pretty obvious, but some people keep trying to reinvent the wheel.
- Allow people to comment. You’re not the only one with a funny bone. Sometimes, comments can make the content more interesting so make sure they’re an option.
- Don’t be insulting or rude. A joke at the expense of others can only go viral in a negative way.
- For blog posts, make compelling headlines which tell a story in one sentence.
- Use images and color to make the content pop. Lack of “pretty” elements can make potentially viral content to fail.
7. Diversify content
If you have a digital signage campaign set up for your dentistry office, for example, it’s going to become pretty dull if you constantly show ads about teeth and how you can help them turn whiter.
Diversifying your content keeps your campaigns interesting, prevents people from ignoring them or getting used to them, and best of all, can be done in many ways. You can employ social media and share tweets, for example.
Another good option is to sell advertising space to third parties as well. It certainly provides more diverse content, but the main reason this option is chosen by digital signage users is, obviously, for the payment they get from advertisers.
As you can see from all the aforementioned methods, using them all together will generate tons of diverse content for your audience, be it on social media, your website or your digital signage.
8. Build anticipation
This is an old marketing method which still works if pulled off properly. Building peculiar ads which make no sense provoke thought, and they certainly make people curious about what’s going to happen next. Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to design elaborate campaigns and advertisements in hopes of pulling the viewer in.
A simple “special offer coming up this Friday. Don’t miss it!” can be enough to create suspense. This veers off into the psychology aspect of content and how to influence people based on words used, as well as the form in which they’re delivered.
As we can see from many of these tips and tricks, the world of social media is probably one of the main components of any effective digital marketing strategy. For a start, you should focus on mastering that particular step, and then move on to the others. Once you’ve gotten the hang of social media, you can easily incorporate other tips mentioned into it for maximum impact.
Digital signage is a formidable tool, but on its own it is simply no longer enough. It used to be, but as the time goes on, it is slowly becoming a mandatory part of any business that wants to stay current. It is the marketing, planning and content which matter most, and with practice of these tips and tricks, you’re on the right track.