How to Create a Digital Signage Strategy That Grows Your Business

When you are ready to jump into digital signage it can be easy to assume your current signage strategy will carry over. But a digital sign is a marketing tool with unlimited potential, and you will want to plan how to use such a powerful tool. With a solid strategy in place, you are more likely to see a higher return on your investment and achieve the goals you have for your business.

So how do you build a strategy for a sign that has unlimited potential? We’ll lay out the steps so you can build a winning strategy.

8 Steps to an Effective Digital Sign Strategy:

1. Establish goals for your outdoor advertising

As all things, start at the beginning. What is your goal in using digital signage?

Here are some of the most typical goals that organizations seek to achieve with their signs: 

• Growth of business or specific product areas
• Brand Awareness
• Increase in foot traffic
• Increase in your social following

Keeping track of these goals will help you understand what to measure, and how to build your strategy going forward. Keep in mind that you can also have multiple goals, as the digital sign allows you to run multiple promotions at the same time. 

2. Clearly define your audience

Who are you trying to reach? Depending on your products or services, this can vary greatly, but it is an important factor to have top of mind. Defining your audience can help you target your message directly to them. As you think about who they are, ask yourself these questions to help you define them better: 

• What do they care about? 
• How do your products or services help them solve their problems?
• Do they care about different things during the week and the weekend? 
• When are they most likely to be coming to your business?
• Do they tend to be friendly? Stuffy? Driven? Extreme?

Answering these questions will help you craft messages as you build out your strategy. 

3. Determine how you will measure success

This step should always align back to your goals. Measuring the success of your messages is the only way you’ll know what’s working. You need to know what you’re measuring, so you know if you’re making an impact. Are you going to track foot traffic before and after installation? Or sales of a specific item? Much like your goals you can track multiple things at the same time. Just make sure you outline it in your strategy and record where you are now.

Here are some metrics you can use to track the four strategies from above:

• Sales weekly or monthly
• Mentions on social media
• Number of people entering your business weekly or monthly
• New Memberships and/or customers
  
  

4. Create your sign content

What you show on your sign is just as important as who you are talking to. You need to make sure your message is clear and inspires feelings or action. You have only a few seconds to get through to the people passing your business, so what do you say? 

While promotions are the most important content you will create, you can do so much more with digital. Make sure you’re sharing your best promotions, but you can add other content to build your brand. From sharing big wins from local champions to sending holiday wishes. Think about what sort of messages you want to share on your screens. Think about your goals, what sort of messages will help you reach them?

Also, consider what medium will work best for your business. Is it text, images, video, or some combination? Usually, a combination of mediums works best, but it’s important to pause and think about which will attract the most attention for your business. 

Finally, you should understand the best practices for creating content on digital signs. We offer a free content tips guide to make that part easy. It will be everything from images to fonts. It’s a great place to start as you think about your content.

Related: Digital Signage Content Tips

5. Set-up a schedule to publish your content

Think about how you will schedule your content based on your audience and how they interact with your business. Using the right content at the right time will make a bigger impact. You can also think ahead and plan out holiday promotions or major sales so you know when to have that content ready to go. 

If your sign requires manual updates, set reminders for 

When you use a digital signage content management system like ScreenHub, you have the ability to schedule when promotions are on your sign. Consider if your audience is different on weekdays than it is on the weekends. Or maybe people are dropping in for different things based on the day of the week. If weather impacts what people buy you could even set up a rain or snow playlist of promotions that you can set up in the morning if the weather is looking gloomy. 

6. Test and refine

Make a plan of action for how you are going to test your content. Once you put up a sign, set a time period it will run for, then check your metrics. Did you make progress towards your goals? If not, now’s the time to make changes to see what does work. You can try different text, pictures, or colors. A little change may go a long way. 

Before you test make a hypothesis. The easiest way to do this is to fill in the blanks on this sentence: 

I believe that if I ____ then I will see ____.

An example: 

I believe that if I add a picture to my combo meal slide then I will see an increase in sales of that combo.

If your hypothesis ends up being wrong, that’s okay too! You have learned what doesn’t work – which means you can cross it off your list and keep narrowing down what does work. 

When you test, we recommend you change one thing at a time. This way you can better understand which change worked. If you change everything all at once, you won’t know what piece had the biggest impact. Maybe it’s that you used a different word to drive action. Or maybe changing the background from black to a bright color attracts more attention. Focusing on one thing at a time will help you narrow in on what really works, and help you focus on content that drives results.  

7. Ask for feedback from customers

This can be one of the hardest parts to successfully gather but it’s the most worthwhile. You need to speak directly to your customers. This could be in the form of a survey or even conversations inside your business. Put thought into what questions will be most valuable. You can ask what they like most about your store, what brought them in, and why they chose to visit your store over others. The options are endless, but getting that information can help you make your on-premises advertising better. 

By incorporating this feedback into your content, you not only begin to understand your audience better, but also learn what makes your brand strong.

8. Revisit and Update

Once you implement your strategy it’s easy to dust off your hands and call it good. But that won’t help you grow or reach your goals. Set-up intervals to take a deeper look at the results of your strategy. Note where you’re succeeding and where there is room for improvement. Then look at your tests and see what worked and what didn’t. Finally, review any feedback you received and take that into consideration.

With all those things in mind, review your strategy and make updates based on those learnings. Then you get to implement the changes. From here it’s just a matter of tweaking over time and improving as you go. 

Ready to go Digital?

If you’re ready to implement a digital signage strategy, we specialize in affordable high-definition signs. We want your message to look its best and attract the attention of your audience from the roadside to the register. If you want to talk to a signage expert, we’re here to help. You can reach out to us at any time.