Adrenaline

Advances in technology continue to raise expectations for what digital signage can do in retail spaces. Thinking past the latest bells and whistles, what are some fundamental strategies for maximizing the medium’s power and potential? At its best, digital signage helps brands elevate and enhance key zones within a space and create consumer connections by serving up curated information about products and services, along with visual imagery that reaffirms a brand’s values. When fused with insights from analytics, digital signage becomes a powerhouse of programming that energizes an environment. 

Here are four best practices to consider when designing and deploying digital signage in your retail environment: 

1) Create Better Brand Experiences

Beyond static elements like wayfinding markers and branded posters, digital signage delivers a richer consumer experience inside a retail space. It’s another critical touchpoint of brand experience that maximizes dwell time by providing dynamic, layered storytelling tailored to the customer’s need-state. Playlist opportunities include marketing and sales messaging to be sure, but prioritizing programming that demonstrates brand values will leave a more lasting impression. Digital signage is the perfect vehicle for showing what you stand for. Don’t waste the opportunity by only trying to sell more. 

  A core channel for communicating brand values in the physical environment, digital signage helps to create immersive and engaging brand experiences, transforming a retail store into a place where the brand comes to life  

2) Understand the Customer Journey

Before deploying digital signage in your retail environment, it’s critical to know how your customers are moving throughout the space. Inexperience design, we call this journey mapping, and these core components inform everything we do in crafting holistic experiences in a retail space. Using data analytics and insights, you can get to know the demographics and psychographics of your customers to develop personas and combine it with essential information about dwell times within the space. This information allows you to create an experience that’s mapped to meet consumer expectations. 

3) Right-Sizing Your Messaging

It does not just dwell time that matters in creating your playlist. Knowing the purpose of each zone helps ensure the right message is delivered to the right audience at the right time. A digital sign in a consultative space requires different programming than signage in a transactional space. In banking, for example, if a customer is waiting to talk to a personal banker, they don’t need a general marketing message delivered to them, as they are already bought in. Right-sizing messaging means each story’s content is optimized in time and tone and zone, showing that you understand your customer. 

4)Develop a Meaningful Media Strategy

Media strategy is an iterative process that combines analytics, objectives, and messaging into a cohesive output. To do this effectively, you must identify a leader who is responsible for collecting all of the visual and brand assets and coordinating their deployment. This “Editor-In-Chief” should ideally be a well-connected liaison who understands your brand’s overarching strategy and how to align channels of experience for consumers. A purposive media strategy will ultimately boost your brand’s emotional appeal and build your storytelling elements into a meaningful brand narrative.

When viewed as a means of deepening and strengthening relationships, digital signage takes on a more significant role along the customer journey. A core channel for communicating brand values in the physical environment, digital signage helps to create immersive and engaging brand experiences, transforming a retail store into a place where the brand comes to life.

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