6 Best Practices for Digital Signage Success
A valued partner of Signagelive, meldCX empowers businesses to create premier customer experiences through AI and intelligent-edge technologies.
meldCX, Executive Vice President of SaaS, Thor Turrecha, is the author of 6 Best Practices for Digital Signage Success, the fourth article instalment of his Intelligent Content series, which we feature here as a guest post.
There’s more to digital transformation than just putting up screens.
As so many more businesses are going online, brick and mortar stores are faced with the challenge of how to stay competitive in today’s digitally-inclined market.
Digital transformation is the universally accepted answer. We’ve seen it add to the value of physical stores with the newest technologies. That’s the reason why we see so many huge digital displays in shopping centres, restaurants, and other high foot traffic places.
However, installing a screen is not enough. You need a robust intelligent content strategy. From our own experience of helping enterprise customers excel in digital transformation, we’ve gathered our best practices in creating digital signage content.
1. Less is more
Too much of anything isn’t good for your digital signage displays. The aim is for your message to be understood at a glance. Whatever you add to your content should enhance your message, and not distract from it.
Font
Only use a couple of font types. Sans serif ensures text is legible, especially for digital use. You can add impact to your messages through the use of styling. Hierarchy keeps the most important information at the top. Say it with big bold letters, but don’t overdo it.
Text
Keeping it short and to the point is key, so write short copy that captures messages succinctly. Following the 3×5 rule is important in displaying text. Use only 3 lines with 5 words or 5 lines with 3 words to ensure copy is clear and easy to read.
Colour
Most designers use three colours to make content stand out. Using the 60-30-10 rule, select primary, secondary and accent colours that you would like to see on your displays.
Imagery
Visuals are a powerful component in effective digital signage content. Content with images is 43% more persuasive, so where possible, choose quality images that best enhance your message.
Composition
Draw on design compositions such as the Z Layout, Rule of Thirds, and Golden Ratio to keep elements in the best real estate within your screen.
2. Move it
According to a study by Intel, animated content gets 5 times more views than static content. It also engages audiences for longer! Provided it helps your message stand out, animate your content with simple transitions or even complex motions.
But remember to ensure that your content is easy to read. Too many moving elements can distract your audience from what your core messaging.
3. Serve it fresh
Outdated content will make your screens irrelevant. Today’s audience is constantly searching for the most up-to-date information, so keep your displays fresh with the latest news, weather updates, foreign exchange rates, schedules or social feeds.
Dynamic content lets you do this without having to update your data every time you publish.
4. Spread the brand love
To help your content stand out even more, seal it with your brand. Don’t be shy and take the bold first step to ensuring that you’re remembered.
Reflect your personality in all the elements. Make use of your brand’s typeface, imagery, tone of voice, or overall style, so that your displays are instantly recognisable, reliable, and most importantly, you.
5. Make them do
Your content should invite your viewers to take action. Make your messages as impactful as possible – whether it’s for a sale, event, or product promotion, or other types of message.
Ask your audience to do something, and inspire them to discover, think, laugh, share. Make them remember.
6. A/B testing
Lastly, it is important to A/B test your content, so you know what your audience prefers, what works, and what doesn’t. But how can you measure the viewer metrics of digital signage?
Simple! You can now measure your digital signage viewership (glance, view and view-through) using vision AI. With AI, you can also collect anonymous data on your audience, such as age, gender, sentiment and exposure time to content.
Viana by MeldCX together with Signagelive offers just such a vision AI-driven solution for digital signage, enabling you to personalise the customer and visitor experience. Here’s how it works.
With the help of web triggers, Signagelive is able to launch specific, tailor-made content for display every time Viana AI-enabled cameras recognise customers and visitors, who match the pre-defined characteristics of your target personas. By accessing your audience analytics and proof of play reports from the Signagelive platform, you can check if your personalised content is resonating with your target audience. Based on this this, you’re then able to switch to the kind of content that has been proven to work best for your customer personas.
