Digital signage is becoming widely used across various industries, whether in retail, hospitality, education, or even industrial settings. Over 25% of companies in the U.S. are including digital signage campaigns as part of their advertising strategies, pushing the growth of the digital signage market even further.
Considered a medium for business growth, digital signs are revolutionizing the way businesses communicate with customers and promote their products and services.
Compared to traditional forms of signage, digital signage is proving to be a much more effective way to attract customers, increase brand awareness, and boost revenue. But exactly how effective is it? We answer that in this article.
Effectivity of Digital Signage Compared to Conventional Signage
Prior to the digital era, businesses used traditional forms of advertising, such as billboards, posters, brochures, and flyers. They had to spend countless hours and resources generating content and printing them out for mass distribution.
Fast forward to the development of digital marketing solutions, and many businesses are still holding on to conventional signage to promote their products and services. While traditional signage has proven to be effective in the past, businesses must learn to adapt and keep up with the times.
In the information age, customers are now demanding content to be available in an instant and are looking for more ways to engage with businesses that provide their needs. Digital signage meets those demands.
With the ability to display multimedia content in various forms, easily update content and customize it to the viewer, and schedule specific content to show up at different times of the day, digital signage is providing businesses with more possibilities while saving them crucial time and money.
Benefits of Digital Signage
It’s becoming more and more apparent that digital signage is the future of advertising. This is because it’s able to offer more for businesses at half the cost of traditional signage. If you’re not convinced just yet and want to know more about how your business can benefit from digital signage before you invest in it, here are some of its benefits.
Allow Customer Self-Service
Gone are the days when people were willing to wait in line to be assisted or to make a purchase. Consumers are demanding faster service — they want everything in an instant. In fact, research shows that 69% of shoppers pointed to long wait times to be the most frustrating part of shopping.
Digital signage targets this pain point by allowing customer self-service. This is possible through the use of interactive displays. By providing all crucial information about a product in an interactive display, customers can help themselves to what they need without having to wait to be assisted. And by the time staff becomes available to assist the customer, they can supply more information or provide help as needed.
Attract Attention
According to research, 90% of the information the human brain receives is visual. It’s able to process visual information much faster too, 60,000 times faster than text, to be specific. And that’s part of the reason why we see so many videos, infographics, and images today.
Businesses are no longer relying on text to relay information — they are leveraging visual media to attract customers. It’s no debate that digital signs are more attention-grabbing than traditional signage. With dynamic displays that use attractive images, vibrant colors, and moving elements, customers are more drawn to looking at a digital sign compared to a static poster or billboard.
80% of shoppers say that they have entered a shop because a digital sign caught their interest, which just proves the power of digital signage in getting customers to the top of the sales funnel.
Better Internal Communication
Digital signage does not only benefit a company by improving customer experiences. It also does a great deal of good internally by improving communication with employees.
Companies that are able to communicate with their employees effectively have four times higher employee engagement statistics than those that are not. In turn, they are able to reach their corporate goals faster and have higher employee retention.
Businesses that are able to achieve high employee engagement start by improving communications through digital signage. As an important communication tool, digital signs deliver information to employees much faster and in a more attractive and engaging manner.
Digital signs are being used to communicate and reinforce company core values, deliver important announcements, display tasks, and deliverables, and more, resulting in better transparency and improved employee satisfaction.
Improve Brand Retention and Recall
In a single day, the average consumer sees a whopping 4,000 to 10,000 ads both offline and online. With such high a number, it seems close to impossible to get them to remember your brand. That’s something that digital signage can help with.
Research shows that 47% of consumers remember seeing a specific ad or message. That number jumps to 55% if the ad was in the form of an outdoor digital billboard. With the human brain able to retain 65% of visually presented information, digital signs are able to tap into a consumer’s long-term memory and help them remember an ad that caught their attention even several days ago.
Increase Sales
Digital signage is filled with features that push customers further down the sales funnel and motivate them to make a purchase. From getting their attention to allowing them to interact with the display to make a purchasing decision, a digital sign can be a profitable investment for businesses.
Digital signs can target specific customers and motivate them to make a purchase by delivering specific content according to their location or demographic. Further, their maximum visibility enables businesses to reach the highest possible viewership, thereby increasing brand and product awareness.
Statistics show that 4 out of 5 brands who adopt digital signage notice a 33% increase in sales. And when computed with the cost savings that these solutions are able to generate, digital signs end up paying for themselves.
Inform, Educate, and Entertain
Digital signs can display any information in a highly engaging and dynamic manner, which, at the end of the day, keeps viewers entertained. The vibrant colors, bold graphics, and moving elements are just too attractive to ignore — and the more they are able to grab the viewer’s attention, the longer they stay to look and read.
This makes digital signage a powerful tool to deliver information and advertisements wherever they may be located. The dynamic design helps the viewer consume and retain information in an engaging and entertaining way that improves their visitor experience.
Provide Insights and Analytics
Unlike traditional signs whose performance and effectiveness are hard to measure, digital signs provide data and analytics that give businesses the exact metrics they need to improve or change their digital marketing strategies.
By integrating analytics software into digital signage, businesses can get information about what products viewers are searching for, the level of interest they have in the brand, the foot traffic the digital sign is receiving, viewer dwell time, and more.
This allows them to reinvent and improve their digital signage content accordingly. For example, if the analytics show that viewers are only sticking around for 15 seconds of a 30-second video, then they might consider making the content shorter or putting critical information at the beginning.
Reduce Business Costs
One of the biggest reasons many businesses are not investing in digital signage yet is because of the misconception that it is expensive. While the upfront cost to install a digital sign can be rather steep, businesses must consider how much money they’ll end up saving with maintenance and labor in the long run.
Digital signs require little to no maintenance. They allow content to be updated from a remote location in real time, and there’s no limit as to how much or how often the content can be changed. This is compared to traditional signage that requires costly and time-consuming reprinting to update content.
Digital signage is also more profitable than conventional signs, with a single on-premise sign increasing annual profit margins by at least 4.75%. With how much a business can actually earn with digital signage in the long haul, the initial cost of deploying it is a meager price to pay.
Update Content Instantly
One of the main selling points of digital signage is how easy it makes it to change, update, and add displays. This is in comparison to traditional signage, which would require drastic measures to change. Digital signs can be operated from a remote location, requiring just a few clicks and steps to deploy new information in an instant.
Whether that’s to make an urgent announcement, advertise a new product or service, or communicate a special offer or event, businesses can quickly change and update digital signage content in real-time.
Choose Digital Signage for Your Business
With all the things digital signs can do that traditional, printed advertising collaterals cannot, it’s high time for your business to adopt digital signage solutions to maximize your reach, improve customer experiences, and increase revenue. Learn about all of the pros and cons of digital signage.
Digital signage is the future of advertising — invest in free digital signage to ensure that you are able to stay ahead of the competition and keep your company relatable and profitable.
