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Aligning the signs
Digital signage is a powerful tool for in-store marketing, if it's designed to work with your other marketing efforts.
January 22, 2008
This article originally published in Retail Customer Experience magazine, Feb. 2008.Click hereto download a free PDF version.
Few technologies have brought as much excitement and potential to retail in recent years as digital signage. And while its full ramifications and possibilities still are being explored, one thing has become crystal clear: Retailers need to work with deliberation to make sure digital signage is part and parcel of the store's overall marketing strategy.
"I believe most retail marketing managers have been exposed to the technology, but don't have a clear grasp of how it can revolutionize customer experience and service," said David Little, director of marketing for Keywest Technology. "When digital signage is spoken of in the context of a marketer's overall integrated marketing communications strategy, they begin to see how those benefits are applied at the store level and can make a positive contribution to the entire marketing effort."
| The addition of digital screens to a retail environment instantly creates an enormous need for new, fresh and appropriate content. |
"Very often, technology is such a concern (during planning and rollout) that after this is resolved, the next epiphany is 'Holy cow, we're running a TV network for our stores,'" said Keith Kelsen, president of MediaTile.
Content quality and quantity
The addition of digital screens to a retail environment does much more than add a few line items to the budget for hardware and software — it instantly creates an enormous need for new, fresh and appropriate content. Nikk Smith, technical director of media firm Pixel Inspiration, said the biggest mistake he sees his digital signage clients make is not updating content often enough.
Planning Marketing for Digital Signage Pixel Inspiration's Nikk Smith offers five steps retailers should go through when planning their marketing approach to digital signage:
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"Digital signage is a live, ever-evolving medium," said Mike Abbott, vice president of ADFLOW Networks. "That is one of its greatest attributes, but if you do not effectively continue to feed the audience with ever-evolving, relevant content, long-term failure is possible."
Abbott added that making smart choices when researching software — and keeping the content need in mind when shopping for digital signage software — can go a long way toward helping the retailer keep content up-to-date.
"Digital media management software that is worth its salt has content-creation template capabilities that keep the ongoing costs of content creation to a minimum," he said.
Digital signage is a visual medium, and as such it is of paramount importance to integrate that visual aspect with the rest of the store design. That begins with obvious choices such as color schemes and fonts for on-screen content, but extends into the more ambient nature of visual communication as well.
"Do not treat digital signage as a separate communication medium," Abbott said. "Make sure the content look and feel, colors, logos, pricing and information all align to other things to protect the brand."
This requires a holistic approach to the brand, which probably is already in place to some extent — most retailers have a binder somewhere filled with corporate specifications for logo shape and size, color schemes, placements of logos and images relative to one another, and so on.
What digital signage requires is that this brand management be expanded to include in-store digital media. That way, for instance, content designers have access to exact color codes in order to match on-screen content with other colors in the store.
Finding a Web 2.0 champion
The high-tech nature of digital signage, and the massive change it can signal in marketing strategy planning, suggests a new need: a new breed of retail marketing professional.
"Everyone is accustomed to print and its accompanying schedules, lead times, delays and lack of real-time feedback," Little said. "However, digital signage is a revolution in communications. What I mean is that digital signage changes marketing communication paradigms and requires new thinking."
What does that mean, in real-world terms? Little suggests that digital signage calls for a new member on the marketing team, someone predisposed to both understand and love the brave new world of "Web 2.0," the still-emerging concept that includes social networking sites, collaborative editing and communal creation of content.
"People who know how to spin up Web sites on short notice, SMS their social networks, shoot and upload videos to YouTube and influence others through Web 2.0-type thinking have a far better grasp of how to use digital signage to engage shoppers with digital media than specialists who are still thinking in the old 'un-digital' paradigm," he said.
One very practical ramification of this, Little said, is that retailers need to actively seek out younger marketing professionals to add to their team.
"Because of their different social and cognitive experiences and perspective, Gen-Y and Gen-Xers will have more natural talent to effectively utilize the power of this medium, and to realize marketing objectives that heretofore were only the stuff of futuristic movies."
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