Digital signage solutions are spearheading the new wave of advertising and communications strategies. Plenty of businesses are beginning to utilize this technology to widen their reach, attract more customers, improve their operations, and ultimately achieve their goals.
Because digital signage is quite an investment, there’s a misconception that only large-scale enterprises are able to take full advantage of it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even small businesses and start-ups can adopt digital signage as part of their internal or external communications strategies.
Benefits of Digital Signage for Small Businesses
Digital signage is a powerful marketing and communications tool that businesses, regardless of industry or size, can benefit greatly from. With its dynamic display, interactive features, and the integration of advanced tech, it can facilitate increased visibility, engagement, and revenue.
For small businesses, digital signage can be valuable in helping them communicate their message, boost brand awareness, and attract more customers, setting a strong foundation for business growth.
We’re seeing increased use of digital signage solutions by newcomers in the food industry, like cafes and family-run restaurants. They’re also being utilized by small hotels and bed and breakfast hostelries. Regardless of your business landscape or the industry you belong in, digital signage can serve as a tool for you to connect, engage, and boost revenue.
How to Get Buy-in for Digital Signage
With the myriad of benefits digital signage can bring also comes a hefty initial cost. So the first hurdle, especially for small businesses, is getting buy-ins to implement the solution. Everyone has seen a digital sign at least once in their life, but getting them to understand their impact and potential ROI can be a challenge.
The best course of action is to create a digital signage plan for your small business. Here, indicate your goals and vision, as well as your specific plans for your digital signage campaign. This should include your audience, objectives, and performance metrics.
If you are the ultimate decision-maker, you might think getting buy-ins isn’t necessary to start implementing digital signage solutions. But remember that you need the support of your staff to convert your goals into results — after all, they’re the ones who will be maintaining your screens and content.
To gain support for your digital signage campaign, think about how you can get your staff excited about the solution and motivate them to buy into digital signage as a project.
What Small Businesses Need for Digital Signage
If you think about it, setting up digital signage is quite simple. You just need to gather some hardware and subscribe to software that can power up your screens. Here are the things you need to acquire to get started with your digital signage solution.
Hardware
The hardware you need for digital signage includes a media player, which will upload and sync content from your software to your display, and, of course, your digital signage screen.
There are plenty of hardware options to suit your needs and budget. While there are professional displays specifically designed for digital signage, most small businesses opt for low-cost alternatives to start.
You can simply purchase a smart TV that’s compatible with your digital signage software or repurpose an old TV or monitor and attach a USB stick to deploy content. There are also media players in the market with more advanced capabilities, such as Amazon’s Firestick or Google’s Chromebox.
Software
Digital signage software is the powerhouse behind your displays. It’s where you can set up and manage your screens, create and deploy content, and integrate apps and technologies to improve your digital signage’s functionality.
There are plenty of digital signage software solutions you can choose from, but not all of them are built the same. Some have better features than others, which makes it important to do your research and choose software that aligns with your goals, resources, and budget.
Ideally, your software should have the following features and characteristics:
- Easy setup: The software you choose can directly affect how easy or how hard it will be to set up and manage your displays. Choose one that requires the least technical expertise to deploy.
- Content creation: Your digital signage software should not limit the type of content you can publish onto your screens. Make sure it supports different media formats, whether video, image, animations, or slides. Some software even comes with ready-made templates that can make content creation much easier.
- Remote management: Remote management capabilities will allow you to control your digital signage from anywhere. Ideally, you should have a cloud-based solution that allows you to manage your screens, content, and media players from any device and any location.
- Third-party integrations: Your digital signage software should allow integrations with third-party apps and platforms. This will widen your content scope, allowing you to add calendars, weather widgets, slideshows, social media walls, or digital RSS feeds to your display with ease.
- Security: Look for software with strong data privacy and security measures. This can help ensure that your content and hardware are protected against cyberattacks and data leaks.
- Support: To help you integrate your digital signage solution into your organization seamlessly, look for software that offers training and support for your employees.
- Scalability: Finally, your software should be able to grow with you. While you might be looking at deploying only one screen in the meantime, we recommend that you find software that can grow your digital signage network as you scale your business.
Steps to Implement Digital Signage for Your Small Business
Getting your hands on the hardware and software you need for digital signage doesn’t mean you should start deploying content right away. To maximize your investment, you need to educate yourself on the best practices for using digital signage. Here are the next steps to take:
Know Your Target Audience
Showing content on your digital signage screen without any intent or purpose is a surefire way to hinder the results you’re looking to achieve. Your digital signage campaign will be heavily reliant on who your target audience is and what they’re looking for.
So, the first step to your digital signage implementation is knowing and understanding your audience. Find out their demographics, interests, needs, and pain points. Only then will you be able to create and broadcast content that aligns and resonates with them.
When you target your content to a specific audience, you get more value out of your digital sign and increase the potential of getting favorable results.
Create Captivating Content
Once you know who your target audience is, you can get started creating content that aims to captivate and convert them into customers. There are plenty of ways to generate content for digital signage — you can use collaterals you already own, create new content through graphic designers or design apps, or use templates provided by your digital signage software.
Regardless of how you decide to create digital signage content, make sure to observe the best design practices. Pay attention to readability, align your design with your branding, and incorporate a persuasive call to action. To make content deployment easier, we recommend creating a content strategy and planning content scheduling.
Assign Content Management Roles
Next, you’ll need to put people in charge of managing and deploying content on your screens. Depending on your bandwidth, assigning your digital signage campaign to your IT department or marketing team makes the most sense.
If you invest in easy-to-use digital signage software, though, digital signage management is a task that can go to anyone. We’ve seen small businesses assigning the task to teachers, office managers, librarians, HR assistants, etc. With a little training and intuitive software, anyone can manage a digital sign.
Measure Digital Signage Performance 
Digital signage performs better than traditional signage by a long shot. Statistics show that it can capture 400% more views than static displays, has a 47.7% effectiveness on brand awareness, and can facilitate a 46% increase in customer satisfaction.
But all these benefits can only translate if you use digital signage correctly. There lies the importance of measuring your campaign’s performance.
Set your key performance metrics and take the time to analyze the data. Assess whether or not your digital signage campaign is progressing toward your objectives, whether that’s increasing awareness, attracting customers, or boosting sales. And most importantly, make improvements to your content until you find the right recipe to advance your goals.
Power Up Your Small Business Digital Signage with Rise Vision
Getting started with digital signage can be a complex endeavor. And being a small business, you might not have a full-blown in-house IT department that can help you manage your displays and keep track of your content strategy.
Rise Vision eliminates all the technical bells and whistles involved in implementing digital signage. Our intuitive software makes hardware and content management easy — plus, we provide full support and training to help you keep your displays running.
Get started with Rise Vision’s software for your small business digital signage. Give our free cloud based digital signage a try.
