Advertising has always been a difficult prospect for most businesses, especially startups and small enterprises. Why? Compared to large corporations where cost is not an issue, smaller-sized businesses often don’t have the budget for extensive advertising efforts.
The cost of printing alone can rack up over time. Not to mention the other fees associated with curating content, installing the posters, and taking them down when they’ve expired. According to a cost analysis done by Medium, print advertising has a mean annual cost of about $5,340, which can really put a strain on a small business’s finances.
Because of this, plenty of businesses have explored other advertising mediums, one of which is digital signage. While there are those hesitant to invest in it because of its seemingly large upfront cost, the investment ends up paying for itself by reducing printing, advertising, and maintenance expenses.
How Digital Signage Can Help Minimize Printing and Advertising Costs
Digital signage eliminates all the time, resources, and efforts spent on traditional advertising channels. Not only that, but it also helps you optimize your cash flow and increase your revenue. Despite the upfront expenses needed to adopt the technology, the long-term use and effectiveness of digital signage can help you understand its financial benefits.
Spend Less on Materials
When advertising through traditional signage mediums, such as posters, flyers, or brochures, you’re paying for all the materials needed to create these collaterals and distribute them to your audience. This includes leaves of specialized paper, colored ink, and any other materials needed to mount your collaterals on walls or hand them to potential customers.
All accounted for, these materials can take a toll on your advertising budget, especially if you’re carrying out a wide-scale campaign that needs hundreds or even thousands of these collaterals to implement. And when you have a new product or service to promote, you have to pay for these materials all over again.
Digital signage offers a much more efficient alternative. To advertise on a digital sign, all you need is a digital signage software subscription, a display screen, and a media player. With this basic equipment, you can display your advertising content on-screen and update them in real-time whenever your needs or goals change.
Reduce Traditional Media Expenses
Aside from the posters and flyers your business creates to advance your advertising strategy, you may also be spending on traditional media placements, such as billboards, newspapers, or magazines. Even when computed conservatively, the cost of these advertising platforms isn’t just spare change.
Including the cost of graphic design, billboard advertising will require you to shell out $2,000 per ad. Newspapers, on the other hand, will require an investment of $21,000 for a ⅛ page advertisement. While magazine advertisements cost $1,500 for a full-page ad in a local circular.
Aside from paying a huge amount of money to advertise your products on traditional media platforms, you also don’t have much control over how your ads appear on them. Usually, the design and format are decided by the advertising source.
With digital signage, you can stop paying for the inflated prices of advertising in traditional media and become more hands-on in your ad strategy. It’s as simple as creating content or using templates in your digital signage software and deploying them onto your screens.
Digital signage will also allow for better targeting. With the right placement, you can directly advertise to existing and potential customers at the right place and time — unlike traditional media that’s usually for mass market consumption.
Interested in allocating a percentage of your advertising budget towards digital signage? Learn more about digital signage advertising rates.
Eliminate Printing Expenses
Over 90% of companies do not track their printing costs, probably because they think it’s not a huge expense that warrants their time and attention. But did you know that your printing expenses are consuming 1-3% of your company’s total revenue?
Add to that, depending on the frequency of your printing needs, and you’re looking at a significant increase in your operating costs. You’re also generating a lot of waste with your print advertisement strategies, disposing of paper and toxic ink every time you revamp your ad campaign — recycling and disposal efforts also come with fees.
Digital signage offers you a cheaper and more eco-friendly alternative. With a digital sign, you can change and update your content anytime you need without extra cost or having to worry about throwing thousands' worth of print expenses in the trash.
Although initial expenses may be large, maintenance and subscription costs are less frequent, saving your business a lot of money in the long run.
And if you’re worried about being able to afford it, you’ll be pleased to know that the cost of digital signage decreases as technologies evolve. In the last decade, there has been a 50% decrease in the cost of deploying and maintaining a digital signage network.
Fast and Easy Updates
Traditional print advertising is not evergreen. Every time you have a new product or service you roll out, you need to do a complete overhaul of your advertising collaterals. That means taking down old posters or billboards, creating a fresh design, printing your new ad materials, and then having people put them up for your audience to see.
In fact, you have to do this process over and over again for even the smallest changes, like price updates or expired and new promotions. And every time you do, you’re depleting your ad budget by thousands of dollars.
But that’s not the case with digital signage. The main draw of this technology is its ability to reduce the work and money you spend updating your displays and showing fresh content.
With a content management system, you can manage your content changes digitally and in real time. You can even show different types of content in a playlist, optimized to be broadcasted on your screens at a time when your target audience is most active.
With this flexibility, digital signage makes it easy for you to make changes to improve your advertising strategies. It also allows you to conduct A/B testing on different content types to find the most effective one to advance your goals.
Increase Revenue
The issue with print advertisements is not only the expensive cost needed to implement and maintain them. Moreso, they’re becoming less and less ineffective in today’s digital age. In effect, you’re spending thousands of dollars on print advertising but not generating the results you’re aiming for.
Digital signage is a solution that will help you keep up with the high-tech world. With its dynamic, eye-catching displays that are hard to miss, you have more opportunities to attract and engage your audience with different media types.
Digital signage doesn’t limit you to static content. You can leverage the power of video, audio, animations, etc. to increase engagement and enhance customer experiences. According to statistics, digital signage gets 400% more views than static displays and has a recall rate of 83%.
With digital signage, you’re getting the attraction and engagement you need to facilitate brand awareness and recall, putting you in a much better position to convert your audience into paying customers. This increases your revenue and translates to a good return on your investment. And soon enough, your digital signage network will end up paying for itself.
Tips to Save More Money with Digital Signage
Businesses have saved up to 76% of advertising costs with digital signage solutions. Here’s how you can do the same.
Templates
Your digital signage advertising network will only be effective if you use it to display engaging content that communicates your message and drives results. While that typically means hiring a design team to curate content for your digital signs, you can increase your cost savings by using the templates available in your digital signage software.
Depending on the software you select to power up your displays, you can get access to hundreds of templates suited for different content types. Whether you’re promoting a new event or need to broadcast an emergency alert, you’re bound to find the perfect template to edit, upload, and immediately deploy onto your screens.
Location
Another important factor to optimize your digital signage is by placing your screens in the right locations. You need to be strategic about the placement of your signs, putting them where they can better serve your advertising goals.
To find the perfect location for your digital displays, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is the target audience for the display?
- Where do they spend most of their time?
- How can you place your digital sign so your target audience can’t miss it?
Putting your digital signage screens in the right places will maximize their effectiveness and help get a good ROI.
Screen Type
One of the costs involved in utilizing digital signage is electricity, which is why you need to pay attention to the type of screens your digital signage uses. Luckily, advancements in digital signage technology have yielded energy-efficient displays that won’t rack up your electric bill.
We recommend opting for LED screens, which are known to consume less energy than traditional LCD displays. Ultimately, the right screen type will depend on your intended application. Consider where you plan on placing your display, how large it will be, and the environmental conditions in your desired placement to choose the right screen type.
Reduce Advertising Costs with Digital Signage
Digital signage eliminates a lot of the expenses that go into print advertising, from the costly materials to printing and labor. If you sit down and compare your print advertising expenses with the cost of installing and managing a digital signage network, you’ll notice a significant decrease in your operating expenses and an increase in your revenue if you opt for the latter.
If you’re ready to save money and advertise more effectively, start a free trial with Rise Vision’s free digital signage solution.
