The world of business is a fast moving one, and trends in marketing are moving even faster. If you’re relying too much on traditional marketing methods, you may be left in the dust by competitors who are embracing digital.
One such trend that’s seeing steady growth is the use of digital displays to replace traditional in-store signage. Businesses in a wide breadth of industries are adopting digital signage to improve their customer experience, reduce overhead costs in the long run, and ultimately market their brands more successfully.
Are you doing the same?
If you’re an owner or marketing professional planning the next step for growing your small business in 2022 and beyond, the answer is simple: Embrace digital display technology (and start today).
What is digital display advertising?
In general, digital display advertising refers to the use of visual content to advertise on websites, social media, apps, and search engines. This can take the form of banner ads, billboards, social media promotions, and many other forms of digital messaging.
In this article, we’ll discuss the application of display advertising in digital signage specifically. If you need a primer on what digital signage is and its benefits, check out our article on that here.
Why go digital over traditional?
Times are changing, and so is the way consumers interact with marketing content. With so many businesses vying for peoples’ attention every day, you need to find a way to cut through the noise. Enter digital signage.
Increased interactivity, richness of media, and a more aesthetically pleasing experience are just a few of the ways digital displays have an edge over traditional signage. It’s our goal to help you understand and apply these advantages to strengthen your digital strategy and avoid the drawbacks of traditional marketing.
Below we’ll share seven ways digital signage displays can level up your in-store experience, and we’ll also go over some of the disadvantages inherent with traditional signage.
The Advantages of Digital Display
1. Gain the potential to earn more revenue
The first major advantage of digital signage over traditional signage directly relates to your bottom line. Incorporating digital display ads into your in-store experience can have the effect of not only increasing a customer’s average purchase amount but also increasing the likelihood they’ll be a repeat customer.
Digital signage adds a stimulating element to your messaging, creates more aesthetically pleasing content, and allows you to add interactive and timely elements to your marketing. In turn, this creates a dynamic shopping experience that will lead customers to want to return.
If you share the same messaging with traditional signs, the content will be static and unchanging (until you do the work to change it). This removes the possibility of timely advertisements, lessens the richness of the media, and overall provides a lackluster customer experience compared to digital methods.
2. Reduce overhead costs by eliminating the need for branded materials
While there is an upfront cost to implementing digital signage in the form of hardware (and potentially software) costs, the benefit of increased revenue and the elimination of costs associated with producing marketing materials cannot be overstated.
This not only applies to the monetary cost, but also the time you spend creating, printing, and setting up traditional assets. Once you’ve fully ramped up your digital display strategy, overhead costs are minimal due to the ease of editing and elimination of printed materials.
Depending on the nature of your business and how often you update your in-store signage, the cost of developing and printing new materials can really add up. A traditional signage process also takes more time, and as the old saying goes: Time is money.
3. Increase positive perceptions of your brand with an updated look and feel
Ensuring that your business has a modern look and feel inside and out is a great way to increase positive perceptions of your brand and gain new customers. Humans respond to eye-catching visuals and aesthetically pleasing experiences on both a conscious and subconscious level, so taking special care in arranging your space to show the right information at the right time (and in the right way) is key.
Digital display advertising can help you do this by leveling up the type of content you can showcase in your business. Adding elements like motion graphics and contextual messaging based on factors such as the season, ongoing promotions, or even the time of day all make for an in-store experience that will delight your customers.
Just like when you visit an outdated website, entering a store that hasn’t seen some love in quite a while can be a jarring experience. Relying on traditional signage means the way you’re displaying messages isn’t as rich and enticing as it could be. Your messaging also won’t be as fluid, causing you to miss out on timely opportunities.
4. Be agile in your ability to edit your marketing content
Speaking of timely opportunities, utilizing digital signage in your store is a great way to ensure your messaging stays fresh and relevant. Digital displays, especially coupled with effective digital signage software, allow you to easily edit the content you show in store.
This means you now have the potential to rotate messages throughout the day, display certain ads at only the times they are relevant, or even have a little fun with it and take advantage of opportunities to tweak your content based on what’s happening in the world.
Traditional signage and in-store displays are unable to be edited without creating new assets and ordering new materials. Full stop. Similar to the rise in QR code usage for restaurant menus, having the ability to quickly change your in-store marketing or create new pieces of content entirely cannot be overstated.
5. Create a more customer-friendly shopping experience
Another advantage of utilizing digital signage to its full potential is the overall improvement it creates for your customers and their shopping experience. Aside from the aesthetic aspects and the ability to easily showcase relevant information, the use of digital display technology can also reduce perceived wait times.
This is especially helpful in service-based businesses like salons, auto shops, medical practices, and professional services where having up-to-date information can ease customer concerns around waiting. They may also just be happy that you’re putting in the effort to update them. No one likes waiting unnecessarily, after all.
Put simply: Using traditional signage (or none at all) makes people feel like they are waiting longer, and no one likes waiting. There are traditional ways to mitigate this with a ticket system or intercoms that convey wait times, but even those have pitfalls in the sense they must be actively managed by employees. The simplest and most elegant approach these days is to have an electronic display that updates in real time.
6. Make your marketing easier to understand (and remember)
Digital signage and the use of digital display advertising can also increase the retention and recall rates of information by consumers. What this means for your business is increased brand recognition and recall of your business when those same consumers think about the product or service you offer.
This is an excellent example of the “phone number on the fridge” technique of finding ways to get consumers to think of you when they’re seeking a particular product or service. If you believe brand awareness is half the battle when marketing your business, then the use of digital signage means you’re already winning.
If digital signage is eye-catching and effective at getting peoples’ attention, traditional signs are decidedly the opposite. People are exposed to an incredible amount of information on a daily basis, so relying on static versions of your messages to carry the torch for your brand is simply not going to cut through the clutter.
7. Increase purchase intent inside and outside your store
At this point we know using digital signage will help people recall and retain information about your brand better. We also know a more modern delivery of marketing messages will help people think more highly of your brand. What does this mean for your bottom line, though? As it turns out, it could mean a lot.
One of the key advantages of digital display is increased purchase intent due to the aforementioned lift in brand recognition and recall. But it can also cause people to both spend more and come back for repeat purchases. What’s not to love about that?
Returning briefly to the idea that traditional advertising has a hard time cutting through the sea of messages people see every day, we can surmise that traditional signs would have little effect on the chance someone makes a purchase from you.
Aside from cases where specific promotions are taken advantage of, engagement with static ads is lackluster at best due to the decreased level of visual stimulation and interactivity.
Impress your customers and earn more business with digital displays
It’s clear digital signage is the way of the future. We’ve covered numerous advantages of digital display advertising, including everything from a more aesthetically pleasing shopping experience and reduced perceived wait times to increased brand recognition and more sales, to boot.
Times are changing and traditional marketing isn’t what it used to be, so if you’re ready to modernize your marketing, make sure to browse our digital signage software directory for more guidance. You can also contact one of our expert software advisors to schedule a call and discuss your business’s specific needs.
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