Enhancing your engagement with the end customer — practicality or novelty?

Nov 03, 2015

Ultimately all marketing is an attempt to engage customers with a positive message about your brand or product in the hope of a corresponding upswing in sales.

The possibility of integrating digital signage systems with new technologies and the flexibility to try new things out in the name of greater engagement is a great reason to deploy it in the first place.

So in this article we’ll run through a few of the ways digital signage could help you to achieve this. Some of them are established technologies, others are novel.


Digital Signage enhance your engagementContent is king

It is always a good idea to test your content on a display to see what it looks like in advance of deployment, and to spec your system so that it can play whatever media you want it to in the first place.Good content always helps engage customers.

Your content may have high production values and look fantastic on a TV, but in a digital signage system it will have to play reliably and crisply 24/7.

If play out of your content glitches, tears or stutters away in the background you might engage customers, but in a wholly unwanted way.


Animate with subtlety

Just because you can play endless graphics on your screen doesn’t mean that you should. People will use your screen to inform purchases, which means it has to convey information effectively.

If that information is something specific, such as a price or special offer, then it is a good idea to let them read it. Animation can be nuanced and subtle, and this can lead to the desired result.


Interaction can help

Interaction in digital signage comes in many shapes and forms, but giving people information in an interactive manner is proven to be effective. You can achieve this with established technologies such as touch screens, or with some of the newer technologies outlined below.


Measure your impact

Customer engagement is not a hard science, so you should utilise any feature of your digital signage solution which allows you to experiment and measure the impact of your display.

Many digital signage solutions will allow you to integrate counting technology, some of which can measure the age and gender of your audience with a high degree of accuracy, as well as other proxy measurements of engagement such as dwell time and how close they stood to the display.


The future?

We are entering the age of the omnichannel and gamified, personalised content. Technology exists right now which makes it possible for you to personalise display to your audience using data you already have.

An example of this would be the possibility of using iBeacons or locations services to geo-locate a customer smartphone to a display through your App, and either personalising the content on the display using e-commerce data or giving them a choice to download something to their phone such as a voucher, App or media file which they could then share online.

Your customers could potentially even make purchases from the screens themselves through your App. This has the potential to engender a high degree of customer engagement, but this technology is still new.


Summary

Improving customer engagement is a key reason for any change in marketing strategy. It is a highly achievable, practical goal using existing digital signage technologies.

It is also an area which is changing rapidly, so some further methods of customer engagement are already available, although these are novel and to some extent untested. This shouldn’t put you off, however.

Personalisation is a proven method of engagement in other areas of digital marketing, such as ecommerce, and our view is that it will gradually be adopted.


Article published by courtesy of John Muir, InStoreMedia. If you would like to talk with our experts to find out more about our solution or to book a demo, please use this contact form.