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Checklist for the Effective Outdoor Digital Signage in Retail

The retail digital signage is changing the market forever. Offline business owners can now improve their customer engagement and deliver more relevant dynamic content. Choose the right digital signage software and get the most out of this opportunity to up your marketing game.

Photo: Kitcast Inc.

November 26, 2018 by Egor Belenkov — CEO, Kitcast

Effective outdoor digital signage for retail stores requires a serious approach and a certain level of involvement in your brand marketing data research.

First, you’ve got to understand how your brand interacts with your customer and who is your target customer after all. Even though retail digital signage lets you deliver the dynamic feed of content, you still have to customize it to boost your engagement rates.

Here is an ultimate checklist that you can use as a cheat sheet while setting up your retail store digital signage.

• Study Your Audience 

Before you start setting up your digital signage in the retail business, you have to know who’s going to interact with them.

Studying your audience includes learning about their age, gender, income, political views, lifestyle, hobbies, etc. The more in-depth research you do the better results you’ll get – it drastically affects the number of customers engaged with your signage. This research data will form a firm ground for your future success.

• Define the Goals of Digital Signage in Your Retail Stores

First of all, you’ve got to decide whether you’re aiming to retain your regular clients or offer something to newcomers? Do you want to sell something instantly or showcase the product benefits to mark the ground and work on brand awareness?

To answer all of these questions regarding the digital signage in retail, you’ll have to know:

- The customer buying cycle of your product.
- The time of your offer (is it instant or you plan something for a long run?).

The goals of your retail digital signage will be based on your initial product concept.

• Determine the Type of Content

Modern digital signage software for retail stores offers lots of ways to express yourself and convey your message with different types of content.

Images, texts, videos, slideshows, and even animated infographics – you name it. The modern business owner can consider all of these types of content. However, not all of them will fit a particular situation and product.

The general rule of thumb indicates that you should choose the content type keeping in mind the following:

- The lifestyle of your retail digital signage target audience.
- The goals that you’ve defined in the previous section.
- The speed of your message delivery.

While choosing the right type of content, you also have to remember the general design guidelines that you should comply with:

- Your digital signage retail content readability should be high, and texts should be easily scannable.
- The colors should be eye-catching, yet your clients should not experience eyestrain as a result.
- Keep it short and simple when it comes to CTA’s, texts, etc.

• Choose the Digital Retail Signage Location Properly

Let’s say you’ve already figured out your target audience. Then you can continue to use this research data to move further.

Knowing the target audience helps you to place the displays properly. The are several things that affect the location of the retail digital signage network:

- The number of people walking by that particular place hourly.
- The amount of time they have to notice and take a look at your displays.
- The lifestyle of those who will see your signage in that particular place.

Analyze everything before devoting yourself to a particular location.

• Bring Value To Your Customers

Retail digital signage gives you a lot of opportunities to create valuable content for your customers. Don’t just deliver the boring marketing content and catchy design tricks.

Work on your content to bring real value to the customers and give them a hint of how they can actually benefit from your product.

The digital signage in retail stores is your best tool to improve conversions and reach the clients that are too tired of boring billboards and ads.

• Test and Make Necessary Adjustments

There is no such thing as a perfect content plan; you’ll have to make changes throughout the process to find that sweet spot that will skyrocket your engagement metrics.

With that being said, once you’ve launched the dynamic content feed in your digital signage retail stores, you’ve got to be ready to make small adjustments to improve it.

Thankfully, modern software allows on-the-go adjustments and reviews of the detailed analytics on a daily basis.

• Use Flexible and Scalable Software

Retail digital signage requires effective software under the hood, but what makes a signage software effective?

First of all, you’ve got to consider how scalable it is. The scalability depends on the number of displays that you can use this software on with a specific subscription plan.

The flexibility of the digital retail signage software can be measured by the quality of content editor and number of features that it offers. The more customizations you can apply, the bigger is the number of creative ideas you can implement and try out.

Usually, a decent software offers a complete toolset to create and manage the retail digital signage content through a well-designed and user-friendly dashboard.

Additionally, it can offer you a set of widgets to improve the engagement and interactivity of your content.

Research the market and choose the software that will help you to get the most out of your digital signage in your retail stores.

Conclusion

If you’re an owner of the offline retail business, you should definitely consider using outdoor digital signage. However, you’ve got to know the fundamentals of digital signage to make it effective. Follow our checklist to build an effective outdoor digital signage network for a consistent customer engagement.

About Egor Belenkov

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