S o you’ve got the signage, but do you have the content to match? When you’ve decided to invest in digital signage for your business, you’ll want to see a return on that investment in the form of impact and increased engagement with your brand.

With traditional static signage, the decision-making is done before you install the signs, and then it’s fixed. With digital signs, content can be much more fluid and adaptive to your customers, and your business needs.

And what truly brings it to life is the quality of your content.

Choosing the right digital content

If you’re going to spend time crafting content for your digital signs, it needs to be the right content for your purpose because the best content will have the most powerful impact on your audience.

When you’re looking for engagement and impact, what should you keep in mind? For exclusively online businesses, there’s a fierce battle for attention and a whole host of optimization techniques to grab users’ attention.

With the content of digital signage, the playing field looks a little different. When digital meets the physical world, context is key in overcoming the challenge of grabbing and maintaining people’s attention.

Tips for crafting content for digital signs

Understand your audience

Before any crafting takes place, you’re going to need a clearly-defined content strategy which aligns your digital signage with your overall goals as a company. For an effective content strategy, you need to know who your target audience is, what they expect from your digital signage content, and the purpose of your signs.

Let’s take a coffee shop for example. Your target audience might change throughout the day. Perhaps in the early morning, it’s commuters or people grabbing breakfast on their way into work. By mid-morning, maybe you serve mainly retired people, stopping for a break from their shopping or parents with young children in need of refreshment. Over lunchtime, maybe there are a few small business meetings taking place and by mid-afternoon older teenagers are dropping by as they finish college for the day.

By understanding your core customers at different times of the day, you can more carefully refine your digital displays to maximize audience appeal. Perhaps during mid-morning, a screen in your front window displays an animated, steaming, and appealing cup of coffee to entice shoppers to take a break.

GIFs are a great way to incorporate moving images without having to spend time and money creating high-quality video content. One powerful technique is to use the GIF format to create a cinema-graph – a photo which has both still and moving parts which play in a loop. So the coffee cup might be still, but the steam might be animated, helping to create a welcoming and warm ambiance.

Attraction not interruption

Continuing with the coffee shop example, the appealing beverage displayed onscreen is a way of attracting customers. By displaying a desirable drink in the place where people are actually looking for it, it is more likely that your customers will want to do business with your particular coffee shop. If they then have a positive experience, they’ll remember your brand and return when they next want a coffee.

On the other hand, if your image of steaming hot, delicious coffee appears on a billboard or a sign in another location, say a bus stop, when your potential customer is focussed on other things, like catching a bus and getting home, it acts as an unwanted interruption.

Keep the noise down

One golden rule of content creation for digital signage is to keep it simple. Too much content at once can be overwhelming, unappealing, and off-putting. Instead, focus on delivering the right content at the right time to your audience. Less is more.

One way you can cut through the noise is to use a clear font in a size that can be easily read from different angles. After all, how often do we look at a sign straight on? Choose a colour scheme that assists readability and also relates to your brand. Good design makes it as simple as possible for customers to engage with your messaging.

Showcase your offering

Unlike static signage, digital signs give you the platform to present dynamic visual content in line with what customers expect to see in other aspects of their life, from video games to the go-to smartphone screen in their pocket.

Adding video content and other engaging visuals doesn’t mean you have to overly complicate your digital content, it’s a great way to showcase your brand, product, or service and provide some clarity to help people understand it better. It can also be used to draw attention to current offers and discounts.

Make it box fresh

Over time, your digital signage and its carefully crafted content will only hold your audience’s attention for so long. That’s why it’s so important to keep your content fresh and updated. Not only should it vary depending on the time of day, you also need to ensure that your offering is kept fresh and so that it doesn’t become obsolete – like adverts for Christmas sales in spring – creating variety and engagement for more frequent viewers, like returning customers and employees.

Be socially enterprising

One way you can keep your content fresh is by tapping into the latest content from your business or employee’s social media channels.

And if there are issues around optimizing the display for a particular channel, a digital sign is a great way to signpost your social channels to queuing customers whilst they’re waiting with their phone in their hand.

Know where it’s going

By giving customers a clear call to action, like visiting one of your social channels, you give your digital signage an obvious purpose. It also gives customers the opportunity to communicate with your brand on their own terms, perhaps by responding to a post, or taking part in a poll, all the time helping to build that relationship with your brand.

Of course, the call to action might also encourage customers to try a new product, a particular offer, or to browse a sale.

Create content templates

With all the hard work that’s gone into creating your content, it seems a shame to waste it once it’s served its purpose or needs a refresh. Creating editable content templates is a great way to save time and effort when you craft your next content for digital signage.

The right tools for digital signage

When it comes to digital signage, quality is king. Your digital content is competing for audience attention in a world of ultra-high definition visuals, and cinematic audio. But quality doesn’t necessarily mean splashing out on high-end film production techniques.

As we’ve seen, you just need the right tools for the job. Quality means creating content that fits your aims, enhances your business, and most importantly creates a stronger connection between your company and its customers and people.

Basic details like getting your spelling right, making sure your content is readable, and keeping your designs uncluttered are essential to communicate quality and care over your messaging.

So wouldn’t it be great if you could use a cloud-based no-code visual editor to create engaging content using shareable templates? After all, it’s easy to create good content using the right tools.

The good news is that Desquare is about to launch software that makes creating high-quality content for digital signs fast, simple, and effective.

Register now for the latest updates on our exciting new software release.