The Best Way to Plan Your Digital Signage Content Strategy

Skykit shares content strategy expertise on how to plan and build out an effective campaign for your company's digital signage needs.

You know the adage about the person without a plan, and here at Skykit, we don’t want any of you to be without a digital signage strategy now or in the future.

Skykit is here to help you set goals and work toward reaching them, starting with creating your company’s digital signage content strategy plan.

Assess Your Digital Signage Content Strategy Needs

Before you start planning, we recommend looking back at how your team used your digital signage solution in the past year.

By asking the right questions, you’ll be able to better plan a content strategy for the upcoming year.

A few questions to examine:

• Do we have the right people contributing to our digital signage content?
• How often did you update content?
• Did your display locations help you meet your communication goals?
• Did you increase the number of audiences who are seeing digital signage?
• Did you set goals at the beginning of the year?
• Did you meet those goals?
• Would we benefit from broadcasting different data from other sources?
• Do your teams use data dashboards and have the information you want to share more broadly?

Documenting these responses and keeping them for future reference will help you identify if you took the proper steps and also help you plan your digital signage content strategy for the coming years.

Set Goals

After you’ve assessed your organization’s use of your digital signage solution, the next step is goal setting. A clearly stated and measurable goal will help your team understand the value and investment in the digital signage solution and lead to better results.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

To help make sure your content strategy goals are not only SMART but also smart for your business, you’ll need to ensure the right cross-functional digital signage contributors are part of the process.  

Partnering with the right teams to map your goals for the new year will help ensure you capture each stakeholder’s objective.

A Few Common Goals To Consider When Planning Your Digital Signage Content Strategy:  

• Drive team engagement (awareness of objectives and creating feelings of affinity toward the organization)
• Use gamification to drive desired behaviors
• Sell ad space
• Reduce workplace safety incidents
• Increase social media engagement and reach
• Reduce the use of printed materials

If this all seems like a lot, don’t worry, start by setting 1-2 goals for your digital signage solution.

Starting small will help you accomplish something and drive you toward further improvements.  Set your goals early on, and then make your plan to guide you toward success.

Plan

Here we go back to the beginning, a person with a plan…

You’ve assessed how you used digital signage in the past and what your goals are for the future, now it’s time to identify what types of content can be used to keep your screens engaging and fresh.

We’ve created a content calendar that you can use to support your digital signage network. It’s got a map for the coming weeks and months with recommendations on maximizing your digital signage solution.

Get your copy to unlock your potential right away. Once you’ve got your content planning tool, you can begin mapping out your digital signage content strategy more effectively.

Although some content cannot be planned, most display content can be programmed in advance.

The content you can incorporate into your calendaring includes:

• Evergreen content, such as company goals, corporate videos, and safety messages
• Company events, holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries
• National observance days (i.e., Earth Day, National Donut Day, National Dog Day)
• Data visualizations using Skykit Dashboard Connections
• Feeds (RSS, weather, news, finance, social media)

Utilizing Beam’s scheduling features allows you to use playlists to optimize your time organizing your content and increase your productivity.

Discover our favorite free tools to help you create content for your digital signage.

Measure

When planning your digital signage content strategy (goals, content, cadence), it is essential to identify how you will measure your success. Otherwise, how will you know if you have met your goals?

When looking for improvement, it’s critical to understand your baseline and measure after specific campaigns or scheduled content is put into place to drive that improvement.

A few standard measurement methods include:

• Surveys or eNPS
  • Organizational check-in times at periodic business reviews
• Data Tracking/collection
  • Social media engagement
  • Internal event attendance and involvement
  • Documentation of workplace incidents
  • Usage of dedicated URLs, promotion codes, or QR codes
• Document Qualitative Feedback
  • Feedback forms

Adjust and Apply

As you analyze the data, you can take the learnings from each category and adjust your strategy accordingly.

For example, suppose your organization modified the use of a meeting space during the year; your answer to the question, “where are my displays located?” might reflect the need for something new — another display and a new type of content to share.

These types of reflections allow you to adjust your digital signage content strategy appropriately.

We recommend Skykit Beam subscribers log in and experiment with new content types to get started applying your strategy to your digital signage network. For those without Beam, we encourage you to book a free demo to see what you’ve been missing.

Improve Your Strategy For Digital Signage With Skykit

We want to help your organization reach the goals you establish, so feel free to contact us for your digital signage content strategy needs. If you have questions or want to set up a time to plan, connect with our Customer Success team. Our Customer Success team also holds weekly Beam small group training sessions available on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. CT. Otherwise, our CS team would be happy to set up a strategy session.