Beginners start here. Before you can create an innovative and engaging digital signage campaign, it’s best to understand where signage has come from when it started in the 90’s. We’ll cover the evolution of the technology and how market adoption has influenced its path over the years. You can see the historical trends so you can hone your company’s strategy before you even start. Learn from the mistakes and the wins of those you came before you.
At best, a CMS can enable you to publish gorgeous content, increase sales and engagement, and make it easier to approve content changes in the software. At worst, the software can fail to offer key features or integrations, have limited scalability, quickly become outdated, and be so difficult to navigate that your users stop leveraging the tool and your content ages quickly.
With so many options for digital signage software, it can be hard to narrow down what makes a CMS a good option, and which software is right for you — because let’s face it, there are no one size fits all. This is what you need to think about when evaluating CMSs, and it will help you narrow your list of vendors.
Selecting the right hardware is just as important as selecting the right CMS, and should be just as carefully chosen to suit your particular use. The truth is, you need to focus on all parts of the digital signage rollout in order to get not only a cohesive solution, but a scalable, secure network. And the hardware plays a crucial role, from the type of screens you choose, to the media player, to the mount, and cabling, they all need to be selected with your goal in mind.
In this chapter, we share the important information you need to know before buying.
Should you go with an on-premise solution or a cloud-based solution? In this chapter, we give you the questions to ask vendors, and the questions you need to think through that influences which option is best for your company.
Forgetting to look at these things can result in a bogged down IT department that needs to support and upgrade old technology, and the systems themselves can leave you with a large bill. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen, and that you have the infrastructure in place that supports your company’s needs today and can support your future.
Google is relatively new in the digital signage space, but with their hardware background with Chromeboxes, Chromebases, and Chromebits, it was a seamless transition.
Chrome media players are serious contenders in the marketplace and offer the same (if not better) results with a lower price tag. Chrome digital signage is a focused on how simple it is to update your devices and centrally control a fleet. We put together a list of some Chrome devices to dig into the pros and cons so you could decide for yourself if Chrome is the direction you’d like to go.
It doesn’t matter if you have the best software and hardware if the content you’re displaying isn’t getting any results. When creating content for digital signage, many of the best practices are unique to digital signage (as opposed to other writing). So even if you’re a confident writer, there are other variables at play like: dwell time, distance from a screen, and calls-to-action.
We have some best practices and a great list of free tools you can use to create your own digital signage content that looks beautiful (without needing a graphic designer).
You need to put serious thought into your strategy for rolling digital signage out in order to maximize its usefulness and accessibility to your audience. Case in point: You need to choose the right digital display to install based on the placement and environment in your store. Of course, the problems can start long before your digital signage is even fully installed. Without a fully planned rollout strategy, costly trial and error can make your expenses quickly balloon above your budget.
In this chapter, we’ll walk you through the digital signage rollout planning process and give you an idea of what to expect along the way.
There’s a difference between a gimmick and a trend. You don’t want to put money behind something that will fade tomorrow, you want to put money into a trend that is in the early stages of lifting user experience and buyer behavior to the next level so you can have a competitive advantage.
In this chapter, we’ll teach you how to tell a trend from a gimmick, and give you an insider’s perspective of what today’s trends really are so you can hop on while they’re still new!
