How to Select a Digital Signage Solution
What is digital signage?
When you hear the term “digital signage,” you may think of a passive display in a waiting room or school hallway, displaying weather or schedule information. But today, digital signage can be much more than that. Digital signage is the digital display of video or multimedia content for informational or advertising purposes. It is an advanced system that connects, interacts, and pulls content from a variety of sources in real time, improving communication with employees and customers.
As employees and consumers ourselves, we see digital signage every day. It enables organizations to attract potential business opportunities, increase brand awareness, enhance operating efficiency, improve customer experience, and more. These benefits drive the exponential growth of the digital signage market. According to ReportLinker, the digital signage market is expected to grow from $20.8 Billion in 2019 to $29.6 Billion by 2024.
Should you invest in digital signage technology?
Your organizational goals and objectives should play a big role in the decision to invest in digital signage infrastructure. Ideas and priorities usually vary widely throughout the business and across departments. For example: your marketing team may want to use signage to engage customers, while human resources may be interested in advertising employee benefit information. Identifying and prioritizing use cases will help you decide not only what to look for in a digital signage solution, but whether you need it in the first place.
So before you dive into features and functionalities, decide how you will use the technology. Common use cases include:
Internal Communications: Located in areas of your office that face internal users, this digital signage communicates things like operational announcements, personnel updates, company events, and policy changes. This content is commonly managed by your marketing or human resources team. It gives these teams an easy way to ensure employees have consistent, repetitive visual reminders of information they need to know.
Advertising: Digital signage can be an excellent medium to inform your prospective customers and existing clients about new products, temporary promotions, and persuasive offers from your company. A captive audience in a line or waiting room may have idle time to watch a whiteboarding video or product demo about your company that they might otherwise not watch. Most digital signage platforms offer an administrative portal that your marketing team can access to keep content up-to-date.
Kiosks and Wayfinding: Self-service screens, menus, and map information are incredibly helpful for providing your customers with a self-guided process. From visitor check-in to finding directions, kiosks and wayfinding functions also help your business eliminate the need for live personnel in low-traffic areas.
Room Schedulers: In addition to self-service for customers, digital signage can help with self-service employee needs as well. Conference room scheduling can be a pain point in busy offices with limited space (and in offices where social distancing measures permit a limited number of bookings and people). Digital signage automates this formerly manual office administration task.
Video Walls: Large-format digital signage displays add major appeal to high-traffic areas. Promotional advertising, graphic or abstract art displays, and gamification can be combined to provide the ambiance and experience your business desires.
What to Look for in a Digital Signage Solution
Once you’ve identified your priority use cases, it’s time to begin your vendor research and evaluation. Although your IT team may be responsible for deployment and maintenance of the digital signage infrastructure, other teams like marketing and HR may be expected to manage day-to-day usage. You’ll want to involve these key stakeholders in the vendor evaluation process.
When you evaluate digital signage vendors, we recommend organizing your evaluation into three key areas: ease of use, features and functionality, and platform infrastructure.
Ease of Use
Users tasked with digital signage content management are typically not IT team members. Therefore, ease of use is absolutely critical. You want to keep the following in mind to ensure ease-of-use:
Your departmental stakeholders, especially potential superusers, should be key members of your product demonstration meetings
Ask these users, most likely marketing team members, to truly envision themselves working in the platform; if possible, ask the vendor for a proof-of-concept or sandbox environment that users can play in
Place high value on the overall look and feel of the digital signage platform interface; if your daily users find the system clunky or too complicated, you won’t maximize the investment
Ask vendors about the onboarding process, available user training, and ongoing support structure to ensure successful technology adoption
Features and Functionality
Keep your departmental stakeholders in the room when you continue on to features and functionality. These are the critical topics to ask vendors to weigh in on:
Assigning members of the organization access to control different signage displays and limit what they can add/remove/modify is an essential feature
The extent of how granular the settings are for scheduling content is important; for example, you may need to schedule different content every 15 minutes (ask your departmental stakeholders to put together a mock schedule or scenario to test vendor complexity limitations)
Being able to group displays together by location or function will make it easier for your users to administer and manage
Widgets integrations (weather, third-party media platforms, etc.) can enhance the interactive experience; ask the vendors about interesting integration or ecosystem partnerships they may have
You will need a digital signage platform that supports text and images, animation, music, and the Internet
An emergency notification feature enables alerts to circulate to any and every sign with the same or different information simultaneously; this is an excellent safety feature that can be critically important in a worst case disaster scenario
Platform Infrastructure
Last but not least, your digital signage solution should complement your existing network and communications infrastructure and product requirements. There are three key considerations as you evaluate platforms and products:
Back-End: On-Premise, Hybrid or Cloud
Most solutions today are purely cloud-based. However certain situations could make on-premise or a hybrid solution a better fit. Consider your specific infrastructure environment to make this decision.
Display Quality: Commercial vs. Consumer
Digital signage typically requires the display to be on 24/7, whereas your standard off-the-shelf consumer TV is only designed to be powered on for a few hours a day. Using a consumer display in a digital signage application isn’t a good option and can lead to premature hardware failure. (And don’t rely on the warranty; consumer display warranties are usually void if displays are used in a commercial space)
Player: Discrete vs. Embedded
Digital signage solutions utilize a digital signage player (DMP) that syncs with the back-end solution and then shows that content on the displays (typically over an HDMI cable). The DMP can be discrete or embedded. Discrete players are a built as a completely separate piece of hardware, and embedded players are a built-in component in the display. We typically recommend staying away from embedded DMPs. They tend to be under-powered and suitable only for the most basic applications. In most cases, a discrete DMP is the best choice.
Ready to start your evaluation?
Before you can capitalize on all the benefits digital signage has to offer, you must begin with identifying your organizational objectives. Once you know the use cases that will provide clear benefit to your organization, you’re ready to begin your vendor evaluation process. As you review vendors, ask yourself:
Is this platform compatible with my users’ content needs and strategy?
Do these features match up with my business goals and user requirements?
Will the platform integrate with my current infrastructure environment?
When you prioritize organizational objectives and user experience, you have the best chance for project success. As a digital signage expert with various platform partnerships, Burwood can help with vendor evaluation, implementation, and training. Good luck with your journey, and reach out if we can help.
July 10, 2020
