It’s no secret that here at Bluewater, we’re big fans of digital signage over traditional advertising or marketing signage. One of the main reasons for this is because it allows your communications and marketing to be as varied and complex as your customers are, and you can easily switch your messaging based on time of day, type of promotion, audience type, or any other factor that may influence the type of content you’re looking to display.
However, with so many possibilities of products that you can upsell or communities that you can connect with through ever-changing digital signage, how can you possibly know where to start when it comes to content strategy?
Luckily, our Bluewater content team has been there a time or two and we have developed a simple three-step digital signage content strategy framework that will help you create an endless supply of content ideas that you can deploy to the digital signage throughout your store. Follow along with these templates below to get started.
Want your own blank copy of the three framework templates we use below? See the bottom of this blog for instructions on how to get your free copy.
Part One: List Out Your Business Goals
The benefit of digital signage over traditional static signage is that you do not have to pick just one single goal or campaign when it comes to what you are communicating to your customers. Instead, we like to choose our top five business goals – one for each day of the week, to keep your content constantly fresh and rotating.
For example, your business goals might be metric-based, such as increasing traffic to your e-commerce store, selling more products, or increasing sign-ups to your company’s loyalty program. Alternatively, your goals could be to drive your customers towards a desirable behavior, such as spreading the word about your business.
Whatever your goals may be, list them out in a format similar to the template above and create 3-5 sub-goals for each one.
Part Two: Define Your Ideal Customer Personas
Once you know what you are trying to achieve through business and marketing goals, you now want to define your core audience and paint a picture of what they look like. What typically brings them in to shop? What are they interested in at each time of day or during each season? What are their main challenges in achieving the goals that you set out? And finally, what are the top opportunities that your business has with connecting with them, solving their needs and challenges, and helping them reach the goals you set for your business?
Part Three: Map Out Content Ideas for Each Persona
Once you have listed out all of your business goals and have broken down the different type of ideal customers that you have shopping in your store, you have all the information you need to start mapping out unique digital signage content ideas for each scenario.
Create a template similar to the one above for each customer persona that you created. For example, we created the template above based on our “Savvy Shopper” persona. In column number one, list out each of the five business goals that you created. (Example: Activate your audience.) In the next column, list out one of the persona opportunities that you created that is relevant to that business goal. (Example: this persona will take action if they have a coupon for your store or are earning points as part of a loyalty program.) Next, combine each goal that you listed with the related persona opportunity to create a unique content idea that would encourage the customer to take action towards that goal, based on what you have come to learn about their persona. (Example: Run a digital promotion that advertises a one-time 20% off coupon that the customer can use immediately if they sign up for your rewards program.)
By creating a piece of digital signage out of this content idea, you can be sure that you are effectively targeting one of your ideal customers and are creating a promotion or piece of communication that will directly work towards one of your larger goals. Repeat this process for each of your target personas and boom – you have a month’s worth of unique digital signage content that is hyper-targeted towards your shoppers and their pain points.
Want a free copy of the three content strategy framework slides we used in our examples above? Drop us a line at hello@bluewatertech.com with the subject line “Digitial Signage Content Framework” and we’ll email you a blank set of templates that you can start filling out right away – no strings attached!
Our digital signage and AV experts are also on hand if you’d like to chat more about implementing effective digital signage into your retail location or business, so get in touch!
