Digital signage is everywhere, from roadside billboards and touchscreen kiosks to ticker tape LEDs, and in-room televisions that display the weather. We see it everywhere and utilized in a number of ways.
Do you want to modernize your facility and you are wondering if this could be the best solution?
Are you looking to enhance communications and/or the customer experience in your facility or on your campus? Have you seen digital signage in other places and are wondering how you might use it?
Well, you are in the right place. We are going to show you ways various organizations and industries use digital signage and the benefits it can bring.
Before we explore the ways to use it, it is important to understand how it works. Depending on the type of digital signage, the setup, control, and functionality can work differently. For example, an interactive touchscreen wayfinding system with mobile interconnectivity will work differently than a digital sign with static content displayed. However, the basic principles apply to all digital signage.
Here is how it works:
The digital signs are just tv or video screens.
The content displayed on screen is controlled through a device called a media player. This is a compact computer that can easily broadcast high-definition images, videos, and animations.
The content the media player is broadcasting to the screens is updated from a connected desktop or laptop.
In simple terms, you can control everything that is displayed on the signs from your computer.
To utilize more complex features or enhanced functions, you will need to work with specialized digital signage software that allows you to get the desired function. For example, Navigo® digital directory signage allows you to add live news, traffic, and weather feeds, and mobile QR code scanning, and integrates with other technologies to view analytics, usage data, and a lot more.
The best way to understand how digital signage works for your specific use case is to get a demo. Getting a demo will give you firsthand experience with the various parts of a digital signage system.
Since 1999 we at ITS, Inc. have been developing digital solutions for buildings and it has been amazing to see the innovations for use cases as technology advances and as consumer behaviors change.
As you will see in a moment, digital signage provides incredibly unique solutions to challenges in various industries. Seeing the possibilities below may just help you solve the challenges you are experiencing.
Let’s dive into some other different ways to use digital signage.
Companies of all sizes are using digital signage to welcome visitors and connect employees across their organizations. Unlike static posters and signs, digital signs can be updated on the fly and rotated as often as you wish to keep your employees informed, engaged, and on the same page. Corporations are using digital signs to spotlight achievements, convey essential information and announcements, display real-time business intelligence data, and reinforce their histories and brands.
Inside a corporate office, you will see digital signage used in a variety of ways:
Announcing upcoming events
Visually display KPI
Share menus
Provide entertainment in lounges and waiting areas
Honor birthdays and employee anniversaries
Track progress toward significant goals
Make emergency announcements
Share local, relevant traffic, news and weather reports
Showcase new products
Honor achievements in a big way
Help visitors navigate facilities
With their sprawling campuses, high visitor traffic, and extensive communication needs, educational institutions are at the forefront of digital signage. Digital signs connect students, staff, and visitors seamlessly across locations, providing better user experiences, promoting safety, uniting the school, and disseminating important information. And they capture the attention of today’s tech-savvy generation.
Digital signage-connected campuses are informative and engaging. They have a strong identity and a dynamic means of spreading school spirit. And they convey a high-tech, progressive vibe that today’s students are looking for when shopping for a school.
Below are ways schools and campuses are using digital signage:
Publishing menus
Sharing calendars and schedules
Promoting events
Making critical announcements
Providing sports scores and rankings in real-time
Generating revenue through campus-approved advertising
Thanking donors
Recognizing student achievements
Broadcasting ceremonies and speeches
Helping new visitors navigate the campus
Promoting bookstores, cafes, and other on-site venues and amenities
With their extensive facilities, large, mobile staffs, high visitor traffic and critical communication needs, healthcare providers are enjoying tremendous benefits from digital signage. They can help streamline important communications and simplify navigating the maze of hallways, departments, and campus grounds.
Connected patients are more comfortable and confident, more relaxed while waiting, and better informed. They make better use of your facilities and have better experiences. Connected staff are also better informed, engaged, and up to date.
From immersive multi-floor, multi-building hospital maps to promoting hospital services, digital signage can be used in a number of both simple and more complex ways, including:
Providing entertainment in waiting areas, patient rooms, and gathering places
Helping visitors find their way around
Providing educational programming
Promoting virtual patient services and information
Recognizing donors
Communicating important information to staff and visitors
Making emergency announcements
Spotlighting patient stories and staff achievements
Providing weather and other local news in real-time
Publishing food menus
Displaying wait times and appointment availability
Promoting on-site amenities
For hotels, conference centers and other travel destinations, providing great visitor experiences is not just nice to do—it is at the very heart of your mission. When visitors miss critical information or cannot find their way around, you lose business. Connected guests enjoy better experiences, use more of your facilities, and buy and spend more on amenities and services.
These are a number of ways the hospitality industry can and should use digital signage.
Provide responsive maps and other important navigation assistance
Promote on-site amenities and local vendors and venues
Post menus, specials and restaurant hours
Generate revenue from advertisers
Share weather, local news and other live content
Connect guests with transportation and other local services
Publish event schedules and daily events
Post check-in and check-out times and other guest announcements
Today’s shoppers are always connected. To get them to buy, you need to connect with them on many levels. Unlike printed fliers and signs, digital signs reach out and engage shoppers with real-time messages in a format they can’t ignore. Connected shoppers buy more, explore more of your retail facilities and enjoy better experiences, encouraging repeat visits.
Here are some common ways retailers use digital signage:
Capture attention with video walls and other immersive displays
Provide real-time inventory and pricing
Advertise specials, upsell and cross-sell
Direct viewers to interactive content through QR codes
Communicate important messages to staff
Share store hours and announcements
Promote on-site services and amenities
Provide menus for in-store cafes
Provide interactive kiosks for store information, language translation, or other web-based applications
Provide wayfinding for visitors needing directions on-site
Generate revenue by selling ad space
Restaurants are connecting with restaurants in innovative ways, streamlining routine tasks like communicating specials, offering a touchless menu option, and placing orders. The result is better workflows and more enjoyable guest experiences. Quick-service and full-service restaurants alike are revolutionizing their processes with digital signage.
Connected guests are relaxed, informed and entertained throughout the dining experience. And connected restaurants provide better service with less work.
From self-service kiosks or digital menus, there is a variety of ways a restaurant can use digital signage, including:
Providing dynamic drive-thru displays
Advertising pricing and specials
Updating menus and offerings with less effort
Allowing table-side ordering
Up-selling and cross-selling
Providing video walls, table-side TVs and other immersive entertainment
Linking ordering, stockroom and food preparation areas
Communicating critical information to backroom staff
Providing weather, news alerts, and other real-time local information
Generating revenue by selling advertising space to local partners
Digital signs have transformed the travel experience for guests and transportation providers alike. Airports and public transportation authorities are using digital signage to direct customers, communicate schedules, and other important information, and generate advertising revenues to offset operating costs.
Connected travelers find what they need faster, require less staff assistance, take advantage of more on-site amenities and are more prepared for travel, creating a better experience for staff, commuters, and travelers alike.
Here are some ways transportation authorities can use digital signage to improve the experience for their travelers:
Posting arrivals, departures and other schedule information
Providing weather updates and other local information
Offering touch screen kiosks for ticketing, navigation and more
Helping travelers find their way through facilities
Communicating important announcements including emergency notices
Connecting employees across distant work areas
Providing entertainment in waiting areas and lounges
Promoting services and on-site amenities
Connecting travelers with travel options and other local services
Generating revenue by providing ad space for suppliers
Digital signage can be as simple as a single welcome screen or kiosk. Small businesses are using digital signs to welcome visitors, connect staff across separate work areas, and communicate important information. Connected business makes a big impression on clients, visitors, and employees.
There are a number of things small businesses can use digital signs for. Here are a few:
Make daily announcements
Share accomplishments
Publish calendars, schedules and assignments
Welcome visitors
Promote special events
Celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and achievements
Share weather and other local information
Provide entertainment in waiting areas and lounges
Publish menus for dining facilities
Post emergency notices
Signs for entertainment venues should be as exciting as they are functional. Digital signage enhances the overall visitor experience at theaters, amusement parks, sports venues, concert halls, zoos, museums, parks, shopping centers, and more.
Not knowing where to go, or what to do can turn a fun experience into a frustrating one. By enhancing the overall visitor experience, guests will be happier, more engaged and more likely to return.
Every entertainment venue should utilize digital signs. Here are a few ways they can use them to improve the visitor experience:
Help visitors navigate on-site with step-by-step wayfinding
Provide schedules, announcements and other important information
Serve as virtual concierges, guiding visitors to local information and services
Post event schedules
Promote on-site amenities
Communicate simultaneously with staff across distant locations
Publish menus
Provide touch screen kiosks for ticketing, wayfinding and more
Communicate important information
Provide scores, stats, and other data in real time
Make emergency announcements instantly
Broadcast events and shows over a campus
Enhance shows with video walls and other large screen displays
Provide direction in parking areas
Financial institutions are using digital signs to connect with customers and provide accurate, up-to-date information. Whether it is a video wall and LED tickers for a trading floor or a kiosk in a bank, providing accurate, current information is critical whenever money is involved.
Here are some common ways financial institutions are using digital signage:
Share real-time data such as interest rates, stock prices, and more
Help and manage visitors find what they’re looking for
Connect staff across distant locations
Provide entertainment in lobbies and waiting areas
Make important announcements
Provide weather updates and local news
Using kiosks for service automation and personalized information
Churches are all about connecting people, and digital signage can make that easier. Whether you’re a small church that wants to provide a welcoming, engaging environment or a large church trying to connect hundreds of guests each week, digital signage can help you engage with guests and regular attenders.
From communicating, to managing ministries and enhancing the overall worship experience, digital signs can help in a number of ways, including:
Welcoming new visitors
Providing touch screen kiosks for sign-in and childcare
Broadcasting services over multiple campuses and locations
Helping visitors find their way
Making announcements
Publishing schedules and events
Posting menus
Sharing weather and other local information
Mission-critical, real-time data visualization is essential to utility providers. Screens that display and relay data from various sources allow for fast response to major events. Flexible solutions that allow a provider to change the digital signs when certain conditions occur like “Dark Sky Days” make an operator’s information workload much more efficient.
Whether it is emergency notices or everyday communications, energy and utility companies can use digital signs in a variety of ways.
Adaptable video walls
Trigger content changes for fast-response scenarios
Arrange data from multiple sources for easy understanding
Engage staff with better communications
Emphasize safety with high-impact multimedia content
Recognized important milestones and achievements
Whether you’re a consumer-focused business or a company serving enterprise needs, digital signage is a tool for boosting communication, engagement, and productivity.
Digital signage is more than a modern way to display static communications. It can be used as a dynamic tool that allows for better customer interaction, visitor experience, and displaying communications in a more engaging way.
Industries of all shapes and sizes are utilizing this technology in so many ways because of the benefits it delivers.
You’ve seen in the previous section what digital signage can be used for. Now let’s explore a few of the benefits it can bring.
Your signage reflects your brand. Digital signage is an indicator that your brand is forward-thinking and focused on high-value results. By transitioning to digital solutions, you can elevate or maintain your brand image and preserve your brand equity with consumers, and employees, alike.
Your signage is a direct reflection of how your brand chooses to present itself. Opting for digital signs affects the messaging image, look, and feel of this marketing content, which in turn, benefits your brand.
Further, the messages and content you display on your signs is more dynamic and engaging. By incorporating movement, powerful imagery, and color-correct graphics, your brand can be displayed very professionally.
Whether your digital signs are customer-facing or employee-facing, they provide a valuable service in facilitating communication. Whether the content of your digital signage relates to sales, promotions, store navigation, workplace reminders, or other information, these displays make it possible to relay information to a large, mobile group of people, giving them the information, they need in the locations they need it.
By supporting communication within your business, you’re able to better coordinate activities in the organization. This can lead to improved workplace morale and greater productivity.
And with digital signage, you can take advantage of more real estate, in a dynamic environment. That just is not the case in a static print environment, where a multitude of messages were, at times, crammed onto one size-limited display.
Brand messaging must be consistent. This means coordination not only between digital signage, but also between sign displays and other marketing content. A marketing manager can manage signage with much greater ease through a cloud-based solution that offers centralized control, real-time editing, and instant display.
Simply put, when a sign needs to be changed, it’s done instantly online – whether that is from a corporate office, a home office, or beachside somewhere. Instead of running around manually swapping out sign content, you can synchronize or customize your content from the comfort of your internet-connected device.
For businesses operating multiple locations, managing consistency across these physical divides can be a headache. But with digital signs in place, a single manager can oversee all of the signage at every location, and can adjust the displays on certain locations to make sure every sign is displaying the same message. Or, you can deploy custom messages at each location to capture a local event.
With a single click of a mouse, one administrator can see and/or change the images and content displayed on digital signs in retail environments, corporate offices, and anywhere else these a digital signage system has been installed.
In summary, enhancing your brand image with dynamic digital content, deployed from a central location, ensures your brand not only appears forward-thinking, but is also consistent and accurate.
The use cases for digital signage has grown over the years. As you’ve seen from the above applications, digital signage is more than a digital form of static communication. It can improve the users’ experience, help visitors find their way, allow for emergency communications, provide virtual services on-demand, and so much more.
The purpose of this content isn’t to tell you how great digital signage technology is, but rather help you discover how digital signage can solve some of your unique challenges.
What does your organization, facility, community, or campus need? Do you have a need for a unique communication solution? Is improving the visitor experience important to your bottom line? Would your business benefit from modernization?
Digital signage can help you overcome many communications, customer satisfaction and business challenges. The best part is that it is flexible and can be suited to meet your specific needs.
So, how will you use digital signage? Contact the experts at ITS, Inc. to explore the viable solutions available to meet your challenges.
