Digital advertising has revolutionized modern business and if you are not leveraging the new technologies you are losing out big time. One of the most ubiquitous advertising techniques today is digital signage with flat panel displays appearing everywhere. From retail stores, campuses to buses, there is no denying the place of digital sign boards in the modern business environment.
The Synergy of Digital Signage and Social Media
With increased competition, businesses are being forced to get more creative in adoption of digital marketing. One of the most creative techniques that big brands are utilizing is the integration of social media in digital signage. Social media has become the next frontier for online marketing with Pew Internet Project’s research reporting 74% of all adults are on social media.
According to Brand Watch, Facebook boasts 1.71 billion monthly active users and 1.083 billion daily users on the social network. The same report shows Twitter has 310 million monthly active users with over 1.3 billion accounts having been created so far. The numbers are also impressive for other top social networking platforms including You Tube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Google+, among others.
Surprisingly, there are over 91 active social media sites and your business can creatively use the popularity of these sites for digital signage campaigns. For digital signage, the benefits are immense including better visibility, easy advertisement of offers, triggering appetite, customer loyalty, low workforce, entertainment, easy updates, instant responses, conveying information, among others.
By integrating social media into your digital signage campaign your business will leverage the synergy of two high performance advertising tools.
Here are just some of the advantages of using this approach:
• Better interaction: Everyone is on social media and if your brand can tap into these networks you will be able to initiate conversations and track what your regular customers are doing.
• Brand awareness: If you have an offer and you create a hashtag for the same you can bet more people will get to know about it. Everyone is looking for bargain and if your hashtag is promising a deal you will get a lot of mentions.
• Better customer experience: Social media allows for quick responses and if you have a hashtag trending on your digital signage, it is easy to learn about areas that can be improved at your store to get a better ROI.
How to Integrate Social Media with Digital Signage
Now that you appreciate the potential in integrating these two techniques, it is time to get down to work. Like all innovative advertising plans, you have to plan, and for your strategy to work, consider these two factors:
• Research your audience: You have to know which social media apps your target audience is using. This is the only way they will be attracted to share your displayed content. In Business Insider Study Nordstrom, the retail giant indicated how its digital signage campaign is working by displaying products that are popular on Wanelo. Simply put, you have to know which social media platform is ideal for your campaign.
• Don’t oversell: There is a tendency for businesses to focus more on the sales funnel as opposed to customer experience. Social media is about fun and your displayed content should reflect this.
Once you have picked the most amazing digital signage templates it is now time to get down to work. Here are some practical strategies that have been tried by other brands when integrating social media and digital signage.
1. Use Live Video
Coca-Cola and Royal Caribbean have already launched successful campaigns incorporating live video and social media. The luxury cruise ship company used Periscope and encouraged its customers to share their experiences on their cruises. These videos were then displayed on large billboards in New York. The campaign was an instant hit with thousands sharing the videos and the brand getting global recognition. Video is the future of marketing on social media and you just have to provide sharable content to make it work for you.
2. Engage Your Customers
Social media is about interaction and having fun and Coca-Cola used this knowledge to push its #CokeMyName campaign. The massive campaign encouraged customers to share their first names and a personalized story would be posted at Times Square. As the campaign picked up more people tweeted as they got the personalized story back in a tweet. The idea here was for the brand to give customers a personalized experience and it worked magic.
3. Make it Fun
People are on social media for fun and if you are launching a digital signage campaign integrated with social media, make sure you recognize this. Your campaign should elicit curiosity and a smile and a reward at the same time. Think of your employees’ selfie with a lucky shopper who has just won from your promotion. You can use such an image on your digital signage and encourage other customers to share it for their own chance to win and feature on your display.
4. Sharing is the Key
If you are to leverage social media then your content has to be shared. You can get free marketing by encouraging customers to share their images online for an opportunity to feature on your digital signs. You can also encourage them to post images where they are using your services or products for a chance to win coupons, gifts or other freebies. This is where hashtags will come in handy as they encourage people to keep sharing.
With these techniques you are now ready to leverage the synergy from social media and digital signage. Your displays must have a call to action (CTA) in order to trigger the action you want. Whether you want an image to be shared or you are alerting people about an offer, it is important for this to be clearly displayed.
Go ahead and leverage the power of digital signage and social media and always look for trends which you can use to get more from your advertising project.
