The most important consideration of digital signage – content

If you’re thinking about digital signage as a new communication channel, then there are multiple things to consider including; the hardware, the software, your data, and the network – but one fundamental part of digital signage that often gets overlooked is the content itself.

When we say content, we’re not just talking about traffic updates, static welcome messages, and the odd colleague shout-out – we’re talking about using content to bring your whole brand to life with stories.

The human brain is hardwired for stories – we’ve been telling them since the very beginning, sharing stories through cave drawings and smoke signals, all the way through to visually-led social platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram.

Therefore if you want to engage an audience, tell them a story. If you want them to remember the story, then you need to make it visual. After all, we respond better when the content we look at plays on our emotions, and ultimately this helps to create the action you want your audience to take with your content.

Research has found that stories are up to 22 times more memorable than just facts and figures, and our brain has the ability to process images a lot faster than words – 60,000 times faster, in fact.

You simply can’t ignore the impact of telling a good story, and visual communication in the workplace is an essential part of how we help connect with your hard-to-reach audiences using digital signage.

So here are our top 3 tips for creating the right content.

Establish the what and why

Before you start thinking about the content itself, it’s vital that you understand the pain point(s) you want digital signage to solve. So in other words, what would you like digital signage to achieve? It could be to:

• Share business success
• Improve employee engagement
• Raise awareness of initiatives
• Create a connected workplace

Whatever it is, the role of design is simple – to help fix problems, so it’s crucial you know what you’re trying to solve beforehand. Without this information, you’re designing content that is based on guesswork or assumption.

Once this has been established and the objectives are in place, you can start looking at what your content strategy should look like in order to achieve those objectives and goals.

Understand your audience

It’s crucial to tailor your content so it speaks to your audience in a way that makes sense to them. If you understand your audience, your content will have far more impact.

Once you know who you’re designing for and the stories you want to tell, you should create a rigid and consistent content plan that will ultimately deliver success for your business. And if managed properly, digital signage will also help to:

• Create a stronger company culture and improve engagement
• Help employees better understand your company’s purpose & values
• Quickly provide useful, relevant, and up to date information

Even with hybrid working becoming the new normal, digital signage can bridge the gap between home and the office. It’s now more important than ever to use it as a channel to reinforce things such as employee recognition and culture, and what better way to do it than by turning colleague successes into stories from both inside and outside of the business you represent.

Design the right content

Content is king, but when it comes to digital signage, so is the context. A recent study suggests that the human attention span is shorter than ever before, at around 1.2 seconds, so capturing attention has never been more important.

However, in order to do this, you need to ensure you’re designing the right content – and a good place to start is to consider these 3 things:

• Location – “Where is the screen positioned?” 
• Audience – “Who’s going to be looking at it?”
• Behavior – “What will they be doing while looking at it?”.

By doing this, you’ll understand what content to display, and when, making it relevant for your audience each and every time.

Your content should be the lifeblood of your digital signage, and you should ensure that there is always a steady feed of fresh and engaging stories that suit and inspire your audience.

This can be achieved through constant dialogue with your workforce, to gain an understanding of what they want to see more or less of, you could start by; monitoring internal communications channels for stories; sharing initiatives, projects, and events that are happening throughout the business, and by delivering regular campaigns that highlight the success of its employees.

You’ll be amazed at how much an employee feels rewarded by seeing their name and picture on a screen.

But what is good content? People will have different opinions but for us, great content should provoke an emotion and a response from your audience that then creates a certain action. If you can get that bit right, the content will almost always work.

This is why you need a dedicated design team who are experts at creating engaging and imaginative content that connects with your audience in the right way. Talk to us today.

If you’re interested in our work – contact us at hello@bds.digital or +44 0191 484 1056