7 Steps to Create Value in Your Business with Scalable Digital Signage

Look around. Unless you’re under a rock in the Mojave Desert, technology is delivering communications to you.

From the smartphone in your pocket to digital signage when you go outside your door—everything from information displays in airports, banks, shops,and hotels, as well as meeting room signage, KPI displays, and employee engagement screens in your workplace—our lives are enriched by omnipresent digital signage.

No wonder businesses in all industries are increasingly embracing digital signage as a highly effective way to grab and hold the attention of their key audiences—whether customers or employees—and deliver key content in a more impactful way. To underline how effective digital signage is in virtually every business you can think of, the market continues to grow rapidly: today it’s worth $26bn and within four years this is predicted to grow to $39bn.

Similarly, for employee communications, where companies use a variety of channels to connect and engage workers through platforms such as Poppulo Harmony, digital signage is really coming into its own. Gallagher’s State of the Sector 2024report showed a 6% increase in digital signage usage since last year and a 24% increase in the perception of its effectiveness.

Clearly, whether you’re a moderately-sized business or a large enterprise with tens of thousands of employees, like many of our customers, you’re going to want to give serious consideration to creating a scalable digital solution that adds value to your business and delivers ROI.

If you don’t want to be left behind your competitors or are just starting out on your digital signage journey, we’ve created a guide to help you, from pre-implementation to tips on how to scale the solution. You can download How to Create a Scalable Digital Signage Solution That Delivers ROI, or read on for a quick run-through and grab the main guide later.

# 1. Make Your End Goal Your Starting Point

Don’t begin your digital signage journey by thinking about how many screens you might need and what you’re going to put on them. Start instead by clearly defining your objectives and what success would look like. What problems or challenges do you want digital signage to solve?

For example, if you know that your business needs to improve productivity on a manufacturing floor, this allows your signage partner to deliver an impactful solution thatmaximizes time to value on your project.

And it allows you to create benchmark data to measure success over time. An important added benefit from being clear about your goals from the outset is that additional channels like mobile and email can be scoped into the project early to help you better reach your audiences.

Scoping these additionalchannels early, even if they’re not implemented until later, saves time and costs in the long run.

# 2. Select the Digital Signage Provider That’s Right for You

The digital signage market can be difficult to navigate, with seemingly hundreds of niche vendors. However, all digital signage vendors are not created equal. When selecting a new digital signage platform or deciding whether to replace an existing provider, it’s vital to ensure you’re evaluating each vendor on a variety of capabilities—for current and future needs. 

Ask: Is it scalable, powerful, and intuitive for anyone to use? Can it streamline device management, and is it able to integrate other comms channels such as email and mobile?

#3. Plan Content Based on Signage Location and Purpose

The content you post will determine how successful your digital signage will be, but before you create a content plan or strategy, complete a journey map for your various audiences: who they are and where they are physically located at different times of the day. You will need this because different locations require different types of messaging.

For example, in a workplace, signs in hallways should be more like billboards with short, impactful messages and minimal detail, while break area screens can have more detail since people have more time to digest the content.

And while content on manufacturing floor screens will focus on operational comms such as KPIs and safety alerts for employees, screens elsewhere can deliver organizational comms such as people updates.

# 4. Develop a Content Strategy

First, make a list of the types of messages you need to communicate to all your audiences and their locations: customers, guests, and employees wherever they work: in the office, on the frontline, or manufacturing floor.

Remember, your content strategy should be fully aligned with company goals. How you create your content is a different matter. Content for some applications—such as KPIs for factory floors, and meeting room signage—can be driven by systems integrations, while other applications need to account for frequent updates from content contributors throughout your organization.

#5. Creating and Deploying Content

To get the most value out of your digital signage network, content should come from every corner of your business. So, one of your first steps should be to identify stakeholders in every department—as well as backups—who will be responsible for content contribution and educate them about the opportunities digital signage presents. And it’s also critical to set timelines around content contribution so you can ensure your screens are always updated with relevant content.

• Provide guidelines for consistent communications. Create a style guide for content creators to ensure communication consistency. Inconsistent content will erode the impact of your signage and work against the initial goals of your project.
• Enable content contribution and management from anywhere. Your content contributors need the flexibility to update and schedule content from wherever they need to, whenever they need to.
• Leverage pre-built, ready-to-use templates, allowing contributors to edit content within an approved layout.
• Include a Call-to-Action (CTA). This helps drive people to places where they can find more information about the content displayed. Given the increased need to provide touchless options, many organizations are relying on QR codes to enable their audience to access additional information quickly and easily.

# 6. Content and Network Governance. 

Content governance is essential for the successful implementation of any digital signage network. To streamline governance, you will need a centralized, cloud-based content repository that gives anyone at your company a place to upload and store rich media assets, and then easily access and schedule that content from any device, anytime.

• Create a content and application request submission process. This is key to driving content because some of the best ideas for content and applications will come from your audiences, the people who consume the content on your network.
• Ensure you have a scalable way to manage users and permissions. When it’s time to scale your network, the ability to easily add contributors—only giving them access to the tools and permissions they need—is invaluable.
• Integrate your digital signage network with your company’s identity provider (IDP) to streamline access and remain compliant with your company’s security protocols.
• Document your digital signage processes. Process documentation may not be the most exciting aspect of managing a digital signage network, but it is critical. Things like defining the process for identifying backup resources, creating guidelines around the removal of content, and implementing rules for content contributor permissions, are all integral to the ongoing success of your digital signage network.

#7. Scaling Your Communications Solution

Measure Channel Efficacy.

There is little point in creating and deploying content on your digital signage network or any other communications channel unless you know whether it’s getting the results you set out to achieve.

So, you need to be able to measure what content is hitting the mark with all your target audiences.

You need to be able to track engagement across every channel that your business uses—digital signage, email, mobile, Intranet, and collaboration tools—to find out what’s working and what’s not and what needs to change to achieve your goals. 

Leverage Pre-Bbuilt Solutions to Scale Rapidly.

Given the increased need for flexible communications solutions, many Poppulo Harmony clients prefer to deploy pre-built, configurable solutions for employee communications and meeting room management so they get faster time to value.

After ensuring that they can effectively communicate across their entire organizations, our clients then begin expanding the scope of their solutions to include more customized applications to solve wayfinding, performance management, lobby experience challenges, and much more.

Scope Digital Signage into New Buildings and Renovations

To create a more cohesive digital experience in new or renovated spaces, you need to scope screens into the architectural drawings, as well as collaborate with your designers, developers, and systems engineers.

Adding screens to a building as an afterthought often minimizes the impact of the network, while proactively planning for screens during renovation or new construction projects helps ensure the location of each screen is optimized for the purpose of the application.

This creates the best possible opportunity to leverage digital signage to achieve your business objectives.

• If you would like to find out more about how Poppulo’s digital signage platform can help you achieve those goals—and how we’re making a difference for our many A-list clients—we’re here to help and we’d love to talk to you.