Bring your brand – or story – to life with LED digital signage

It’s easy to get fixated on ‘online marketing’ – and while it’s hard to believe, not everybody spends every waking hour looking at their mobile, tablet or desktop.

When you look at your whole customer journey or the lifestyle, activities and habits of your customers, you soon realise they inhabit physical spaces. It could be your foyer, customer business centre, showroom, retail space, train station or sporting event. So it’s important to think about context-relevant content.

To influence your customer’s perceptions or decision-making, in your marketing planning, you should analyse and document the whole buyer’s journey. A day in the life of your customer if you like.

This thinking is not new. This is what ‘out of home’ (OOH) advertising does. Think billboard on your way to work. But there are a few things that are changing.

Firstly, LED displays or ‘digital signage’ are coming down in price and improving in quality and resolution. They can bring emotion to your messaging and brand.

LED signage is bright, and engaging, can be large in scale, great for outdoor spaces and can be custom-built for any space. They can even be curved – and the new transparent LED resources are really cool. You’re probably seeing more LED’s around but you are also noticing that the quality can vary greatly. The LED display outside your local club looks a lot different from the LED wall at Tiffany’s in Sydney CBD.

LED digital signage means that content can be dynamic, unlike static billboards or fixed signage, and with the right content management system (CMS), your messaging and creativity can be customised for different locations. So your messaging can be tuned for particular demographics, purchasing patterns, competitive environments or even climate. And of course time of day.

So the theory is great, but managing the content has typically been difficult and resource-intensive. Content is often curated from several different people but ultimately requires approval, so there’s a ‘content workflow’ to create or curate content, approve it and get it to the right screen at the right time. And on brand of course.

The good news is there have been developments here as well – with new platforms automating content creation and managing the approval and distribution workflow. Typically, the simplification is delivered by creating a set of templates upfront that can be customised or enhanced by integrating with an existing digital asset library.

So in terms of key takeaways:

• Think beyond online and fully understand your customer’s purchasing journey as well as their lifestyle habits
• Identify points of influence in the physical spaces they ‘inhabit’
• Consider LED signage combined with new content creation, curation and distribution platforms as a way to bring your brand or story to life