Benefits of Digital Signage

Cilutions is pleased to announce the launch of its corporate blog. With this inaugural post, we want to welcome all our Digital Media Bridge users to regularly read and comment on articles that will be posted here. We intend for this blog to be an interactive forum, wherein we request feedback from not only our user base, but also from subject matter experts in the content delivery domain.

Cilutions especially wants to assist the small medium business (SMB) community in better understanding content delivery applications such as corporate communications, distance learning, digital signage and IPTV (a.k.a. business TV). These applications are transforming the SMB world by making them more competitive through increased productivity and enhanced customer satisfaction.

So is your business reaping the benefits of digital signage? Digital signage means different things to different people. However, we simply define it as the delivery of desired digital content to specific audiences at a preferred time. Among the top two concerns that SMBs have when considering deploying digital signage are:

* What is going to be the ROI?
* What makes for an effective content strategy?

Based on deployments in various market segments over the past several years, it has been noticed that digital signage applications have been able to provide an average sales lift of over 15%. On the cost side, digital signage hardware and service costs have been falling on average about 10 to 15% annually. One has to only look at the cost of flat panel LCD displays and broadband network charges to know that this is a fact. More importantly, the costs of creating and managing digital content have also been coming down every year. Given these revenue and cost numbers, the ROI on a typical digital signage deployment has halved from about 3 years barely a couple of years ago to under 18 months now.

As far as the considerations for a content strategy go, the SMB needs to look at the following factors:

1. What is your targeted audience or market segment for digital signage?
2. What is your message going to be for this targeted audience?
3. At what specific locations will your business be placing the digital signage?
4. What are your business’ performance criteria for the digital signage?
5. Who is going to be responsible for digital signage content design and management?

Once the SMB has a content strategy in place, digital signage becomes a cinch.