Nov 15 2014

Bringing digital signage into your marketing mix

Digital signage strategy should align with and support a company’s marketing and branding strategy, but it is very important to understand the medium and its intended audience and use. It is important to build a strategy with a solid foundation that promotes, protects and strengthens the company brand.

The real magic happens when you can strike a balance between the company’s marketing strategy and effective employee engagement.

In a corporate environment, one must recognize how easy it can be for content to become white noise. Remember employees, unlike retail audiences, are captive audiences. Building and maintaining a trust with this audience can be very difficult, but not impossible.

Every successful system begins with a strong foundation, build yours hand-in-hand with your company’s strategy — but don’t stop building! Break your content strategy into sections; enterprise messaging, brand awareness, rewards and recognition, etc. Do some research and find out what will make the audience look up. For some, it is seeing production data while for others it is seeing themselves through rewards and recognition.

Create visually dynamic messages based on your findingsand consider these questions:

• What can you do as content creator to build that trust with the employees?
• How can I ensure material is relevant to their everyday existence?
• How can I ensure the content is accurate and timely?

Building onto the foundation of your company’s branding strategy while following through with your role to engage the employee will produce a strong corporate communications channel. Ultimately, the question isn’t whether or not to align, it’s how, why and to what degree.

Getting the most from digital signage advertising

As consumers begin to open up spending again, businesses need to use advertising campaigns to attract and engage. Through powerful innovations in software and ever-cheaper hardware, digital signage advertising is primed to take advantage of these new consumers.

Digital screens and posters

Digital billboards present one of the best examples of how an emerging trend can be quickly transformed by new innovations. Originally, the advertising value of digital billboards were viewed as all about eye-popping displays, video content, and the ability to modify or replace an ad display at a moment’s notice. These benefits are still powerful but zoning laws are becoming increasingly restrictive as to the size, brightness, and location of these billboards.

The mobile landscape

The ability of mobile networks and Bluetooth technology to send advertisements to the phones of drivers as they pass by is now seen as the future of digital billboards and, quite possibly, digital advertising in general.

Digital signage advertising advertising and content software

To stay on top of new innovations and emerging trends, you need digital software that can deliver capabilities that are compatible with the latest technology, along with a user-friendly interface that will allow companies to generate their ad content in a timely manner.

There are some super digital signage advertising and content management out there now, such as the Hub from L Squared, which can get your digital sign advertising up and running before you know it and give the tools necessary to monitor their effectiveness.

Aug 23 2014

Profile: digital signage reseller program – ViewSonic

The ViewSonic digital signage program aims to help VARs break into the digital signage business and build a successful practice

ViewSonic Corp. targets resellers to help them grow their digital signage business, launching a new digital signage program within its Finch Club partner program.

Sheridi Higa, channel marketing manager at ViewSonic, said any partner who’s interested in the digital signage space is welcome to enroll in the digital signage program by visiting www.finchclub.com.

“We’re looking to build our digital signage business, so the program is open to anyone who’s interested, or who’s already in this vertical market segment,” Higa said.

Gene Ornstead, director of DTV and business development at ViewSonic, said the new program includes resources and tools such as training, Webinars, sales incentives and demo offerings which are tailored to meet the needs of digital signage initiatives.

“Today, only about 10 per cent of our business is in digital signage,” Ornstead said. “We’re hoping to increase this by the end of the year to 20 per cent, minimum.”

Currently, the company has about 20,000 value-added resellers (VARs) in North America, with about 2,700 in Canada.

“I’d like to have a good couple thousand resellers in Canada that engage with and service this market,” Ornstead said. “We’ll also recruit new resellers into this space too.”

Ornstead explains that resellers are faced with difficulties and challenges in the digital signage space and may find themselves overwhelmed with everything that’s involved.

“Content is king and managing the content is an important area of selling digital signage,” he said. “Partners are asking how to manage and create content so it can be downloaded onto a server that then talks to the display.”

The digital signage partner program, under the Finch Club umbrella, will help partners solve some of these complex issues and questions. The goal of the program is to educate and train ViewSonic VARs on how to participate in this marketplace without being discouraged or frustrated, Ornstead explained.

Once engaged in the digital signage industry, Ornstead said partners can also leverage ViewSonic’s content creation reference partners.

“We can give VARs our reference partner recommendations for getting content created,” he said. “The goal is to make it easier for our VARs to get into this space and really understand it.”

Using ViewSonic’s DisplayIt 3.0 software, Ornstead says at the most basic level, those VARs who have a working knowledge of PowerPoint can easily start working in the digital signage space.

Some vertical markets where ViewSonic sees opportunities include education with digital signage helping with things such as emergency notifications, retail and other point of sale opportunities, transportation stations for signage and alerts and even corporate communications in front-office lobbies, Ornstead said.

ViewSonic’s first Webinar series for digital signage partners is slated for March 16 and 17 and will focus on the company’s digital signage products and the DisplayIt 3.0 software solution.