Mobility on the Move

By Don Pierson, Flypaper
Now that we’ve all grown comfortable with the content possibilities for digital signs, let’s talk about how what’s ON the screen can be carried OFF for further engagement. Given a head start of many years, online marketers have figured out hundreds of ways to do this through e-mail, online ads, and social media. And now the same can and should be done through digital signage. It all comes down to the connection between the screen in front of the customer and the smartphone in their hand.
 
Here are three reasons why mobile matters to resellers:

1. Vendors Want Content Consistency
Five years ago your average buyer looking for a digital signage network wasn’t as interested in engaging the customer so much as informing them. The same was true for most areas of digital marketing. Websites were being used as brochures and the idea of using a sign to collect customer data would have seemed completely foreign. Today, marketers are searching for any means possible to give customers personalized experiences with their content, then gather enough data on them to get them into the sales funnel. That’s the new expectation. The good news is that digital signs can do that as well. Especially with the advent of multi-touch, customers are using signs more and more as a main interaction point.

Every good CMO is looking for ways to consistently thread their content together from every point of customer engagement. They want the coupon to reinforce the billboard, which reinforces the e-mail, which is solidified in the mobile ad. Now that digital signs have the capability to engage more than inform, they become part of that mix. You can bet that every major brand is factoring mobile ads and mobile marketing into their overall campaign. If you can show that your signage solution can tie into that by giving them another portal to reinforce a message, you’ll be providing that much more value and moving up the food chain in the budgeted spend.

2. Mobile Helps Bring Measurement to Signage Marketing
Consider this opportunity: A young woman is standing in front of a digital sign in a mall. The sign can tell that she’s a woman between the ages of 20 and 25. It flashes a promotion for 20 percent off at the Gap. But in order to get that promotion she has to use her mobile phone to scan a quick repsonse code on the screen. She scans the code and a few things happen: 1) The young woman has chosen to use a sign in the mall the way consumers today engage with email marketing (think Groupon). 2) The Gap now has this woman in their pipeline to market to, and may also have some valuable demographical data. 3)

The Gap can test the validity of the promotion. If the woman doesn’t use the 20 percent off coupon that day, the Gap can send her targeted and geographical ads to influence her back to her local store to shop, or to shop online. Concurrently, they can very easily track how many people respond to the kiosk promotions, to more accurately measure if the signage campaigns are working.

3. Customers Will Expect It
This is really a result of touch screens and the booming tablet market. It would be hard to find a consumer that doesn’t interact with their tech. Hand a smartphone to a 12 year old and they’ll know what to do with it. In the next two to three years, people will walk up to digital signs and they’ll expect that they can touch it to navigate to the information they want, or simply to find something cool. They’ll expect the interface to echo what they’ve become used to on their other devices. They’ll expect some kind of promotion to pop up. They’ll expect to be able to tag and reference what they found on the sign that they want to pull it up later. This is how people are using every other digital technology in their arsenal. Progressive resellers will find ways to meet this expectation sooner rather than later, so their customers can beat the curve.