Many organisations face their biggest challenges not in hardware but in the development and management of content. There are a few ideas worth considering to help ease the load of creating and updating content.
Creation & Design
First and foremost, create content that can be repurposed across multiple platforms. Always remember your video assets are worth a lot and should be reusable and archived. Understandably, that might be a challenge with some businesses as trends always dictate industry direction.
Maintaining continuity with other marketing messages and images across the organisation works well to retain brand consistency, whilst you need to modify the design to fit the digital signage audience, it can save the expense of creating content from square one. This is very helpful when working with a modest budget as the reuse and repeat of good stories ensure higher impact level. If your digital signage requires different layouts, this type of event-content can be stored for the future.
When designing content, try to keep the same layout/template; this ensures brand consistency through the look and feel of the signage, however, content personalisation from branch to branch ensures relevancy; maintaining the same layout also ensures efficiency.
To be even more time efficient, make use of ‘evergreen’ content that can be stable, and remain there even when other schedules are changing, such as the time, branch hours, and managers names etc. Additionally, building a library of icons and images can also save time and increase ease of use as graphics are readily available. Lastly, ensure that the management system is easy-to-use and intuitive, and your content is simple, direct and fits your audience for maximum impact.
Content Management
Content can always be delegated between numerous employees, so different team members can be responsible for updating each category of content – this reduces work load whilst also increasing efficiency and accuracy. You may still need a subject matter expert who can manage the playlists, but the shared effort means no one has to spend too much time every week creating and publishing messages.
If you do share out content sections, the system should allow for one person to authorise it before publishing. This tool is very useful to ensure all content is appropriate and written in the same company style.
A question some may have is do you farm out the content or pull from resources within? Many people do it internally because of the company knowledge base, however passing it on to a partner to create may actually result in a quicker turn-around and be more effective. The hard part (the part that makes it expensive) is doing it as close to real time as possible.
If your company struggles to appoint one person, or multiple people, to manage the content – then it is logical to have external help for content that looks professional, up to date and consistent with your other marketing material.
Content can make or break your Digital Signage – create considered material, plan ahead and delegate… remember content is King!
