Category: Digital Signages

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Digital Signages

7 reasons why Digital Signages make an impact on business

Digital Signage technology is a fast growing tech-space that drives communication to audiences physically through digital screens.
Digital signages can be used across sectors: Think of digital screens in a retail store, that communicate offerings to customers from the central marketing team at real-time.
Or in a corporate that integrates employee engagement related campaigns and drive best practice sharing across the organization.
You can read more on its applications across sectors on our website, especially across Retail, Restaurants, Corporates and Manufacturing.

Off late, and thanks to advancements in underlying technologies, communication through digital signages has become more intelligent. Here are some interesting features that make for compelling reasons to think of how a Digital Signage maybe applicable to your business.

Reason #1: Show products and offerings at real-time and amplify sales
Did you know that a product that is well-highlighted in a store, sells upto 2X-3X times a product that is not highlighted. When a customer is at the point of sale, the most valuable asset is your time with him or her, which can be used to communicate more effectively. By showing product communication and updates at real-time, your communication efficiency to customers is greatly enhanced.

Reason #2: Show more products by new communication every few seconds
With digital screens, you are no longer constrained by the number of creatives you can show. A number of messages, products and offerings can therefore be conveyed to customers, through the same medium. This directly implies a better use of real-estate.

Reason #3: Reduce the lag between what you want to show and what is shown
At times, strategic communication at retail outlets needs to be planned well in advance, so as to communicate it at the point of sale correctly. Often this results in communication of offerings which are irrelevant, or simply not in the store (due to being stock-out, etc)
With digital signages, however, communication becomes more instantaneous and dynamic, and there is no lag between what you want to communicate and what you actually do.

Reason #4: Make your signage network intelligent
With the advent of advanced underlying technologies, signage networks are far more intelligent than they were. Think of each digital signage display as an intelligent unit, which can schedule communication based on the time of day, local sales patterns, live in-store demographics and more. Personalization of communication can be achieved at different levels. This results directly in sales amplification.

Reason #5: Compelling dynamic creatives
One of key reasons why digital signages garner upto 2X attention versus static communication, is simply because they are brighter (due to it being an LED display) and the creatives can be dynamic (moving). Small movements in creatives substantially increase viewership levels.

Reason #6: Measure precise ROI
It is always important to measure and get a bang for the buck. Marketing spends can be better optimized by measuring ROI of channels.
Digital signages help us estimate ROI by various parameters: like measuring viewership or impressions i.e. number of customers who saw the creatives, their demographics, attention span to the creatives, and many more.

Reason #7: Add engagement to your customer interactions
Digital signages, once installed, can be augmented with sensors, through which the same display can be used with a layer of added engagement. Be it use cases like virtual trial rooms, or a social media engagement campaign, a number of such ideas can be added on top of the digital signage foundation. Our earlier article on “5 coolest digital signages from across the world”, gives a few exciting applications of the technology.

To conclude, digital signage technology is a nascent but growing technology which helps catapult efficient stakeholder communication.

It has applications across sectors, and in case some of the reasons above echo with your business need, do try out our free trial to pilot the features for growing your business.

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Digital Signages

Case Study: Smart Notice boards

by Anvesh Mantena

Anvesh Mantena is Co-Founder & COO of Intelisa with over a decades experience as a digital technology consultant across global markets like US, Japan, Germany & India.

Executive Summary:

The trend for integrated townships with private living, high security, and advanced amenities has been on a steep rise over the last couple of decades. It perfectly combines privacy of space with a taste of community and built-in amenities, and has created a one-stop destination to family living.

Privacy is an integral part of a township. The residents do not want to be disturbed by salesman at their doors, or pesky marketing material that filter through barriers. However, from the viewpoint of brands, these customers need to be reached in order to communicate offerings.

This is evident from the fact that these Housing societies receive an average of 20 requests every day for access!

Intelisa, the next-gen digital signage solution, in partnership with a prominent media agency created an innovative WIN-WIN solution for such housing societies as well as marketers by deploying large LED TV’s at strategic locations across societies. These screens were divided into two parts, with one part controlled by the media agency to run advertisements and marketing material (ads), while the other part managed by the township as a smart notice board for internal communication.

This greatly reduced the operational effort required by society for internal Communication by 80%. The communication on screens has 85% higher engagement and retention compared to posters on notice boards. This automatically brought high viewership for ads that were running in parallel.

Business Scenario and Challenges:

Let us take one housing society in which we deployed our solution – With 14 blocks and 2000 family residents, there is evidently a continuous stream of communication and the management of the same. It is a mini-city in itself with a lot of planning, be it for maintenance, day-to-day essentials, events, celebration, etc. A management team is generally constituted who is responsible for making the choices on a lot of these daily activities and these have to be communicated effectively to all the residents. Here were the challenges the management team used to face:

  • Everyday, on an average, there is at least 1 notice that needs to be communicated to all residents.  The old method of having a person reach every house to communicate the message is unviable with 2000 units.
  • With the plethora of email that people receive on a daily basis, these society emails are lost in the clamour.
  • Social messaging chats like WhatsApp can only accommodate 256 people so having multiple different WhatsApp groups makes it difficult to manage.
  • Physical Notice board at lift lobbies were an option. However, this involved operational challenges of physically putting up the notices and monitoring them, as well as a lot of printing involved.

While all this was internal communication, there were external factors as well. On an average, the society received at least 20 requests from various prominent brands for distributing product promotions, for door-to-door marketing access, for placing posters on notice boards, and so on.  The advent of COVID-19 has forced societies to follow a strict check on people entering and leaving society.

How Intelisa Helped:

Intelisa in partnership with a popular media house in Hyderabad developed a unique offering to address multiple challenges of the township.  Large 55 inch UHD digital screens were placed strategically across key places throughout the township. Intelisa’ s technology split these screens in a 60-40 ratio, where 60% was offered to partner media agency to run external ads/promotions while 40% was offered to the Society management to run Internal communication messages.

Each party had a unique login without any interference with each other All the advertisement request were now routed to the media house there by reducing the burden on the society, Intelisa’s capability allowed the Media agency to:

  • Run hyperlocal advertisement all from their office in regular time slots
  • Update ads with a click of a few buttons in real-time
  • Preview the content playing on each of the screens in real-time
  • Screen status reporting (ON/OFF) as well as quickly troubleshoot in case of issues.
  • Directly email customers with details on their ads total screen time and its repetition frequency.

Similarly, the society passed a resolution to keep all internal communication on these new digital notice boards, thereby reducing the operational challenges of having to print notices or having to send door to door messages. Intelisa’s capability allowed society to:

  • Schedule notices in the form of PDF files
  • Live preview the content playing on the screen, add/modify/delete notices with a click of a few buttons.
  • Run engaging content like event photos, competitions, video messages, etc.
  • Earn additional revenue for all the advertisements that are routed through the media agency by society.

Results, Return on Investment and Future Plans:

Intelisa’s Digital signage solution offering has built an opportunity for marketers to reach out to the customer closer to their homes, in a non-pervasive way and in the process also has enabled housing society to adopt the digital platform for internal communication and reduce operations overhead creating a WIN-WIN situation for all the stakeholders.
The following are the key benefits for each of the stakeholders:

Housing Society:

  • Increase in revenue from advertising income for the society.
  • Increased awareness of maintenance updates and participation in community events. As per the society, participation in events has increased by at least 50% percent, after the introduction of digital notice boards.
  • Printing for notices completely eliminated (>95%), which is one step closer to making the society eco-friendly and resulting in a cost-saving of at least 10% on monthly stationary expenses.
  • Avoid access to external people moving inside the society for marketing purposes, thereby ensuring higher security compliance which includes Covid safety protocols.
  • Increase access to bulk marketing deals offered exclusively for the society from hyperlocal brands.

Marketing Agency:

  • Access to a targeted set of audience, as close to the home as possible.
  • 70-90% ad slot utilization, on any day with a lot of request from SME and hyperlocal companies.
  • Ability to add/delete/modify marketing content from their office in real time without any other operational overhead.
  • Very high viewership estimated to be at least 40% of the residents on a daily basis. Given that these notice board were the key means for internal communication, almost every resident would pause to take note of the screen communication.
  • Real-time reports to track and monitor campaigns on various different screens.
  • Run all kinds of media be it video, images, document, or directly stream from the Internet.
  • Transparent reporting on total screen time as well as advertisement  repetition frequency across all the screens

COVID-19 has only accelerated the Returns for the marketing agencies with more and more brands trying to look for media as close to the consumer’s home as possible. With the success of this model, the agency is already in talks with more societies to replicate and expand.

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Digital Signages Everything IoT

IoT based Digital Signages will gain significance during COVID-19

Digital Signages for Covid

by Mr. Anvesh Mantena

Note: The author of this article has over a decades experience as a digital technology consultant across global markets like US, Japan, Germany & India.

With the world heading towards a new normal, next generation IoT based digital signages are set to play a significant role to not just help business navigate the current operational challenges, but increase their preparedness to mitigate the impact of such challenges in the future. 

The words corona, social distancing and lockdown were virtually unheard of, a few months ago. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of people and disrupted thousands of business worldwide. The reality of the outbreak is starting to settle in and business leaders are strategising to navigate a broad range of interrelated issues. One of the key business challenge that is industry agnostic, is ensuring health and safety of employee and customers. 

The fact that a vaccine is still months away, amplifies the relevance of digital signage which has taken up the role of providing the most important commodity of all: information. If the importance of digital signages was ever a question before Covid-19, there is no doubt of its value now.

Although it seems obvious, the need of the hour is to continuously remind your customers & employees about importance and safety related information to further drive the point. The cloud based solutions give complete control to the head office to drive emergency communication in real time to multiple or a specific remote location. Digital signages are all set to play a prominent role to keep people informed and fight against their fears at places where it matters the most.

While enabling communication remains to be the key, the next generation digital signage solution which are IoT based and are driven by AI, will works as a platform to build industry specific application that would not just help businesses navigate through the current pandemic but will increase their preparedness to mitigate the impact for the next one if any. The below are a few use cases which we would see gaining traction. 

  • Remote training: While training is a key for businesses to grow the current pandemic has been driving a wide range of reskilling initiative by organizations, virtual meeting tool like Zoom are helping white collar employees, the same can’t be said with blue collar employee. This is where digital signage are set to play a significant role. The real-time capabilities of the modern signage solution will help business reuse the screens placed at strategic point across factory floor to train workers.
  • Queue Management: Queues for entry into retail stores, is quite common these days. This will further formalise into appointment based shopping. IoT based digital screens installed at entrances of stores apart from its basic functionality to act as a medium of communication will also provide queue management services to regulate the inflow of customers thereby avoiding the pile-up of people in endless lines and increase the confidence of the customer to come and shop with them.  
  • Remote monitoring: With high levels of compliance standards being set by governments, organisations will need tools to monitor their implementation at manufacturing plants or retail stores. The next generation digital signages based on IoT platforms, integrated with sensor technology will eliminate blind spots, giving management a holistic view of operations that can be monitored remotely. In-built algorithms will automatically alert staff by bringing up relevant messages on screens at times when standards are not being met by employees. 
  • Local Community marketing: ‘When customer don’t come to you, you go to your customers’, is the mantra that businesses will follow. The advertisement spent for organisations will be very limited and targeted with companies being very particular on where every rupee is spent. Marketing in public places through OOH might lose its sheen with more marketers looking to reach the customer as-close-to-home. This will open up avenues for marketing agencies to invest in digital screen controlled by an efficient cloud solution in various large housing societies, which will take brands closer to the customers. Digtial signage solution will provide real time analytics on the advertisements making the business investments measureable. 
  •  Contactless attendance & screening: Finger print recognition has been a standard over the last decade for daily attendance registration at various offices/plants across the world. This pandemic has brought about an urgent need for a contactless technology.  Face recognition which is already making its presence in the mobile world will be the new normal. The camera scan along with a few thermal scanning sensors will see integration with IoT based digital signages for automatic attendance capture and screening at entrances with capabilities to automatically trigger warning messages.
  • Store Information & availability display:  In the short term, window shopping at malls will reduce due to the fear of infection, and customers will shop for a particular pre-decided product. The time they want to spend in stores will be minimal. In these scenarios, real time information on the availability of product and their exact location will be of great help for people to directly walk to the product pick it up and check out. Digtial signage’s will play a significant role by integrating the store inventory & layout diplaying real time product information and their availability. 

With the changing global context, Digital Signages are maturing from just being a marketing tool to an IoT based enabler by integrating real time applications, resulting in being an efficient and effective communication of the one of the most important asset – information!  

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