6. Ongoing content strategy. Who’s going to the signage ‘champion’?
Its all well and good to look at digital signage and think “I can do that”. What looks like a simple template or advertisement may have taken many hours to produce or much longer if there is any production to be done.
At JDS one of the questions we ask our potential customers is, “who is going to create your content?” The question is often responded to by the answer “I hadn’t thought about that.”
You have a few options, but the one thing which remains the same for all options is that you need a ‘Content Champion’ someone who is ultimately responsible for the overall look, feel and accurate deployment of the system.
When content is made you should be thinking about:
- Who is the target audience?
- Why are they where they are when they are watching your screen?
- How long do you have their attention for?
- and what do you want them to do?
Your champion must think about these things with each piece of content they deliver.
So, how do they do this? We will assume that you are not able to outsource content creation for the sake of this bog.
You can create your own content with software such as Photoshop, Premier, Adobe Flash if you are lucky enough to be able to use these creatively. If you are like me, I can use them a little but when it comes to being creative, well I kinda suck.
Many digital software packages have built in content creation software. This can be simple or very complicated. Signagelive software has customisable templates. These are essentially a still image which is used as a background and then people can add text boxes on top of this image to create great templates for schools, menu boards, notices etc. In this example you can outsource your background image to a creative person and simply drop in the text boxes to suit. Updates to the text are done quickly and simply using a cool feature called Message Manager. This allows people to log in an only have access to one or more of these templates which they can update. Once they change the text they click save and the screens with automatically update themselves. VERY simple.
If you can’t use Flash but want the results. Flypaper is a great alternative. Touted as being as simple to use as PowerPoint but with all the motion graphics of Flash in 1/6th of the time. Software like Flypaper makes is simple for people to create some excellent content. It contains lots of templates people can use to help them get started.
A content champion should ensure that the message is on brand and suitable to deploy. Whilst it is a great idea to share the workload and have many people contribute to digital signage. Without a content champion, the messages can look messy and unfinished.
Make sure you know how often to refresh content and have a strategy over a period of time. Don’t do it ad hoc. Chances are it won’t work as well as it could. Follow these simple steps to ensure you have relevant content sending the right message to your audience.
