If you are a company marketing manager or a professional facility manager, the past few years have been an excellent time to get involved in leveraging digital signage as part of a media campaign for yourself or for clients who would like to use your signs.
Here are some of the most intriguing opportunities to either pursue revenue or exposure for your content using digital signage:
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Invest in a master content management package:
You may have digital signage around your building and at other locations. Despite the fact that the signage could be networked and harnessed to serve a lot of content that either pays or is company-wide, you may remain isolated if you do not get a software package that connects your worlds. Navori, one of the leading digital signage system companies, has a software package that allows users to publish content, manage it, and automatically push it to your entire company network of digital displays. In essence, on the production side, you get to produce like you are a television network, curating, editing, and scheduling your content. And if you would like more of an entree into digital signage outside of your network, some master content management packages allow you to pay for content to be displayed anywhere on Earth. They can do this because they have partnerships with large networks that aggregate advertising venues.
How impressive is it to be able to test market your advertising message in Japan, or Shanghai without having to go through media agents. If you are a facility manager, marketing content to other venues could become a managed service that you provide in-house for other people. If you don’t have access to a pre-existing network through your software, you can always build one by working locally to exchange time on digital displays of companies that you do not compete with.
Lease your digital displays:
Although there is a perennial problem with companies that join advertising networks and then find out that the filter that screens out their competitor’s content is not perfect, it is still worth looking into as a strategy to gain access to more screens in a shorter time. If you want to know how Mexicans and Americans respond to your product, you can use this type of network to snap into coverage for your content at a border city that has viewers from both demographics.
You can also advertise your digital displays and allow companies that have the same software that you do to snap into your schedule, giving you added revenue potential when you do not have content that you are sharing.
Make digital signage a profit center in your company:
If you have a lot of real estate and have been considering an investment in a more digital signage so that you can advertise to customers and employees, you might consider looking at what some IT departments did 10 years ago. When their firm could not afford to keep them as a cost center, some companies that had IT teams started having them offer their services to other companies regionally. The additional revenue allowed them to be able to turn a profit independently of their parent company. This in turn, allowed the parent company to hire more people and purchase more equipment without losing money.
When you implement this type of strategy in your own company, you can use marketing, facilities, and IT people to put together an infrastructure that can be utilized by yourself and other companies. You could also create a roadmap that would show how you might start by building out digital signage, before signing agreements with area firms that have digital signage in order to be able to use their systems.
As digital signage becomes a more ubiquitous part of advertising at some companies, some managers have decided to become more sophisticated about managing the content and the digital sign network. Because there is a lot of open space in the media market for digital signage, aggregating digital signage of companies around you is also something that companies are starting to look at.