6 tips for managing digital signage screens

Digital signage is an excellent way of unveiling your brand's universe to a target audience, whether customers, visitors or employees. A digital signage content management solution makes it easy to deliver up-to-date, captivating content to your screens. However, if you have a lot of screens to manage, there are a number of things you need to bear in mind to get the most out of your campaigns (especially if you're new to digital signage). Below are some of our top tips to help you manage a large digital signage fleet.

1/ Have a clear objective for each of your screens

You switched to digital signage for a good reason: perhaps it was to promote your offers and increase sales, to train your staff, to entertain your customers, or to improve your brand image. You may have different objectives for different screens; for example, customer-facing screens may be designed to advertise promotions, while staff-facing screens may be designed to communicate corporate information. When creating content for your network of screens, don't lose sight of the purpose of the content; drift can easily occur when content slips into information that isn't fundamentally relevant or necessary.

2/ Choose the right location for your screens

When installing numerous screens or managing a large park, make sure you place the screens where they'll be most effective. It goes without saying that people need to see them clearly, but you also need to think about the distance from different viewing angles. Take a walk around the sites where you'll be installing the screens and make sure they're located within your natural field of vision. You don't have to limit yourself to standard locations either; many companies offer tilting wall mounts, ceiling mounts, and some manufacturers offer screens that can be placed on the floor. Think carefully about the lighting in your premises. If you're planning to place screens in a shop window, make sure they're very bright, and check that they still provide a quality display on sunny days.

3/ Update your dynamic content regularly

The undeniable advantage of digital signage is that you can change your ads and messages as often as you like, without the inconvenience of print. To keep your target audience's attention, make sure your content is not repetitive, especially if it's on a loop and likely to be seen several times.

Some digital signage content management systems offer weather adaptation anddata feed integration, two powerful ways of updating your content. With weather-reactive advertising, you can define content to be displayed under certain weather conditions, enabling you to deliver a message that's both relevant and interesting.

Thanks to dynamic feeds, you can distribute up-to-date content, perfectly adapted to current events or the location of your screens. This saves you a considerable amount of time, as the information is updated automatically, adding great value to your audience. This can include content from your social networks, weather, traffic or even air quality. 

4/ Create local content with multi-user management

If you manage a fleet of screens across different sites (for a chain of stores, for example), make some room for local content, which is more relevant and therefore more attractive to customers (as with the above-mentioned integration of social network news feeds and user-generated content). Your digital signage content management solution should enable multiple users and contributors to add content. Cenareo offers cooperative management, with different levels of access for different team members.

You can even consider monetizing your screens by selling communication time to your partners and suppliers: ensuring that you always have content on screen, and above all that your investment pays off! This is what VandB does with its franchises.

5/ Manage your screens remotely

When the screens in your network exceed a certain number, or extend beyond one physical site, you need to be able to manage them remotely. You need a digital signage solution that allows you to centrally control and monitor every screen in your network. To start with, you need to be able to remotely control the on/off function of your screens, so that you can schedule their switch-off, for example at night, to save energy and reduce your impact on the environment. Then you need to be able to monitor the operation of the screen, checking not only that it's up and running, but also that it's displaying the content it's supposed to. 

6/ Protect your digital signage displays

Like any other IT equipment, digital signage displays are vulnerable to attack if they are not properly protected. Hackers may gain physical access to your screens, for example via an easily accessible USB port, or through a breach in your network, if they are connected to it. The possible consequences are the recovery of screens and their use to broadcast inappropriate content, or access to other parts of your system and confidential company data. The more screens you have, the more vulnerable you are. So you need to put in place a security strategy, drawn up with your service or IT manager. The first steps are to ensure that all screens are physically secured, to check that all online access via your content management solution is password-protected, and to check that your supplier automatically downloads updates, security patches and new versions of their operating system for you directly from their servers.

Cenareo offers an intuitive, scalable Saas solution and perfectly adapted to the needs of communications professionals in all sectors: Point of sale, Internal communications, Hotels and Restaurants but also DOOH.

We're with you every step of the way on your digital signage journey, offering fast, personalized support and assistance to every one of our customers. Contact contact to discuss your project.

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