Advance your Retail business with Digital signage

Article by Claire Warrington

A few years ago the only way to catch the attention of viewers at retail locations like showrooms and malls was to put up as large a hoarding or a billboard as space permitted. Displays on a video screen had not attained popularity due to some technological limitations. Billboards and posters are static and convey little to a viewer nor do entice or influence the viewer. The poster simply showed the company product and a short message. To know more about the product an interested viewer would have to approach the shopkeeper or the floor salesperson and get to know more. This was rather irksome. One, most people are hesitant to simply ask for details when they have no immediate plans for purchase. Secondly it is the attitude of the salesperson which can be off putting. Most would ask if the inquirer wished to purchase the product and the attitude would be defined on the basis of the reply. Being human a salesperson would not have the answers to all questions or present the product properly and this sometimes had a negative effect. Instead of actually advancing the retail business such salespersons hampered it. All this has changed with the advent of digital signage in retail. One has seen ads on TV. Digital signages are similar except that they are dedicated solely to displaying more details over a longer duration of time. A typical retail digital display signage would comprise of 1 A large LCD TV/monitor to display the images2 A computer or a media player at the back end to feed the TV/monitor with the images. There are further sophistications in the display of the images. For one content can be designed specifically and targeted at the consumers based on the surveys for that region. Content can be made information and interesting in much more detail. Content can also be varied and made in great detail showcasing every detail. Simply by viewing the infomercial the viewer can get to know quite a bit about the product or service. He can make an informed decision. The quality of the content and the display can influence him to buy. A step further would be to have an interactive ordering out facility where a customer can fill in his details through an interactive touch screen and place the order and have the product delivered to him. Digital signages in retail are the inanimate salespersons that are ideal for such environments. A retailer who is stocking products of known brands would simply have to install the hardware without bothering about the content which can be fed to the display either from the media player or through the computer which is connected to the brand owner