Commercial signage helps companies supplement marketing strategies and promote their business to anyone who comes across their display. With clever placement and engaging content, commercial signage becomes an invaluable tool.

If you want to make the most of your signage, though, you need to invest in modern solutions that can enhance your content and streamline your marketing processes. Because of this, more businesses are replacing traditional, analog signage with digital LED displays. Learn more about how digital signs improve upon analog marketing and make your content more effective with this overview.

Benefits of Digital Over Analog

Analog mediums laid the groundwork for out-of-home advertising. From billboards along highways to smaller storefront signs, businesses have long used analog signage to drive traffic to their locations. Digital signage expands upon these mediums and gives companies more creativity, flexibility, and convenience when creating content displays. Below are just a few key advantages of replacing traditional displays with digital signage.

Update Content Remotely

Manually updating content requires workers to reach the sign and physically change the content. This process takes time and energy. It also frequently relies on elements that are out of your control. For example, no one wants to send a worker out to update content when it’s pouring rain.

With digital signage, you can update content remotely. In addition to making the act of updating content much easier, this allows you to display relevant, timely messages with minimal stress and hassle. As a result, you can adapt content to fit the specific needs of a certain day, promotion, or target audience.

Convenient, remote content updates also allow you to fine-tune your marketing campaigns as you go. This enhanced flexibility helps you optimize messages and displays according to feedback, engagement rates, and other information. The result is more effective signage that you can continue to improve with on-demand changes and updates.

Videos vs. Static Images

Analog displays are static. They can’t display videos or moving images, which severely limits their creative potential. While companies can still display clever pictures and messages, they will never replicate the kind of dynamic content that digital displays can achieve. Videos give your content team more space and resources to work with. This opens the door for greater creativity and more unique content that will help your display stand out among competitors.

Implementing moving images creates a living visual that is more impactful and memorable to viewers. Video displays do a better job of grabbing and keeping the attention of passersby. Viewers might look at a static image and decide within seconds that they’re uninterested. With videos, however, viewers will naturally keep looking at the display to see what happens next.

Integrate Across Your Network

Upgrading to a digital display also means you can upgrade your content management system. Using a sophisticated CMS program allows you to connect your signage, content, and other technologies across your network. You have the ability to integrate with mobile devices, use your content to connect signage with social media platforms, and do so much more.

Best of all, you can manage your entire network with one easy-to-use program. This allows your content teams to connect and collaborate in one efficient space. You can create, schedule, and update content remotely, which boosts efficiency and convenience. Your CMS program will also help you track signage performance so that you can quickly identify and fix errors, locate areas for improvement, and monitor engagement and conversion rates.

Target a Specific Audience

Analog marketing mediums often try to have as broad a reach as possible. The goal is to put your company’s name in front of more viewers to expand brand recognition. While this might lead to a larger viewership, it doesn’t necessarily create higher engagement and conversion levels.

Digital signage improves upon analog marketing by creating relevant, eye-catching content that speaks more directly to your target demographic. You have a greater chance of turning passersby into customers. Strategies like displaying social media handles or sending viewers to your website with QR codes improve conversion rates even more.

Furthermore, the ability to refine and update digital content quickly makes it easier to target more specific demographics. You can leverage more specific content to impact a smaller audience more effectively. When you use these advantages to reach different parts of your demographic throughout the day—such as morning commuters, lunch rush customers, or evening errand runners—you can achieve higher levels of engagement while still reaching a wider range of customers.

Engagement Tracking and Evaluation

Tracking engagement rates helps you make sure your signage continues to be an effective tool for your business. It’s hard to determine how many people visit your website after seeing your name on a billboard, flier, or other form of analog media. But with digital display strategies like unique QR codes or web addresses, you can obtain accurate information about engagement levels from your digital signs.

It’s also easier to direct customers—especially younger audiences—to digital surveys rather than physical evaluation forms. Customers are much more likely to fill out a quick online form on their own device than they are to sit down with paper and pencil to complete a physical feedback form.

Creating an Experience vs. Creating an Advertisement

Analog signs advertise your business, but digital signs create an experience. Outdoor full-color LED displays deliver brighter colors, more dynamic images, interactive elements, frequent updates to fit the weather, time of day, or other special events, and other features that make your digital content more dynamic.

Because digital content is both more attractive to customers and more convenient for your business, it creates greater opportunities for your company to continuously experiment, expand, and improve your marketing strategies. Digital solutions provide the perfect platform to stretch your creative boundaries and do more with your advertising.

The Importance of a Multi-Channel Strategies

Using both digital and analog mediums in tandem gives you access to more opportunities and advantages with your content. While analog marketing isn’t as attractive as digital—especially to modern consumers—it still has benefits and can be a useful supplement to your digital marketing strategy. For example, you can include QR codes or social media handles on print media to direct potential customers to those spaces, giving them an actionable step that improves your chances of conversion.

Knowing your target audience is important, too. Customers who grew up relying on mediums like paper fliers or traditional billboards might respond to analog signs better than they would email marketing or paid social campaigns. By combining traditional and modern marketing strategies, you can reach a wider audience, produce more effective content, and cater to everyone in your demographic.

Reap the rewards of a modern signage solution when you invest in outdoor full-color LED displays from Optec Displays. Work with our team today to make the most of your signage solutions.