Pop quiz: If you walk into a store today, will you be greeted first by a salesperson, or big screens running video loops showing beautiful product images and happy people loving that brand? Probably the latter. Video screens are engaging, inviting, eye-catching, and inspirational - they help shake money out of your pockets.
Digital signage, screens, and billboards have become part of the customer experience journey. They exist in the moment as one part inspiration, one part explanation, but are 100% designed to drive a purchase.
About five years ago everyone said it was the Year of Mobile. Mobile sites and apps were beginning to drive new customer interactions both for content and commerce; getting web content, quickly, onto the device your customers were carrying around — that was the big idea.
You might call 2016 the Year of Content Everywhere. Enterprises are figuring out how to deliver content and campaigns far beyond the website and mobile experience. Content isn’t only words and images; it’s data, and feeds, and triggered alerts that can deliver maximum, personalized experiences to any screen, or anything web-enabled, even if it has no screen. Amazon Echo and its capability for voice interaction is a great example of that.
Organizations are identifying diverse needs and use cases (not only selling) where delivering digital content to screens and signs in their locations is not just important, it’s critical to a complete customer experience. Examples include:
- In-store product videos and images showing new products and offerings
- Aspirational videos showing people using products and interacting with the brand
- Offers aligned with the time of day, or day of week, or the profile of the customer in the store interacting with a screen or device
- Wayfinding and information screens that improve customer experience, in locations like hospitals and airports
- Real-time screen-based information, news and alerts in college buildings or other high-traffic locations
The demand for content everywhere has now coincided with the tools to manage and deliver it. And not just one screen at a time, but perhaps thousands of screens at a time. Digital signs and screens, networked across many locations and powered by centrally managed content, represent the next wave of customer experience. In the realm of digital transformation, major organizations are investing in new technology to harness the power of digital signage.
Two great examples showing disparate use cases point to the power of Drupal and the Acquia Platform to be a scalable digital signage solution for different types of organizations that reduces costs, speeds time to market, and builds new, engaging experiences for people seeing the screens.