Four common mistakes to avoid in retail LED signs

With digital signage, businesses can come up with some really amazing retail experiences for their customers. Launching your LED sign campaign should not be rushed, particularly if you have a restricted budget. Mistakes could not only cost you more but will also lead to poor results. Read below for four common mistakes that you should avoid in your LED sign investment.

1. Planning

Incomplete or rushed planning is a big problem that many retailers experience. LED signage is already playing big in the retail industry and is predicted to keep growing.

In 2013, the LED sign market was at $6 billion and is said to reach a massive $23 billion in 2018.

Maybe these numbers can be ignored. But when a competitor across the street actually goes ahead and makes the investment in LED signs, you begin to get cold feet. Suddenly you are tempted to rush into purchasing an LED sign and install it as fast as possible. LED sign installation is like any other business strategy and should be planned with great care. Failure to do so will result in issues such as unclear vision.

The first question to answer before you make the investment is “why do you need an LED sign”? A decent answer would be “to make money”. But that’s not enough. You have to come up with a team to organize content for the sign and install it correctly. Members of your team should be on the same page. Problems will arise if one person wants to enhance brand identity with thematic content and the other wants to push products simply by advertising all the time.

Therefore, planning and putting in place a clear vision for this investment is extremely important. With this, you will be able to measure the ROI for your LED sign in a better way.

2. Poor integration

The content on LED signs should be more than just a fancy presentation with professionally designed slides. Retailers want to integrate LED signs with several systems that are present in the retail setting. These screens should be used after hours as well to make them productive to the max. Retail digital signage content should be linked to the inventory system of the retailer so that particular promotions can be offered based on items that are selling and not selling. Further efforts can be made by coordinating LED signs with other methods of marketing such as online and on mobile devices. This will thereby create and omni-channel experience, which should be done with a lot of thinking and planning.

3. Producing sufficient content

The dynamic nature of LED signs is a great advantage over the traditional signage methods. Even though the content is being repeated in a loop, the content on the screen keeps changing frequently. So even if a customer has seen an advertisement once, they will probably look at it again because they didn’t get a proper glance the first time around. Traditional signage is more like wallpaper that people are tired of looking at day in and day out.

Even with digital signage, the looped content should be changed regularly in order to maintain effectiveness. Once a month is a reasonable timeline to update the content displayed on your LED sign. If the same loop is being repeated all the time, people will eventually stop looking at it. Updating the content regularly gives you chances to promote more products to keep your inventory moving. It is important to have a plan as to how often you are going to produce content and this can depend on the scale of your company and the budget assigned for LED advertising.

4. Localized messaging

The ability to localize content is a major advantage of LED signs but unfortunately, retailers have trouble in correctly localizing their digital signage. This problem too can be solved by doing some advanced planning. Explain to your signage team as to what exactly localization means, what content has to be localized and at what level localization should occur.

During the planning stage, look out for solutions that make your content locally applicable. Usually retailers like to make LED screens in every location responsible for content related to that area.

Also, get your team to come up with a set of guidelines for style and voice that will help maintain your brand image. It is a good idea to use data analyzing capabilities to produce messaging that is highly targeted.

Conclusion

As you have probably understood after reading this article, planning is extremely crucial in implementing LED signs. Every little detail such as who will be in charge, what hardware will you use, how will your signage work with other existing systems, and so on have to be thoroughly mapped out.

With careful planning, you can make bold and risky moves to enhance the chances of your success.