These tips are perfectly suited to advertising in the context of digital signage. They can also help you create more impactful ads on traditional media, digital media, or social media.
Step 1: Determine your goals
Before creating any advertising, you must start by making a complete assessment of your goals.
When you think about your goals, you certainly have in mind the idea of growing your sales and increasing your turnover. But is that really the only objective that your advertising campaign can fulfill? We offer you different objectives that may be aimed at by a digital signage communication at a point of sale or a public place:
- Promote the launch of a product or service : you can present a new product or a new service, and push your customers to discover and buy
- Communicate about your loyalty program : you can create an advertisement whose main objective is the subscription of a loyalty card, or information on the associated benefits
- Inform about a novelty or a change : your advertising can inform your customers about new hours, about a promotion, about a private sale or about an exceptional opening on the occasion of a public holiday
- Sharing your values and actions : an advertisement broadcast using digital signage can also highlight your charitable actions or your CSR involvement (“For every €10 of purchase, we finance the planting of a tree”, “We contribute to the employment of people with disabilities”, etc.)
- Recruiting new collaborators : your customers love your brand, and may want to put their skills and motivation at your service
These few examples invite you not to neglect this first step. Less ambitious advertising, which focuses on a specific objective, generally offers a better return on investment than advertising that targets an objective that is too generic and too vague.
You should also enlighten your goals in light of your resources and the constraints encountered. Have you set an advertising budget? Is your campaign limited in time, or linked to the calendar (sales, Black Friday, Valentine's Day, etc.)?
Step 2: identify your business targets
In-depth knowledge of your commercial targets is a key success factor for your ads:
- It allows you to validate the adequacy between your objective and your target
- It helps you validate the tone of your advertising message
- It promotes the identification of arguments that will convince and encourage action
You can for that create personas. A persona is a fictional person who combines the typical characteristics of your commercial target. Depending on the positioning, several personas may be interested in the same product line.
Let's take the example of a store that sells smart watches for sport. We can define two personas:
- Christine, 41, a municipal employee, likes to run once a week for a distance of less than 10 km. She just wants to stay in shape, get some fresh air, and is not looking for performance. Uncomfortable with technology, she is looking for a solution that is easy to use.
- Antoine, 32, digital project manager and technology enthusiast, is an experienced runner. He runs 3 to 4 times a week, over a distance of more than 10 km. He does several triathlons every year.
Christine and Jean both want to buy a smartwatch. But they are not looking for the same references, and are not sensitive to the same arguments:
- Christine wants to buy an entry-level watch with basic functionalities, and is especially sensitive to ease of use and price.
- Antoine prefers a high-end smartwatch, from a well-known brand, which offers numerous functionalities.
These two targets expect different advertising messages.
Step 3: Define your message
An effective advertising message is powerful, clear, concise and precise. Above all, it must be perfectly adapted to your commercial target. It is useless to multiply arguments, at the risk of diluting the impact of your advertising. Instead, you should focus on the key arguments that can drive the decision and trigger action.
The message is adapted to the objective and the commercial target:
- Christine is sensitive to an advertising message that highlights price and ease of use: only €19.90, Intuitive application.
- jean prefers an advertising message about the performance of the smartwatch, and is sensitive to the prestige of the brand: Waterproof up to 100 meters, 200 training programs included, Battery life of 450 hours...
These two messages are aimed at specific targets, and provide immediately identifiable added value. Your digital signage can also include in a loop a More generic advertising around the smartwatch range : 40 references of smart watches, From €19.90 to €790, Watches adapted to all sports...
Step 4: create an impacting visual
Apart from certain specific cases, such as ads on search engines such as Google Ads, an advertisement cannot rely entirely on text to achieve these goals. In an attention economy, the amount of time your target audience can devote to you is limited.
You need to rely on visual and multimedia content (video, sound) to produce more impactful ads. These visuals must respect your graphic identity, to create a coherent brand environment (color, logo presence, etc.).
For example, do you want to highlight the 20 pre-recorded sports in a multimedia animation on a smartwatch? Opt for icons instead of words!
The duration of your ad must also depend on the context of distribution. For example, in the context of digital signage, an advertisement that is too long will not be viewed in its entirety by a customer or by a passing customer. You should prefer a short format, lasting only a few seconds.
You can use dedicated tools such as Canva, or entrust the production of your visuals to graphic designers or designers.
Step 5: Measure the results obtained
Several key performance indicators, also called KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) in English, allow you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising.
The ROI (Return On Invest) measures the return on investment of your advertising campaign, taking into account other expenses (salaries, suppliers, etc.). This indicator is valuable for measuring the profitability of your actions. For example, an advertising cost of €1 for €10 is not profitable if your margin is €0.80.
ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) focuses only on the ratio between the revenue obtained through an advertising campaign, and the exclusive cost of this campaign. ROAS is very easy to obtain in the case of digital advertising: audience measurement tools in fact make it possible to attribute a visit or a sale to an advertising click, and allow very precise measurements. In the case of digital signage, the return on investment is more difficult to measure. However, it is possible to obtain trends: for example, increasing the sales of a model during the period when an advertisement is broadcast at the point of sale makes it possible to establish a positive return on investment.
The Reach refers to the number of unique people who saw the ad. This KPI is very easy to obtain in digital advertising, and can also be measured relatively well for traditional channels such as radio or television. Reach can also be obtained in the context of dynamic signage, by the number of people who visit the store during the advertising broadcast. The measurement can be refined by eye tracking technologies: a special camera detects eye movements, and identifies the people who are actually viewing the advertising content.
The ROO (Return On Objectives), less well known, is useful for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising on objectives that are difficult to measure. Approaches vary depending on the goals. For example, an advertising campaign intended to increase the awareness of a brand or a range of products can be measured by surveys carried out by specialized agencies, or online surveys. Marketing professionals can help you manage and create more effective and profitable advertising.
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