By Alex Mardikian

There are more than 3 billion people on social media. Integrating digital signage and social media makes excellent business sense. Doing so allows you to bridge the gap between online and offline marketing and communicate with an audience that is offline one moment and online the other. You give them the choice to shop offline or online, depending upon their location.

Improve brand recall, boost brand image, generate more sales, get more leads, and keep in touch with your customers.

Do you know where your audience socializes online? A very simple technique for harnessing social media for digital signage communications could be to display ads of products that your audience is discussing online.

Knowing about audience interests can help you manage inventory.

Digital signage and social media are an unbeatable combination for creating a memorable customer experience. Today, marketing is so much more than just trying to get people to buy your products or services. Even with a great product, but an unsatisfactory customer experience, you stand to possibly lose the customer. Discounts can help but are not a permanent substitute for a satisfactory experience, whether online or offline.

Satisfied customers are often the most dedicated promoters and they will do this promotion free. Many such promoters are well-known social influencers online, and their followers pay heed to what they say. With social media, you can treat each customer as an individual and communicate on a one to one basis. You can provide them with tips, ideas, discounts etc. for purchases based on past shopping trends and their social media behavior. VODXS faucet-based ad systems can display targeted messaging on the basis of such information, these can also access relevant information through NFC that connects the system to a user’s smartphone.

Social media can provide you with an unending supply of content for digital signages. You can get people to share images that you can display on signages, indoors and outdoors. Social media users will happily pose with your product or purchases made at your stores. Throw in a special mention or a prize for the photo that receives the maximum response online, and you will benefit from really high-class and good quality modelling for your digital signage campaigns.

It is worth mentioning that every interaction between digital signage and social media produces valuable data from which you can gain insights that can influence your purchase decisions, sales plans, display locations, and seasonal marketing plans.

Videos will work just as well as images. Videos invariably generate higher dwell times and more engagements. With more engagement, you generate greater conversions. People stop to watch videos. Add a call to action and put the videos to work for you. The best part, these videos are user-generated.

Such videos of a consumer’s perspective of your product, service are a wonderful endorsement for your business because these come from a party that your prospects and customers trust. Peer reviews are a big reason for the success of social media.

Digital signage allows you to interact with customers on social media. The most common way of achieving this is to get a customer’s name on digital signage screen outdoors and then tweeting that back to the customer. It’s a given that the customer will retweet a tweet showcasing his name on a giant screen. This is basically pandering to an individual’s vanity, but it works wonders for a brand trying to whip up some interest or create curiosity about a new launch.

Since people access social media on smartphones when on the move, harnessing social media with digital signage to interact with a customer base is not at all difficult. With geo targeting, a digital signage screen can address a prospect by name and flash a relevant message.

Marketing campaigns that are interactive and fun have a great a chance of succeeding. Running search campaigns on digital signages ensures widespread viewership.

Selling by creating a sense of urgency is an old and successful technique that all marketers employ. You can also use this idea to get footfalls into your store by creating a sense of urgency among mobile social media users. For example, it could be something as elementary as people sharing the message via digital signage on their social media accounts. Once they do this, it qualifies them for a discount at your store.

This technique can be used to sell stocked items to introduce a new product.

Digital signage can be used to increase your follower base across social media websites. Add social media icons and your social media handle to the screen. On interactive screens, users can directly engage with you on social media platforms.

Inform your audience via digital signage about the great content that your brand post on its social media pages. Give them a reason to visit your brand’s pages. Share images, product videos, product reviews, unboxing videos, online discounts, cashbacks, sales, answers for customer queries, etc. These are great ways to attract followers on social media sites.

Plan social media and digital signage marketing campaigns after considering the kind of content that different social media platforms excel in. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest all have different strengths and users are drawn to these platforms because of the type of content they can engage with. For example, engaging with your audience on LinkedIn for a B2B launch or job vacancies is a better idea then doing so with your followers on Facebook. When you market using Instagram, you may want to factor Facebook into the proceedings because many Instagram users also post the same content on Facebook.

As much as possible, create interactive campaigns because these are fun, and users are more likely to respond to a call to action at the end of an interactive campaign instead of one that flashes at the end of a message on a digital screen. The coming together of digital signage and social media on to a single platform allows businesses to introduce and benefit from personalized communications. Such personalized communications are invaluable in taking customers down a sales funnel through an omni channel marketing strategy.