How to engage a higher ed audience beyond the digital screen

In trying to create new and relevant content for digital signage screens, we sometimes forget that our audience is in motion and will not see everything they are intended to see.

As part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, digital signage can be an effective facilitator of information, but is not always treated as such.  With the wider availability of smart phones, laptops, and tablets, we need to be able to reach our audiences where they are  — namely, on the move.

In a workplace or school setting, most of the information being distributed on the screens is also being sent through other means.  Websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, eMail, text messages, RSS feeds and more are incorporated into a marketing strategy to make sure the message gets out.

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And sometimes, colleges clutter valuable screen real estate, putting the exact same message on our digital signs.

Given that the majority of our audience is on the move, we are wasting time and resources on these ads.   Think of freeway billboards.  They are huge, designed to be read as quickly as possible, and they often point to a website or radio station so the customer can learn more about the service.

Can you imagine seeing a billboard as full of text as we have seen on some digital signs on college campuses?

If we can’t highlight every single reason a person should come to our event, buy our product, or otherwise take action, what can we do?  The simple answer is to point the audience to another resource.

This can be done using a web address, a phone number, or other point of contact, or other more creative means. By sending the audience to a place where it is OK to have several paragraphs worth of information, the digital sign is less likely to be overlooked as it is passed by each day.

Pointing the audience to relevant information and adopting a minimalist approach to content can greatly increase the return on intent or investment, depending on your setting and goals. There is an added benefit to putting a call to action on a screen: analytics are easy to come by.