How to engage a higher ed audience beyond the digital screen

When your customer is sent to your website, calls a phone number, or contacts someone by eMail, there is tangible evidence that the sign accomplished its task – customers saw the information and acted on it.

Websites are particularly valuable because you can see what device was used to view the content, and can create content suitable to the device in the future. This can be in the form of a native iPhone or Android application featuring your signage content, or a website dedicated to supplementing the signs.

Finding out where and how the information is digested will help focus future marketing efforts to save resources and get the message through.

What content should be featured on a digital signage screen, then? One should always start with the basics – the who, what when, where, and sometimes, the why.

Usually the “why” constitutes the bulk of the clutter, so it is important to create a compelling reason for the viewer to digest this information elsewhere. This means that the “who, what, when, and where” are even more important.

Without paying careful attention to the way the message is displayed, you might go to the other extreme and lose the audience’s attention for lack of information. This is where strategy comes in.

As mentioned above, there are a number of alternative modes of communication available to reach your audience. It is important to think of ways to incorporate each of these features in a comprehensive campaign, in order to provide the information the audience needs, where they are, and in a manner useful to them.