You’ve finished the digital signage installation. You’ve taken the training. Now what? We’ve talked about implementing digital signage and our 10 tips for digital signage startups, but what’s the best way to have stunning signage on Day 1? Here are some quick tips for a successful digital signage launch:
Permissions
First, you’ll want to make sure that your user roles are set up with the proper permissions. You should have a plan in place for who is doing what in the software, and make sure each person is clear on their responsibilities and access. There are four user roles in AxisTV:
- Administrator: allows the user to manage and configure all aspects of the AxisTV system.
- Content Approver: allows the user to create, manage and schedule their own content; to edit, manage and schedule others’ content; and to approve content for play in the playlist.
- Content Creator: allows the user to create, manage, and schedule their own content, but limits access to others’ content and denies their content immediate play until a user with approval rights has authorized the content to begin playing in the playlist.
- Template User: can only create messages from templates and cannot create original messages or tickers.
Themes
Designing for digital signage is like designing for a magazine – items are shown next to each other in a small space, so you want to be sure everything looks good together. Although you may be a talented artist for single messages, you need to ensure that the entire screen is attractive and engaging.
If you’re not experienced with designing for the digital signage medium, start off with a theme pack for your signs. A theme pack includes layout backgrounds, message backgrounds and templates that are all color-coordinated so they look good together.
A theme layout can include your logo to brand screens, and you can either choose from 25 pre-designed themes or have a custom theme built for your organization.
Starting off with a theme in place will ensure your signs look great on Day 1, and it takes the design burden off of your team while they get more familiar the technology and tools.
Content
Now you’re ready to start building content, right? Not yet. Come up with a content plan and some policies for everyone to follow.
List out your content sources and contributors. List all of the types of content you might include and how often they’ll be published. (Don’t forget about auto-updating content!) If different people will be creating diverse content types, make a chart.
Make sure your team is clear on what you want them to create, your policies and any design or brand standards you want them to follow.
If you want to control the formatting and design, restrict contributors to using templates. They allow you to pre-format messages for your team to simply fill out like a form. If you don’t want to use templates, give everyone some basic design tips and show some examples of good messages.
Remind people to always include a call to action so your audience is motivated to take the next step. If you want to include measurement techniques to track your message success, give your team some tools to design with ROI in mind.