In the fast-paced world of modern communication, keeping audiences engaged and informed is paramount. For digital signage users, this often translates into a constant demand for fresh, appealing content. However, the reality for many communicators is a busy schedule with limited time and resources for content creation. This is where the power of automated digital signage content comes into play. By leveraging digital signage automation with smart tools and strategies, organizations can deliver stunning, up-to-the-minute messages with minimal effort, ensuring their digital signs remain dynamic and effective communication hubs.
AxisTV Signage Suite digital signage software offers a robust suite of options for populating screens with captivating content without the need for constant manual updates or extensive design expertise. These solutions are broadly categorized as “ready-made content”, which provides pre-designed templates and frameworks, and “automated content”, which focuses on self-updating information feeds. The beauty lies in their ability to save time, reduce effort and consistently deliver relevant, engaging visuals that capture attention and reinforce your brand messaging.
Ready-Made Content: Building Blocks for Beautiful Displays
Even with limited design experience or time, you can create professional-looking digital signage. Ready-made content options provide a strong foundation, allowing for quick deployment and easy customization.
Templates: Instant Messages, Effortless Design
Imagine needing to put up an urgent announcement, celebrate an employee’s birthday or recognize a student’s achievement. Starting from scratch can be a drain on time and creative energy. This is where message templates become invaluable. A comprehensive library of hundreds of pre-designed templates in the content management system (CMS) can cover the most common message types, offering a simple and efficient way to get messages on screens quickly.
These templates offer a high degree of flexibility. Some are purely text-based, ideal for quick updates, while others include image placeholders, allowing you to incorporate your own artwork and branding elements. And customization extends beyond that, with options to choose from various color schemes, backgrounds and aspect ratios to perfectly fit your screens.
System administrators and designers can even craft their own templates in the CMS, choosing which text fields and visual elements can be filled in by users. This is a great solution to present consistent brand colors, fonts and formatting across all of your visual communication channels.
Templates are a great tool for team members without design training, allowing them to create impactful messages quickly and easily. The entire process, from choosing a template to customizing and scheduling it in the online CMS, takes under five minutes. This means you can work on your digital signage content from anywhere with an internet connection, ensuring maximum convenience and responsiveness.
Signage Packs & Kits: Structured Content for Key Information
For those who need to display up-to-the-minute, structured information, digital signage content packs and kits offer a powerful solution. These kits provide pre-designed screen layouts and artwork that can be easily imported into the CMS. Get message packs, background designs and artwork elements that can be mapped to specific data sources for both static and interactive displays.
Consider the common need for displaying event schedules, directories or menu boards. Rather than building these complex layouts from the ground up, content kits provide a robust foundation. You can take these pre-configured basics and easily make them your own by adding your logo and a custom background image or simply utilize the stock elements that are already included.
The process is streamlined: import the pack or kit, customize the layouts and then sync with the CMS. The result is beautiful, accurate information that updates in real-time, all on its own. This is particularly useful if you don’t have in-house designers but still want stunning content on screens.
Automated Content: Always Fresh, Always Relevant
The true power of modern digital signage lies in its ability to display content that updates automatically, requiring minimal ongoing intervention. This “set it and forget it” approach is a game-changer for busy communicators, ensuring screens never go stale and audiences always receive the most current information.
Subscription Feeds: Curated Content on Autopilot
If time is a luxury you simply don’t have for content creation, or if you want to supplement your existing messages with diverse, engaging topics, subscription feeds are an ideal solution. These easy-to-implement feeds are specifically designed for digital signs, offering curated, auto-updating visuals for a wide range of subjects.
For as little as 33 cents a day, you can access professionally designed content for weather, traffic, sports, stock market updates, news in pictures, flight boards, social media, inspirational quotes, safety tips, and health and wellness information. The setup is remarkably simple: you merely point to a URL for the desired feed and schedule when and where you want it to play. Once configured, you can sit back and enjoy a continuous stream of fresh content on your screens, keeping your audience informed and engaged without any manual effort.
Dynamic Widgets: Real-Time Information at Your Fingertips
A key part of digital signage automation is robust data integration with external sources, which Visix’s system offers through its dynamic widgets. Some of the most popular are:
- Day, Date and Current Time: This seemingly simple automated content is incredibly effective. People will frequently glance at screens for the day, date or time, and in doing so, they’ll inevitably see your other important announcements, maximizing the reach of your core messages. Our recommendation is to place these as a permanent part of your screen layout.
- Weather: A perennially popular choice, weather can also be shown as a permanent part of the layout or in discreet message zones on a schedule. You can choose what weather elements to display (current temperature, forecast, humidity, wind speed, etc.) and even set up background designs and weather icons to automatically update based on weather changes. Once configured, it continuously pulls the most current data, ensuring your audience always knows the forecast. You can also set up auto-updating tickers for current weather conditions.
- Event Schedules: Sharing scheduling information for conference rooms, meetings, classes or other events is a common need for any organization. Connect your digital signage system to popular calendar apps like Microsoft Exchange, Google Calendar, EMS, Mazévo and CollegeNet to show room reservations and today’s events. Once a template is set up with your preferred background and schedule data, it auto-updates, ensuring your audience always has access to the latest schedule information.
- Data Tables: For organizations that rely on structured data, pulling information directly from Excel, XML or JSON files is a powerful content automation tool. You simply format the data on screen once and then it automatically updates on your digital signs any time changes are made to the source file. This is a great way to manage menu boards, fundraiser totals and directory listings, especially if data management is a team effort.
- RSS Feeds: The versatility of RSS feeds means that almost anything on the web can be exported and pulled into your digital signage. This is a fantastic way to access current and often free content, allowing for a wide range of information to be displayed automatically. Just be sure to check the usage rights for any information you display.
- Web Content: For images that update frequently, such as traffic camera images, weather maps or graphics based on database information (like sports statistics or poll results), simply pointing to a URL lets you display an image stored elsewhere on the web. You can also point to whole webpages to show dashboards, your intranet or public website pages. If you have touchscreens, you can use a web browser widget to show fullscreen HTML5 webpages at up to 4K resolution.
- Media Directory: This option is a major timesaver for both designers and digital signage managers. Instead of having to share, reformat and reschedule content across communication platforms, you can simply point to a network folder to show images and videos automatically on digital signs. Whatever content is in the folder, it will play on screens until it’s deleted from that folder, so you can conveniently manage your content all in one place.
See our full list of timesaving AxisTV Signage Suite widgets.
Faster & Fresher: Strategic Advantages of Automation
The benefits of embracing pre-designed and automated digital signage content for both communicators and audiences are clear and compelling:
- Time and Effort Savings: This is perhaps the most significant advantage. By automating updates and using handy templates, communications teams are freed from the constant burden of creating new content, allowing them to focus on broader communication strategies.
- Consistency and Professionalism: Stock templates and curated feeds ensure a consistent, professional aesthetic across all your screens, reinforcing your brand identity and message quality.
- Always Fresh and Engaging: Automated content (like event schedules, news and traffic) ensures that your screens are always displaying the latest information, keeping your audience engaged and giving them a reason to keep coming back to your displays. Stale content is a surefire way to lose audience interest.
- Enhanced Audience Engagement: By providing information that is popular, relevant and visually appealing (such as date/time, weather and social media), you provide content that audiences actively seek out, increasing their engagement with your digital signs and, by extension, your other important messages.
- Reduced Design Expertise Required: With quick-start templates and user-friendly customization options, even those without extensive design training can create visually appealing and effective messages. By managing external data sources in familiar apps like Excel, everyone can contribute.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Subscription-based feeds offer a highly affordable way to access high-quality, constantly updated content, often costing mere cents per day.
Timesaving Tool: HTML5 Content Publisher
In addition to taking advantage of prefab designs and preset feeds, digital signage managers can repurpose that content by publishing it to websites, intranets, messaging apps and mobile devices using the HTML5 Message Playlist Viewer in AxisTV Signage Suite. This significantly increases the reach and real estate of your messages, extending those messages to off-site audiences without the need to redesign or reformat anything.
Administrators can choose what content to publish from the digital signage CMS and then share a URL or embed it directly into internal or external webpages using a simple iframe. Because it’s HTML5, the messages automatically scale to the size of the screen displaying them.
This feature offers valuable customization options: you can choose which file types to display (designed messages, videos, etc.), show or hide playback controls (forward, back, pause) and even control their style. For transparent messages, you can select a background color to ensure readability when viewed in a browser.
The HTML5 Message Playlist Viewer eliminates the need to duplicate work to reach remote employees or off-site stakeholders. A message created once can be scheduled for on-site screens and simultaneously embedded in your intranet homepage for at-home workers, ensuring everyone is on the same page with consistent, great-looking messages, all while reducing your workload.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
In the dynamic landscape of digital communication, the ability to deliver engaging, up-to-date content efficiently is a competitive advantage. Through digital signage automation, ready-made and automated solutions offer a powerful and practical approach to achieve this. By strategically combining pre-designed templates, dynamic data feeds and expansive distribution options, organizations can transform their digital signs into vibrant, informative hubs that truly capture attention and enhance communication.
Don’t let content creation be a bottleneck; embrace the tools that allow you to communicate better, faster and more effectively, ultimately maximizing the impact of your digital signage investment.