How to Measure Digital Signage ROI?
Companies across sectors have embraced digital signages for their reach, customization, and cost-effectiveness. Along with these, another important benefit of digital signage solutions is their accountability. Organizations can measure their ROI and recalibrate their systems for greater efficiency.
Brands have learned that digital signages are one of the most reliable channels for their marketing campaigns. Organizations are using digital signages to increase employee engagement. Hospitals are using them to inform patients, visitors, and their staff of health and safety protocols.
If your organization, small business, or marketing team uses digital signage, it helps to routinely review its performance. Measuring digital signage ROI is how you’ll know whether the systems are in alignment with your objectives and whether you need to tweak them for better results.
So, What Is ROI?
Return on Investment (ROI), also referred to as return on costs, is a metric to measure the profitability of the investment. Simply put, it helps you know whether the investment you made is making any profits.
So, if you were to invest $25,000 in marketing to increase the number of visitors to your site, you can measure your ROI by tracking site visits. They should be compared to the base level before you rolled out the campaign.
It should be noted that not all investments can be analyzed in the short run. Some will take longer to produce results.
But what if your primary objective is not to increase the number of visitors to your website but to raise brand awareness? Or, let’s say that your goal is to change the perception of your brand. You won’t be able to track them with the usual sales numbers.
What you can use is Return on Objective or ROO. This is for measuring goals that can’t be analyzed using hard data.
Best Practices for Measuring Digital Signage ROI
So, how do you start analyzing whether your digital signage solutions are profitable and doing their job? You begin by evaluating your goals.
Define your objectives
Every organization would have a unique set of goals that would change over time. For digital signages, these goals can also vary according to where the systems are deployed and who they’re talking to.
A company can use the system to engage with both its employees and customers. The system’s performance would have to be calculated against its objectives of employee engagement or customer interactions.
Your primary objective for using digital signages could be different from someone else in your category. Two marketing teams in the same sector could have two different goals. For one, it could be to raise brand awareness and for the other, it could be to encourage sales.
For a hospital, the goals would be to inform and direct patients and visitors, limit the need for in-person queries at the reception, communicate safety protocols, etc.
A supermarket can have several objectives that include helping customer-navigation, communicating sales and discounts, and offering customer support. So, the digital signage system’s performance should be judged against these varying objectives.
ROI to ROO
Since the objectives can vary, it would be unwise to measure a digital signage system purely based on its impact on the bottom line. The goals of a hospital can differ from those of a supermarket or a restaurant.
This would take us from ROI to ROO or return on objectives. So, what you should be measuring is not the system but the campaigns that are being run through the digital signage. For the same location and business, the ROO will vary according to the objectives.
For example, if you’re a supermarket, you could measure whether customers are aware of the new product launches. Do they ask employees for directions? Can they find the sections easily? Do the displays at the counter speed up payment processing?
Each of these objectives has to be measured separately. While some may impact the revenue, others would be hard to quantify. These include customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Choose your timelines
You should also keep in mind that all objectives cannot be measured using the same timeline. Some may need a longer timeframe to bear fruits. For example, no matter how interesting and strategically relevant your content is, employee engagement won’t increase overnight. It may take several quarters.
Would it immediately show in the bottom line? No. But would it impact your growth in the longterm? Absolutely, yes.
So, you should choose metrics that are relevant to your audience and then give varying timeframes to measure those. Then, you should calculate your ROO based on the movement in those metrics before and after you’d deployed your digital signage solution.
Measure the content
Your digital signage experience is as good as the content you deliver through it. So, before you broadcast anything, you should do an audience survey to know which one is more likely to work.
You can do it through A/B testing where you create two pieces of content on the same brief. You can then run them on your signage system and see which one creates more impact. This pre-release testing will also give you directions on content creation.
Audience feedback
One of the easiest ways to measure the effectiveness of your digital signage system is by learning how your audience reacts to it. You can use quantitative data including their reactions to any “call to action” hooks in the content. These could be signups, opt-ins, or their engagements with any QR codes.
A more direct way to measure audience involvement is to ask them. This is easy for internal audiences including employees. You could do a survey to figure out how easily they comprehend the content, how they react to it, and whether they would like to see any changes.
If it’s an external audience like consumers in a supermarket or diners in a restaurant, you could ask at the end of their shopping or dining. Through a short questionnaire, you can easily find out if your messages are being received well. These will give you directions to change the content or delivery.
Measuring ROI and ROO in digital signages must be in line with the pre-determined objectives. Like any marketing or internal corporate communication, it will take time to produce results. But regular analysis will give you actionable insights on improving the quality of the content.
It will also show ways to customize your content, which is one of the biggest advantages of digital signages. If there is a lack of engagement, maybe the problem is the lack of variety in your content.
You could add news or weather widgets to make it compelling. You can also add social media apps to make your system more interesting. Maybe videos with the right captions will work better for your audience.
Once you know what produces better results, you can adapt that to other parts of the system. That process of constant learning and iteration is what will make your digital signage system work for your organization.
How Can EasySignage Help You Measure Your ROI and ROO?
EasySignage is loaded with features / apps that can help you measure your campaigns, but maybe the most important two are proof of play and QR code generator.
Proof of play
Proof of play offers detailed data on media playback, as well as exportable reports that can be used to monitor the content and ad campaigns.
For more infomration how to use it, check the Following link: PROOF OF PLAY.
QR Code
The automatic QR code generator is designed to help users generate and update QR codes without using any external tools. The QR generator is embedded within the online visual editor, use our QR code generator to embed traceable URLs and encourage your views to scan the QR code by offering them incentives.
What’s The Best Part?
The implementation of a digital signage system does not require much effort. You only need EasySignage and the appropriate hardware to get started.
To take advantage of all the benefits of digital signage, sign up for a free licence with EasySignage: manage.easysignage.com.