5 Ways to Build Customer Trust with Digital Signage

It’s a common trope that people love people and ideas - not logos. Customer trust in brands is at an all-time low. According to Nielsen, “92% of people will believe peer reviews or even recommendations from people they have never met, over what a brand would say.”

And yet we still see campaigns led by brand-first messaging that has little or no relevance to the people reading it. In digital signage campaigns, this is even more obvious. We’re in the throes of a love affair with screens. While books and written mediums are in decline, we’re looking at our TVs, smartphones and laptops more than ever.

The gap between the screens people want to view and the effectiveness of them is the content. Sure you could stick a screen up on the wall with your latest ad campaign and hope people see it, but what if you made the information truly useful, convenient or authentic?

Screens are powerful and customer trust is powerful, so joining the two together creates something really rather special. Here are five ways to do exactly that.

1. Share dashboards of live data

Dashboards are one of the most underutilized ways to build customer trust from digital screens. First, you have a ton of options: social media dashboards that share real-time updates from your fans, project management dashboards, statistics from your website or product sells, or even voting dashboards on your most popular products.

People trust in data. Real-time data especially, can’t be fixed. When you pop up a dashboard on the wall, it’s very easy to build trust. Unlike an ad campaign, it’s very difficult to fake data or try to paint your brand in a better light.

Check out the dashboard apps on offer in our App Store which help do exactly that.

2. Showcase testimonials

You already share testimonials on your website, right? But have you considered pushing them up to your digital screen? Written testimonials are effective at building customer trust, but image and video are even better. All you need to create a great testimonial is a simple notice or image creator (check out Noticeboard for a lite option), an image of your best customer, and a few words from the horse's mouth, as they say.

This creates a quick, yet powerful, piece of proof that your company delivers as it says. The beauty of digital signage is that you can easily update testimonials every few weeks or months. Just add in a new slide, delete the old ones, and you have a constant, fresh and most importantly, believable, stream on what people think of you.

3. Engage social proof

Social media is another shortcut to taking the words of your customers and getting them up on screen. If your customers are taking pictures with your products, snapping away within your restaurant or telling their friends about your offer, that’s great marketing potential for your business.

User-generated content (things shared on social media by customers) is proof that your business can be trusted. It’s 100 times more powerful than you telling customers you’re trustworthy, so why not let them do the hard work for you?

4. Lead with company insights

There’s a reason why people work for your company. Often, this is only visible from the inside. Some of the most recognizable brands in the world (think Innocent, Buffer, Google and Facebook) are partly successful because of how they treat their staff. Others have great policies on charity initiatives or doing things simply for social good. Whether it’s your staff or your favorite charity you’re treating well, it's an important tell that should be shared with customers. It’s easy to think that customers are only interested in what you’re selling them, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. What customers are really interested in is the people and proof behind the brands they’re buying from. Consider all aspects of your brand and then use them to build powerful digital signage campaigns.

5. Balance advertising with useful information

One of the big benefits of digital signage is that power to marry advertising with information. TV has been doing this for centuries - blending ads between content, but viewers have learned how to tune it out. With digital signage, you have the option to refresh the medium. Say you share an ad on your latest product or service, but split the screen down the middle so that the rest is filled with a live travel board or news feed. Your viewers are eager to engage with the screen, if they want to know what’s going on in the world or not be late, that is. You get more eyeballs on your ad than could likely be achieved with a banner ad or TV display, and at the same time, your audience receives information they actually want to see.

The true secret of effective communications is finding the small gap between what everyone is doing and where there is a gap. Right now, very few brands are utilizing the power of digital screens paired with useful, relevant content. There are plenty of people doing digital signage plus advertising and plenty doing informative content through print, blogging or social media but without digital signage.

Harness the gap and it becomes easy to build trust with customers. Get started today with your free ScreenCloud trial at signage.screen.cloud/.