Why Startups Should Use Digital Signage

The thing we love most about startups? That their staff, investors and advisors are as important as customers. That’s rare. Get to a mid-large sized corporate and it becomes super difficult to think this hard about your first five employees.

So what if there was one thing a startup could do to make communicating with these key cohorts even easier?

Enter digital signage.

Digital signage, the art of filling office walls with digital screens to share content, is big news in office communications. One, because it’s simpler than ever to set up and two, it fulfils a myriad of problems that startups could otherwise flounder with.

Here’s a few we’ve noticed.

The impact of culture

When a company is fast growing (as most startups are) it’s natural to become concerned about the impact on culture. You want to retain the early ethos and turn new staff members into visionaries, but how? You don’t have time to put together heavy documents, the CEO is up to his or her eyeballs and can’t spend much time onboarding. So it gets left to HR, or a few other early team members, who all have their own mountain of work to get through.

But hey, what about your other buddy, the digital screen? If you have a TV monitor up on the wall in your office (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) therein lies your answer.

Digital signage can easily be used to communicate values, explain onboarding processes, direct new team members to the kitchen, or to 'free beer Fridays and to enable more collaborative work. 

Throw up a simple video explaining what you’ve been doing for the past six months, add a few company mottos as graphics, or setup images of team days and already you begin to fill your office with company culture.

Cloud-based design

Startups are fluid and agile by their very nature. The tech they work with has to be the same. That’s why cloud-based digital signage software like ScreenCloud is an ideal match. ScreenCloud allows you to setup a trial with no contract or credit card required. Then, if you decide to continue using it, you get billed $20 per month, per screen. If you have a NFP or educational angle, it’s even less. If you add a screen halfway through the month you only get billed for the part of the month you used it and you can remove or stop a screen and your contract at any time.

Secondly, we have a modern approach to hardware. In an ideal digital signage world, everyone would have the same screen and it would be the same size and made by the same manufacturer. But that’s unrealistic, so we found a way to give digital signage power to any screen, regardless of whether it’s screen or tablet, Android or iOS, smart or non-smart. Find our more using our hardware selector. 

Sharing of information

When it comes to digital signage content the choices are endless. You can set up social media feeds, powerpoint presentations, Trello boards or news.

In startups, KPI dashboards are often key. Digital screens make it easy to keep this information super visible, right where people want to look at it. Simply use a web link to your dashboard URL in our “Add Web Site” section, or use an app like Google Sheets, Microsoft Power Bi or Klipfolio to set up a custom dashboard.   

The sharing (and reading) of information becomes much easier when you have a screen to send it to.

External communications

As well as internal comms, digital signage helps you to impress big customers and investors too.

Say you set up a screen in your office lobby or reception. Each time an investor or customer walks in, they see exactly the information you want to share with them.

This might be news of a big win, sales figures or an exciting product development. While they wait a few minutes to be collected, they get a great first impression about who you are as a company and what you’re doing. Our eyes are naturally trained to glance at screens. Why not make the use of the opportunity to feature your company vision and brand to all that pass by?

Spreading news (and wins!)

Lastly, digital screens are a great place to spread news and positivity. Using the Twitter Search app you can set up your screens to show positive feedback from customers sent in on the channel.

You can use a Slack channel to send customer testimonials up onto the screen, welcome new staff or add quotes from team members.

Digital screens are the perfect, fluid way to spread internal news, wins and social media updates. It changes as fast as you need it to, can be automated through apps to update automatically (all in a few clicks) and keeps your office alive with the latest information.