How to Easily Custom-Brand your Digital Signage Content - Checklist

We don’t need to spend time philosophizing over the importance of branding to a business. It’s your shop window. Your reputation. Your competitive edge.

Which is why it is important to drive home your brand aesthetics as much as it is your company values. Ultimately, the two go hand in hand. So luckily for you (and us) a digital signage software like ScreenCloud can help boost brand awareness in an easy-to-manage and no-design-experience-required kinda way. It helps to empower everyone within your business to become a Brand Guardian.

Why custom-branding your digital signage is important

It’s hard not to fall into the mindset of “that’ll do”. We understand how time-consuming it can be to find the correct logo, brand hue or right font every time you need to produce some branded digital signage content. And this is before you need to make any little changes.

But brand association is a powerful thing and should be treated as importantly as sales.

Image source.

Driving home your logo or brand colors builds trust with customers. The more someone sees your brand, the more likely they are to remember it; brand recognition and recall does wonders for reputation. And sales. (And there’s the whole concept of advertising, in less than 36 words).

When you pair this with digital signage, the importance of custom-branding increases:

• 71% of people said they felt advertising on digital billboards stood out more than online ads, and 46% said they were more prominent than even television ads.

Add that to digital signage, which has a recall rate of 83%. 

So with that in mind, how can you make sure that you’re maximizing your branding through your digital signage design?

How to Custom-Brand your Digital Signage Content

Before kicking things off, grab some inspiration from our posts on 30 Examples of Good Content for Digital Signage, and 10 Rules for Designing Digital Signage Content.

1. Create a theme

Being a Brand Guardian is all about ensuring consistency. With ScreenCloud you can set custom branded themes that allows you to transfer what’s in your company brand book and fix it in your digital signage CMS, to use as many times as you like. You can also apply this to multiple apps without having to constantly re-add colors or choose fonts.

Here are some additional tips to help you pull out your branding elements if you don’t have access to a company brand book:

i) How to easily find your brand colors

While it’s always a good idea to know HEX code of your brand colors, if you have no idea then upload your logo to the Image Color Picker. This will help you pick out the different HEX codes (those that start with #) in your logo or branding to quickly find the exact hue.

ii) Find your font

To find out what font you’re using, head to your website and open the source code. To do this on Google Chrome, you can enter cmd, option, u.

This should bring up a new tab full of code. Search for the word “font” and you should see a URL or name for your font.

In this example you’ll see the URL: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:300,300i,400,400i,700,700i|Material+Icons This shows the font as Lato.

iii) Create contrasting themes

When it comes to using custom branded themes you'll want to consider two contrasting colors you can use. This is particularly important for digital signage, where you want your messaging to stand out and catch attention.

2. Use Canvas app to design branded signage templates

The Canvas app is one of the most-used resources on ScreenCloud. It’s a free tool built inside the ScreenCloud software that works a bit like (simple) Photoshop.

You can design eye-catching posters, signs and graphics that are optimized for displaying on your digital signage screens. And if you need a hand, get your design department to create templates / set up the brand colors and fonts first. 

Once a design has been finalized anyone can edit at any time and push directly to your digital signage screen without the need to download, re-upload, edit, save, upload…

With Canvas it's easy to add your own brand elements including:

• Custom images
• Brand logos
• Background colors

Here's how it works:

With Canvas app, you can go back and edit the same content at any time without having to start from scratch. This makes it easy for your design or marketing team to create posters or signs, that can later be updated or changed by anyone.

3. Add your logo to your digital signage content

In this guide we explain a quick hack for adding a logo to your screen content.

One thing to bear in mind is what your logo will look like on top of different pieces of content; it may be worth having different color options depending on what it will be sitting on top of. 

4. Use digital signage templates

Having a consistent style is really important. Creating a consistent style when you’re not a designer can be really hard. That’s why we love templates. At the most basic level, a tool like Google Slides has some great templates you can grab, tweak the colors and have your own semi-custom templates for displaying information like digital menu boards, or team profiles.

We actually created 30+ Google Slides templates that you can use for free which are a great way to get started.

These templates focus on design and layout, ensuring all of the information will look great on screen. But you should also dip in and change the colors to your custom brand. You can also change the font type and images so that all of the information is personalized to your company.

5. Personalize your digital signage content

Custom content goes far beyond just colors and fonts. Reinforcing your branding is about reapplying your messaging and getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time. 

Using automation is a sure fire way to impress customers. One of the best tools for pulling the brands of your customers is the Clearbit API. In its most basic sense, their free logo tool lets you find and embed logos.

This could be applying the logo of the company coming into a meeting to a welcome screen or adding logos of your customers to ambient content. Making your digital signage information meaningful is finding what matters most to your audience; whether that’s your customers, your employees or passers-by in the street. Usually, if there’s something you want to show and it lives in an online system, there will be some way to show it.

Custom Branding Digital Signage Checklist

Now you know how to custom brand your content, use this checklist to make sure you have all of the areas covered:

• Ensure the HEX codes for your main brand colors are saved and added to ScreenCloud
• Choose brand fonts
• Create a logo with a transparent background
• Set up a custom theme
• Use Canvas app to create custom branded content
• Upload your logo as a zone
• Personalize a Google Slides template
• Create custom information for your audience

Get started by logging in or signing up to our 14 day free trial of ScreenCloud and begin playing with the tools you need to custom-brand your digital signage communications.