GreenScreens have been using ScreenCloud since 2018 as part of their approach to innovate Cannabis retail operations . We spoke with CMO Colton Keluche and the leadership team about the growing importance of the ‘connected store’ and how digital signage is helping dispensaries navigate the competitive landscape of the post-COVID world. 

Unlike a majority of industries during the pandemic, sales of legal Cannabis increased throughout, hitting a record of $17.5bn – a 46% increase from 2019-2020. 

According to a report by cannabinoid market research company BDSA, over the past year alone 30% of consumers have shopped for Cannabis more often. And with maturing markets like Illinois (who earned the largest dollar gain over 2020) and California (whose sales increased by $586m to $3.5bn last year – making it the largest Cannabis economy in the US), fulfilling demand has made the Cannabis retail space one of the most competitive markets in the United States.

As a highly regulated industry, dispensaries do not have access to typical marketing solutions like television, radio or billboards. Yet the number of dispensaries in the US outnumber McDonald's and Starbucks combined. Cannabis dispensaries therefore need to be even more strategic about how they connect with their customers when they’re already in store; enter GreenScreens.

While the results of 2020 indicate the Cannabis industry’s exponential growth, it is still a maturing – and heavily regulated – market. But it is also a competitive one. This has left room for experimentation and innovation, and ultimately, investment in new technologies like digital signage. 

“Convenience is king. The cannabis industry is at the heart of a low-input high-output consumer mindset. What delivery and pickup does for convenience, we aim to accomplish for the retail experience by constantly getting ahead of the market demands via showcasing relative data at the right time.”

GreenScreens champions what they call the ‘harmonized dispensary experience’ in a bid to unite such a  fragmented and highly regulated industry. Operating in such a volatile environment has meant digital engagement has become a critical consideration for dispensaries: it’s the key to educating, communicating and connecting with the customer to create a memorable retail experience, while also working to erase the stigmas surrounding the industry itself. 

The importance of enhanced digital engagement 

Within the retail space therefore, digital engagement is used as a vehicle to interact, connect and build relationships with customers;

“Today’s consumer doesn’t just want to make a purchase. They expect exceptional, informative and memorable experiences. So it's critical for our dispensary customers to stand out and utilize the tools that are available to them in order to connect and engage with their customers.” 

In this setting, digital signage is the ultimate marketing tool. By using screens for advertising, promotions and consumer-facing product menus, GreenScreens' dispensary customers are able to showcase their unique brand and messaging to create that consumer engagement from the moment they walk in the door. Importantly, this also allows them to nurture their relationships with their own customers;  

“A post-covid market has learned the convenience of self-guided shopping and decision making when given readily available product knowledge and information. The Cannabis industry is no different as tablets and integrated menus allow for ease of access to provide digital hand-holding while maintaining a familiar retail experience.”

Digital hand-holding: digital menu boards

Purchasing Cannabis from a legal dispensary is still a relatively new retail experience. This adds to the importance of creating a reliable shopping experience, along with efficiently educating consumers about the fundamentals of purchasing Cannabis products. Combined, this goes some way in lessening industry stigmas. 

By integrating real-time menu boards on consumer-facing screens, dispensaries are able to not only show what is available in-store, but GreenScreens pre-load each screen with a library of educational content to empower purchasing decisions. Aside from the educational aspect, this also frees up staff time, enhances the consumer experience and gives room for greater foot traffic.

While the in-store strategy of educating the consumer in order to make informed decisions, GreenScreens also encourages their customers to fully harness the powers of digital signage in the back office too. Surfacing retail performance analytics and other data dashboards on screens allows dispensary managers to make data-driven decisions to improve the daily running of their business;

“Tools and solutions for Cannabis dispensary operators are emerging, but we have to remember that this industry isn't even in its crawling phase. There is a lot to learn as the landscape continues to evolve, so current products and solutions are adapting while others continue to emerge to meet new challenges head on.”

To find out if digital signage can help boost your revenue, increase employee engagement and improve internal communications within your business, request a demo or start a 14-day free trial. 

Click here if you'd like to learn more about GreenScreens.

Digital signage is revolutionizing the (legal) Cannabis retail industry. See how GreenScreens and their customers are achieving this with ScreenCloud.

With 2020 marking a record for (legal) Cannabis sales in the US, the resilience of this rapidly maturing market has made competition rather high…

GreenScreens and ScreenCloud: A Joint Effort in Revolutionizing the Cannabis Buying Experience 

But, it’s not always been a sweet ride.

While we would love to delve into the romantic historics of the touring musician-turned-retail-titan, we’re here for something much more rock ‘n’ roll: employee engagement. And how hacking the Friday app and integrating it with ScreenCloud helped Sweetwater achieve their internal communication dreams. (Don’t smash your guitar up just yet.)

Sweetwater - Friday app integration 

As a case study, Sweetwater are what we’d call an ideal customer.

When talking with Michael McNees – Sweetwater’s IT Delivery Specialist – during our Reboot Hackathon, he validated our existence; he and his team had built Sweetwater’s own digital signage system, albeit one where he would create Keynote files and distribute them via a cable TV system. This came with a host of headache-inducing issues:

And most importantly: it was no fun at 8 am on a Saturday morning when a screen would go down.

The other issues faced by the team was what content to put on the screens themselves. They had customer-facing screens, screens for employees, and then screens for both. Each screen required different files to be created and uploaded into different boxes, with no centralized system. (Time to smash that guitar – from frustration.)

Spoiler alert: Sweetwater joined ScreenCloud. 

But aside from the obvious problem solving our digital signage software provided, we wanted to make even sweeter music with Sweetwater.

Part of the Reboot event (read more about it here) was the Hackathon. We learnt from Michael that he had just implemented an internal comms app called Friday to enhance employee engagement across multiple teams in different locations; monthly in-person ‘stand-ups’ just weren't viable anymore. But he didn’t have a scalable way of sharing Friday’s content.

Together we built a custom app integration for Friday so that Sweetwater could implement it effectively within their digital signage strategy, and share its content across specific - and multi-location – screens. Everyone likes a pat on the back, but we like it a whole lot more when this praise can be seen throughout the company in real-time. 

If you’d like to see how to build your own custom app to integrate with your ScreenCloud account, get started here. 

Otherwise, here's process Sweetwater followed to build the Friday integration:

The app was built as a web application hosted in Firebase.

Then, a Firebase cloud function was created as a proxy to fetch data from Friday. This proxy is to mitigate exposing sensitive data such as the API Key to the frontend application. Data can then be mapped here from the responses to the format that is required to be sent to the front end.

When the app is being shown on screen, the player fetches the hosted web application from the Firebase cloud function proxy, based on the configuration received. 

The Firebase cloud function proxy will be periodically called upon by the web app to receive more up-to-date information from the Friday API.

If you’d like to see whether ScreenCloud is for you, give it a go with zero commitment. We’re offering a 14-day free trial with no need to enter any card details. You don’t even need a screen to get started. 

Building a custom app integration for your digital signage strategy can really enhance your employee engagement. Just ask Sweetwater, that's exactly what they did with ScreenCloud.

Founded as a recording studio in the back of a VW microbus in the 1970s, later becoming the largest online retailer of pro audio equipment in the US, Sweetwater is no stranger to digital transformation.

ScreenCloud & Custom App Integrations: Everyday’s Friday at Sweetwater 

How Cars.com provides engaging, personalized data to supercharge their dealership community

Founded in 1998, Cars.com is one of the largest online shopping destinations for car buyers and sellers in the US. Their platform offers new and used vehicle listings, research tools, reviews, and other resources to help shoppers make well-informed decisions, connect with automotive retailers, and enable a smooth car buying experience. Cars.com also offers online subscription advertising products targeting car dealerships, empowering them with innovative solutions and data-driven intelligence to better reach and influence shoppers. 

Cars.com was looking for a new solution to help dealers increase inventory turnover, drive sales, and ultimately boost their market positions.         

To share relevant, useful performance information to their network of dealerships via tablets

To help individual dealerships have real-time access to their relative positions and sales information and to drive their productivity

To automatically update information without any human intervention   

Here, we speak to David Greene, Sr. Director, SEO & Retention at Cars.com and General Manager at NewCars.com on his experience working with ScreenCloud’s Professional Services and development teams to create a new application for their network of dealerships. 

We’ve been a ScreenCloud user for a while and enjoyed using their product and services. We were exploring a new innovative solution to better serve our dealerships and equip them with useful information (i.e. merchandising scores, performance metrics, and inventory stats). We aimed to show them how well they’re doing compared to other nearby showrooms offering the same brands of cars, and ultimately increase their engagement and drive their overall performance. We wanted to build a new application that dealers can easily use via tablets. Given our positive experience with ScreenCloud, it seemed natural to reach out to their team for help. 

We worked closely with ScreenCloud’s development and Professional Services teams to build CarsNow, a custom application that can pull relevant, personalized data for each dealership location from our central database and display it. Each location has a unique Cars.com ID number, and CarsNow uses this to make sure that the data is secured and sent to the right location. The teams at ScreenCloud also created branded animations to help maintain a modern look and on-brand experience. CarsNow was then deployed privately to our ScreenCloud account.

Whenever there are new changes in the databases, the information on the users’ screens will be updated automatically. This ensures that our dealerships have the latest metrics and information they need without the need for any human intervention.

Version 1 of the application has been a success, and we’re pleased with what we’ve achieved so far. We’re currently working with ScreenCloud to add more functionality to CarsNow, and we’re excited to introduce the app to our network of dealerships.

Cars.com using ScreenCloud to provide engaging, personalized data to improve their dealership community

How Leading Online Automotive Marketplace Cars.com Empowers Their Dealerships with Performance Data Using ScreenCloud

Cos Bar - Customer Story 

How Cos Bar use ScreenCloud to enhance their world class luxury beauty buying experience for their customers.

Cos Bar in Brentwood is a luxury multi-brand beauty retailer specializing in high-end beauty products. As part of creating a world-class beauty retail experience, they wanted a slick digital signage solution to help promote products, events, and marketing initiatives to their discerning customers.

Be able to update content as new promotions go live, in line with their wider marketing plan

Find a cost-effective digital signage solution with affordable hardware and easy-to-use software

Here, we speak to Cristina Estrada, VP of Operations and Elizabeth Setyono, Marketing Associate at Cos Bar on their experience using ScreenCloud digital signage.

We were looking to bring in digital signage for our store so we could communicate better with our customers and create a high-end retail experience for them. When we researched different solutions, the more traditional retail vendors had very expensive hardware and were complicated to install, while ScreenCloud was perfect for our budget and very easy to set up.

We use ScreenCloud to highlight the luxury brands we love and to promote all our upcoming events. It’s also a simple way to promote our marketing campaigns and omni-channel initiatives like ‘Buy online, pick up in-store’ or SMS texting. We also display our social media feeds like Instagram, so that our in store customers can see what we're up to in our online channels.

We’re a fairly small up-and-coming brand with a smaller budget and no technical resources. ScreenCloud is a huge cost saving for us, compared to other solutions, and it’s so easy to set up and use that we just did it ourselves. 

I’d recommend ScreenCloud to any retailer, big or small. The digital signage is an elegant communication tool that fits perfectly in with our shop design, and it’s enhanced our customers’ retail experience while providing us with an effective channel for marketing. 

How beauty retail store Cos Bar used ScreenCloud to promote their marketing and omni-channel initiatives via digital signage screens located within their shops.

“ScreenCloud is affordable and easy to use. It enables us to communicate our marketing and omni-channel initiatives with our customers, creating a high-end retail experience for them.”

Digital Signage Enables Much-Loved Luxury Beauty Retail Chain Cos Bar to Create a High-End In-Store Experience

How Barnes Harley-Davidson delivers engaging promotional materials to a regular dealership community. 

Barnes Harley-Davidson is a series of three Harley-Davidson dealerships located in Victoria, Langley and Kamloops BC, throughout Canada. Their aim is to make it as easy as possible for customers to live the Harley-Davidson lifestyle in a way that’s personal and meaningful. 

To have a digital signage solution that treats their business as one dealership with three locations, rather than three separate dealerships. 

A system that can be controlled from head office, with the marketing team able to  easily change what's being shown on the screen.

Ability to change content easily, to ensure regular visitors to the dealership do not get content fatigue. 

Here, we speak to Kiran Rancourt​, Marketing Manager at Barnes Harley-Davidson  on his experience using ScreenCloud to power their digital signage.

We were using a local company before and one day the screens just stopped working, so we freaked out - we had all of these huge TVs in all three stores and suddenly they're just blank.

We looked for something to replace it with and ending up trying ScreenCloud and another tool. ScreenCloud was the easiest for what we wanted.

We wanted a program that we could control from the head office, so our marketing team could easily change what's being shown on the screen. To change not only the large screens, but also all of the little ones throughout the entire dealership and for the different departments to change at the same time as well.

We have three Harley-Davidson dealerships and we try to treat it as one dealership with three locations. So whatever we have in one we try to replicate that as best as possible in the other two.

We have a large video wall that shows when customers walk into each dealership and because it’s a Harley store, it's a different vibe from most automotive dealerships. We have loud music playing, free coffee and popcorn always freshly made. To match the exciting atmosphere, we use our TVs to show custom content. On each TV screen, some of the screen will be playing some kind of video, maybe riding or something cool, and then we’ll have our different monthly promotions. Whether that’s sales promotions or riding gear and also events. Then at the bottom we might have the news and weather in a ticker tape scrolling past.

That’s when customers first walk in and then above each of the parts counters where people buy parts, which is a big thing in the Harley-Davidson community, there are more screens above them that mirror the same thing.  

We use the YouTube app to pull our playlists, and images to show sales and events posters. The news ticker tape is an RSS feed from the local news in the dealership area. We have about 5-10 seconds between each poster and everything is scheduled in a playlist. 

We update our content once a month and every now and then if we have a sudden flash sale. We change it so often because Harley-Davidson customers come back quite frequently. It's not like a car dealership where people buy a vehicle then only come back for servicing, Harley customers come to drink coffee and just hang out, it's more like a clubhouse. We have to change it more frequently, so that when they're getting coffee and they like to sit down and watch whatever we've got playing up there, they’re not seeing the same thing. 

We have a great response because we display our own content so it's not the generic Harley corporate stuff or what other dealerships would use. 

ScreenCloud is an easier program to use for sure, it’s much easier to get the right content out there.

In our Auto Group we have other dealerships and the digital signage system there is very expensive and needs replacing every few years.

ScreenCloud is much more affordable and I prefer that we can control the setup on our site.

We also plan to use ScreenCloud for our trade show booth which has a TV wall. The tradeshow booth will be traveling all around British Columbia and we plan to show content based on the type of event and the location. This will help our marketing appeal to the local demographic.

How car dealership Barnes Harley-Davidson uses ScreenCloud to increase community and display videos and promotions to its dealership community.

"In other dealerships the digital signage system is very expensive and needs replacing every few years. ScreenCloud is much more affordable and I prefer that we can control the setup on our site."

How Dealership Barnes Harley-Davidson Uses ScreenCloud to Deliver Engaging Promotional Materials to Customers

How SOLETRADER achieved a competitive advantage using ScreenCloud digital signage. 

SOLETRADER: ScreenCloud is a "competitive advantage" for retailers

SOLETRADER is a premium fashion retailer specialising in branded footwear for men and women, from vintage classics to modern originals. Launched in 1946 the company, which retains its family-owned status today, has up to 50 different stores across the UK. They needed a digital signage solution that could be easily rolled out across their stores, using the most up to date technology to join up social media with the in store experience for all customers.

A platform that would save them time, money and effort compared to their existing digital signage solution.

To increase engagement in stores and across a number of online platforms. 

To find a system that would ensure content was fully up to date - at any given moment in time. 

Here, we speak to Marcel Bordon, CEO at SOLETRADER on his experience using ScreenCloud and digital signage.

We have around 50 stores at any one moment and were looking for a digital signage solution to update the movement and the engagement within our stores.

We used to use something which was updated say, twice a year, where we’d have to produce a video on typically old-fashioned technology like a CD-ROM. It wasn’t up to date because as soon as you put it in, it was actually out of date whereas the digital signage solution we got from ScreenCloud is completely up to date at all times because it’s feeding a live feed from our Instagram pages.

We have an online media feed sent via our company network through an Amazon Fire TV Stick to a Samsung screen. To get all parts communicating correctly was the challenge.

ScreenCloud proved to be the best option after our media team researched the marketplace because ScreenCloud integrates well with all parts of the process.

We create all of our content in-house and this is sent directly to screen. 

ScreenCloud has been great and store staff and customers are responding well to the new feeds. 

The ScreenCloud solution is a very good solution for saving time, effort and cost. It is an up to date, up to the minute, presentation of our imagery in store and our customers have reacted well to the screens in store. We hear from all our staff who say this has definitely created an increase in engagement and recognition of the brand awareness.

It’s a whole different process, it’s a seamless process and it’s way better than what we used to do.

Our future ambitions are to roll this out across all SOLETRADER stores. 

Our advice to other businesses? Well I’d tell them not to bother with ScreenCloud because that’s our competitive advantage. We are absolutely saving time, effort and money on working with ScreenCloud.

How ScreenCloud helped SOLETRADER develop a digital signage offering for customers of their retail store, with an online media feed and social networks.

"The ScreenCloud solution is a very good solution for saving time, effort and cost. It is an up to date, up to the minute, presentation of our imagery in store and we hear from all our staff who say this has definitely created an increase in engagement and recognition of the brand awareness."

How In-Store Digital Signage Created Increased Engagement and Brand Recognition for Footwear Retailer SoleTrader 

How Lenovo updated content in real time to get more customers interacting with their products.

Lenovo is a PC and Tablet manufacturer, highly recognised in its home market in China but with growing expansion all over the world. Lenovo is increasing its presence in Europe and especially the UK, with a range of professional products such as ThinkPad and its YOGA range of laptops, desktops and tablets. Working primarily through retail partners such as Currys, PC World, John Lewis and Very.co.uk.

To get more customers interacting with Lenovo

To provide a way for customers to play and interact with Lenovo hardware

To launch a selfie wall which could update in real time

Here, we speak to Guillaume Bouchard, UK&I Retail Marketing Manager at Lenovo on his experience using ScreenCloud and digital signage.

One of Lenovo’s main challenges is that we don’t own any shops ourselves and rely heavily on our retail partners to do a good job at demonstrating what our products can offer. With such fierce competition we had to find a way to get our customers interacting with Lenovo so they can understand who we are and what we stand for. With this in mind we opened brand zones within two UK-based PC World stores.

The aim within our brand zones was to ensure each customer could play with our products and interact with them in the way they were meant to be used. We also wanted to bring a never-seen-before interaction with our brand through a selfie wall and that's where ScreenCloud has been fantastic for us.

ScreenCloud has enabled us to deliver two things:

Create a fun interaction where customers can take a selfie with the background of their choice and push it out to Twitter and Instagram through our selfie wall, allowing us to link the social media world with the retail world.

Create content via a video loop that can be updated from my desk at head office. This has allowed me to push new promotional messages about Lenovo out to the big screens in-store without having to send USBs or constantly worrying about a manual update.

ScreenCloud delivered exactly what I needed and have been very easy to work with. With a project so complex I didn’t worry once about ScreenCloud not delivering on time. I’m pleased to say they succeeded in delivering a great experience for me and my customers.

I would recommend any business with digital signage to use ScreenCloud. If you have a lot of digital signage to manage and need your content to be updated rapidly and safely then ScreenCloud is the service to go for.

How ScreenCloud helped Lenovo deliver an in-store experience, with a live selfie wall and content that could be changed in realtime from anywhere.

“ScreenCloud delivered exactly what I needed and have been very easy to work with. With a project so complex I didn’t worry once about ScreenCloud not delivering on time. I’m pleased to say they succeeded in delivering a great experience for me and my customers”

How Lenovo Got More Customers to Engage with Their Products by Creating a Selfie Wall Powered by ScreenCloud 

Case Studies - Retail