The Ultimate Digital Signage Playlist Guide

There are more uses than ever for digital signage, with the industries and types of businesses adopting this versatile technology growing by the day. And as every business is different, many of them have different demands when it comes to the types of content displayed. Whether that's promotional video, simple signage, social media streams or music playlists.

With ScreenCloud, you have the ability to set content on your screens using a multitude of options, but highlighting the use of digital signage playlists is key to unlocking flexible potential in your content operations strategy – and saving time where available.

What is a digital signage playlist?

In the same style as a music playlist, digital signage playlists are simply used to organize your content and play everything in the order that you want it displayed. You can organize pieces of content, apps, and media from your ScreenCloud account into a playlist. Once assigned to your screen, the playlist will run on a loop based on the order and timing of the content you’ve set up.  

Playlists can be used independently, but also collaboratively by assigning multiple playlists to play in a Channel; think of it like TV scheduling.

Why use a playlist for organizing content

The primary benefit of using playlists is for content organization. Instead of the time-consuming scheduling of content one-by-one you can use playlists to bucket, group, and collect content.

For example, Richard and Stephanie work for a corporate marketing firm that has offices around the globe. As employees, they are planning a global company-wide social event for their various locations.

Both employees have connected screens that they manage for each of these locations - but each location is unique in respect to time zones, safety protocols, events, and day-to-day activities for the socials. 

Richard and Stephanie can create playlists to manage and collate content according to categories, topics, locations and socials. Whether the team is managing large numbers of files to upload, dashboards, or want to show social media apps, like Social Feed for Facebook, the possibilities are endless for how you can choose to organize your playlists productively. 

How to use playlists for scheduling

With ScreenCloud, you can use the Channels feature which functions similarly to a TV channel. This gives you the ability to group and organize content in a meaningful way by theme, usage, department, topic, or any other way you’d like. Using Channels you can schedule playlists of content that you have collected and combined. 

Playlists are essential in streamlining resource and time management for your digital signage programming. Instead of using Channels to schedule individual pieces of content or media, you can add multiple Playlists into any number of Channels. 

For example, Channels can be categorized (similarly to playlists) however you’d like. They can be used to target specific content across various needs and requirements. In the screenshot below, there are a number of different use cases, such as “Corporate Comms”.

Within the “Corporate Comms” Channel, you can add as many playlists for grouped content as you’d like to schedule for any time. 

This allows anyone using digital signage the ability to think and act ahead of the curve - strategizing a collection of content to amplify your key messages using playlists.

How to plan digital signage content playlists

Planning and strategizing your content is obviously going to be the best way to create the most effective displays.

To get the best results, follow these simple steps.

1. Review your digital signage goals

What are some common reasons as to “why” you’re using a digital signage platform? Here are a handful of examples below:

• Globally manage updates to anywhere that has a screen, PC, or display
• Showcase user-generated content and utilize cost-effective content creation
• Environmentally friendly facilitation of communication - go green and paperless
• Display class schedules, agendas, and course curriculums
• Resolve challenges in barriers of remote-working communication or distance-learning
• Coordinate food menus, items, or merchandise with ease of online technology
• Drive increased engagement for employees, teams, and build morale
• Drive ROI, sales, and advertisements with branded content creations
• Assess inventory management, stock, and resources visible to key stakeholders
• Data visualization - KPIs, dashboards, and successes in customer satisfaction
• Broadcast travel statuses, emergencies, or critical messaging to takeover displays

Get a touch of inspiration from our case studies and industries using digital signage.

2. Research your audience

Like almost all elements of business marketing or content creation, it all comes down to targeting your audience effectively. And this means having a good understanding of who your target audience, or audiences, are.

Don’t underestimate the importance of this. 

37% of consumers buy more from retailers who personalize the shopping experience across channels. One third of marketers also state personalization as the most critical challenge now and in the future of marketing.

The biggest challenge? Gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%). 

In an offline situation (where your digital signage will sit) this becomes slightly easier. You know the types of customers, clients or potential employees who walk through your doors at any one time. 

If not, here are three questions that will help get the cogs turning:

• Are all of my customers from the same cohort or do they differ depending on time and day of the week?
• If they aren’t, which categories can they fall under? In business this might be clients, potential clients, employees and interviewees. In B2C environments perhaps it’s more demographical - teenagers, parents, families or business people. 
• What do they want with me? Are they there to browse or to buy? Will they be making an instant decision or will they need to come back? Thinking about buyer intent is essential to all industries. 

3. Brainstorm your key topics

Next, list your key topics. Are you using digital signage to display emergency messaging or social information for employees and colleagues?

Or are you wanting customer-facing content like promotions and event countdowns? The best strategies outline, journey map, and visualize topics in relation to your goals. 

For example, a playlist topic could be “Team News” which has a goal of both globally managing updates to any teams worldwide and resolving barriers of remote-working. This playlist is curated and crafted with team-related content only - such as birthdays, using native apps like ScreenCloud Engage to inspire sharing photos, work anniversaries, and more. 

4. Experiment with content

One of the great things about using ScreenCloud is that it's really easy to play around and see what works. Because there are easy to use templates and designs, you can create different types of slides in just a few minutes to see what works best.

You could experiment with video, try adding music or songs, linking your social media channels or streaming live content, link to videos from YouTube or add weather or sports scores widgets.

5. Explore your playlist options

There’s a number of ways you can improve and enhance the way playlists can be used within ScreenCloud, such as:

• Creating playlists by topic, category, location, and more - keeping content segmented
• Always name and label your playlists accordingly (i.e. Corporate, Culture, HR, etc.)
• See all the FAQs and what you-can-do with playlists
• Manage your Media Library using folders to easily find content while building playlists
• Tag your playlists using keywords for quicker searches and accessibility
• Don’t just rely on uploaded media - explore apps and integrations for versatility

6. Preview and experiment with your digital signage

Make sure to preview, review, and see how your playlists display on your live screens.

You'll find plenty of templates and apps to help you make experimenting easier too.

Playlist case study: Mamuska Polish Kitchen

One of our clients, Mamuska, a London based Polish restaurant recently followed the exact steps above with some interesting results.

They started by looking at their audience, which resulted in the following guidelines.

As you can see, there are many different ways Mamuska can cut through their audience. From the type of customer, through to the time they visit and the motives behind it - are they stopping to grab a coffee or sitting down to a traditional family lunch?

From this, Mamuska has been able to individualize each and every screen they own.

They have external screens showing menus, company news and hero products (objective two achieved - their customers now know they deliver).

Their internal screens showcase delicious desserts and videos of their premium vodka - upselling the products without them having to mention it. They also know how and when to integrate live entertainment such as Polish football league streaming and X Factor, because they know when that audience is likely to be nearby.

When it gets late, the likelihood of them catching diners is slim, so they switch their content (using a predefined playlist and schedule) to tell people what drinks and late-night snacks they have available.

All in all, an excellent case study in how to really dig-deep into your audience and set up your content for success. 

Playlist case study: ScreenCloud

Yes, of course we use our own product - and we're always trying to work out how to optimize our own content and messaging.

We recently exhibited at a trade show and spent many hours debating over the best way to show content and how it should be positioned for the people we would meet on the booth. We knew that many would walk by, perhaps shoot a cursory glance, or even stop briefly before carrying on.

Others would stand and chat for a while and some may have a specific use case for us to demo.

In response, we created five playlists of nearly 30 items, each showing for 7-8 seconds. This didn’t take long at all! Particularly as we could duplicate the playlist and then make changes as we went.

This 7-8 second viewing time of each piece of content felt natural when we checked the playlist back. It was enough time to scan the message but not too long that we got bored watching.

Top tip: if you don’t have a screen to hand you can use your PC to review your playlists by choosing ‘screen preview’ from the ScreenCloud ‘screen’ section.

We managed to show many different pieces of content in our playlist and we used slides created in Picmonkey to anchor this together. For example, introducing our App Store feature, then moving on to the next slide showing what it could do. This created a story and synced together the content seamlessly - regardless of whether our audience was there for 10 minutes or 10 seconds. 

We then repeated the playlist throughout the day using our scheduling tool. 

We also ensured that the playlist showing was relevant to time of day and the real time activities going on.

This meant one playlist for AM, welcoming people to the show, showing breakfast menus (it was a show aimed at restaurateurs) and reminding attendees that we would be giving a presentation at 2pm.

Then another for the afternoon, providing messaging consistent with the rest of the day.

Once the presentation was over, we swapped to a playlist without the presentation slides. But it would have been just as easy to log in and delete them too. 

Lastly, we had a playlist full of great case studies and demo content ready to wow our audience with what we could do. 

This is just one example of a playlist and schedule that worked really well for our audience showing how a little thought (and a lot of testing) really does go a long way.

Tips for the perfect digital signage playlist

What are great display playlists made of? Great content. Here’s a little known secret to modern day digital signage: it’s actually pretty easy to create amazing content for screens.

Firstly, you have content you already own in the form of images, videos, presentations and dashboards.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just upload this into your playlist? Well, guess what. You can!

Uploading content to a digital signage CMS such as ScreenCloud is as easy as uploading an image to Facebook or Dropbox. Find out for yourself and give our free trial a go and find out how easy creating a digital signage campaign can be.

But uploading content is only half of the story. The key attribute of any digital signage system is that the content is adaptable and easy to edit. So that when you need to delete a couple of slides from a presentation you can. From anywhere. Even if you’re a million miles away from the screen.

As well as the content you already own you also have the option of digital signage apps. Enter the ScreenCloud App Store. 

A ton of useful tools, ready and waiting for you to use.

The beauty of the ScreenCloud App Store is that it takes away any time or resource needed to create content. No design or marketing programs here! Simply choose your tool (social media, dashboard, meeting room software, news, world clock, weather), choose your settings and you’re ready to add to your playlist.

If you need help selecting or setting up, check out our post on how to use digital signage apps to create awesome displays. 

It really couldn’t be more simple! 

Creating the right content at the right time, for the right audience

This is all simple marketing practice when you get into it, and many of the approaches and strategies might be the same as you have seen in other marketing guides.

And digital signage is just another form of engaging content, which is why it shares a lot of similarities with creating content for your website or social media. It's all about catching the attention of your audience, maintaining their focus and getting your message across in a bold and engaging way.

Whatever your digital signage goals, ScreenCloud have got all the tools you need to attract customers or engage your workforce.

From promoting your services or running ads, to managing team roles or performance, try ScreenCloud for free.

Try ourfree trial orbook a demo today.