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Learn MoreA great digital signage playlist comes down to curating content that centers your audience. Want to make an efficient plan for your playlists? Read this article for our best practices on how to plan and create the ultimate digital signage playlist for maximum audience engagement.
Digital signage is a marketing vertical that’s new to many companies. While the setup is easy enough to come naturally, the content curation may not be as straightforward at first. Questions on what to show, when, for how long can intimidate you.
But no fear — in this post we’ve put together tips that point towards the best way to collect and curate your digital signage playlist to perfectly fit your audience’s needs.
With ScreenCloud, you have the ability to set content on your screens using a handful of options. A Playlist is a flexible, hands-off, and time-saving feature that fits in your content operations strategy seamlessly. Instead of the time-consuming scheduling of content one-by-one you can use Playlists to bucket, group, and collect content.
Through Playlists, your content is organized and played in the exact order that you planned. Pieces of content, apps, and media from your ScreenCloud account can all be created 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 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.
Using Channels, you can schedule Playlists of content that you have collected and combined. 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.
For example, in the screenshot below, there are a number of different use cases by location, such as “Corporate - New York" versus "Remote Workforce".
Within these Channels, you can add as many Playlists you’d like to schedule for any time from around the globe, which is especially useful if each location your screens are in are unique in respect to time zones, safety protocols, events, and day-to-day activities for the socials.
Want to make sure your Playlist speaks to your audience? Follow our best practices guidelines below.
Why are you using a digital signage platform? A company’s most common answers to this include:
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.
Your audience should be segmented by day, time, interest and information they need. For example, if the person viewing your screen is going to be there for an hour, you’ll need more than 10 minutes of content. If they only have a few seconds to look at the screen, then you may want to keep your messages short, sweet and on repeat.
If you’re not sure what your audience will look like, ask yourself these questions:
If your displays are going up in an office, or surgery waiting room, naturally you may want to extend your playlist length for a ‘captive audience’. If they’re going up in a college corridor, where students will have a glance window of just 10-15 seconds, you may wish to make them shorter. The demographic of a visitor may vary also.
For example, in a coffee bar you may have Moms and babies at 10am and teenage students at 1pm. Or, manufacturing floors may have different objectives according to time of day. The content you will show to each and the duration could differ wildly.
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:
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.
Some studies suggest that six pieces of content creates the optimal playlist format. As a test, you should be able to read your message three times over in the allocated time frame. If you can’t, make the message shorter or easier to digest.
With your digital signage you can create A/B tests for calls-to-action, images, videos and wording, then choose the more engaging option out of the two tests.
As a guideline, each piece of static content should play for eight seconds or less to ensure it captures the attention of humans, who have a surprisingly short attention span. In areas of high footfall (i.e. shop windows) lower the duration of content to five seconds only.
If your content contains complex elements (i.e. animations, longer descriptions), extend the length of content - it takes the brain much longer to process motion graphics or animation.
If you don’t refresh your content frequently, repeat visitors will eventually stop paying attention to your signs. Work out how often your playlists will show to the same audience by measuring dwell time or footfall. Try to ensure that your audience is subject to the same message no more than seven times during their customer lifecycle.
The key attribute of any digital signage system is that the content is adaptable and easy to edit, so make sure to choose a digital signage solution like ScreenCloud that has remote device management so you can edit your Playlists anytime, anywhere after you preview them.
If your digital signage screens display in an office or reception, where employees might see them everyday, take advantage of apps that update themselves. Social media, live news apps, sports scores and Trello boards for your project management processes could all help keep data up to date without you having to constantly update playlists.
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.
We hope this article has given you a baseline from which you can create your first digital signage playlist. Just remember that once the first is created, you should experiment, seek feedback, and adapt your digital signage campaigns in order to create a second Playlist that is better, but not always bigger, than your first.
ScreenCloud helps teams in 9,000+ organizations around the world communicate with those who matter most, using the screens on their walls and the content already in their systems.
ScreenCloud’s digital signage can inform employees on corporate information like social media feeds, data visualizations, emergency alerts, and live broadcasts – or even simply the news, sports scores and weather.
Sign up for a free demo and see how digital signage can work for you today.
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