Welcome to our 2021 digital signage content examples guide.
Digital signage is a highly visual form of communication. In a world full of digital messaging, posters, and advertising, your content needs to stand out and grab the attention of your audiences. Your content needs to be unique so that it stops passersby in their tracks and grabs their attention.
Finding inspiration for great digital signage content can be challenging and time-consuming. That’s why we’ve put together your go-to guide for digital signage content with examples and inspiration. In this guide, we reveal content ideas that will change your digital signage game and take your screens to the next level.
20 Great Digital Signage Content Examples
1. Images
We’ll kick off this guide will an easy one. Images. Although we all know what an image is, are you using them to their full potential?
A properly used image can make all the difference on your digital display. Sometimes digital signage users will avoid using images and solely use videos, not realising the many benefits they bring. Depending on the use case of your screen images can:
- Increase Trust.
- Decrease Anxiety.
- Promote Your Products And Services.
- Help Your Audience Visualise What Your Organisation Does.
- Show Off What You’ve Done.
- And So Much More
This is a non-exhaustive list for how you can use images so experiment to your heart’s content.
A good example and a popular use case for images is on waiting room screens in hospitals and dental practices. Digital signage for hospitals will often display pictures of their friendly staff to reduce patient anxiety and make them feel welcome. Putting a friendly face to the doctor or dentist performing the treatment can greatly increase the patient’s experience. See our example below to see the difference between a dentist’s digital screen with and without images.
Most digital signage software should support PNGs, JPEGS, GIFS, and even images via URLs. If you’re looking to display multiple images on your digital screen you can do that too! Image slideshows allow digital signage users to compile a group of images and play them in an order of their choosing. This image use is great if you wanted to display pictures from a past event such as a school trip, or if you wanted to advertise products you have on offer.
2. Digital Menu Boards
Digital signage content has changed restaurant menu boards forever. Food on display now looks tastier and more exciting. By simply having animated content on your menu board such as a bead of condensation rolling down the side of a frosty beer glass can be the decider in punters buying your food and drink.
Organisations and restaurants operating within the hospitality industry have experienced a wave of digitalisation. This runs further than digital menu boards and extends to table service apps, home delivery apps, and much more.
Perhaps the largest benefit of restaurant digitalisation comes from the time and paper saved during the process of changing content. Redesigning menus, leaflets, and even your traditional menu board can take a considerable amount of time away from what’s important. Giving your customers an experience they won’t get anywhere else. Through digital menu boards, menus can be planned and scheduled in advance and content updated in seconds. This is especially handy if you have multiple sites as this can all be done from a single location.
Looking to take your menu boards to the next level? Try using multiple screens to create a video wall and have one large flowing menu. Video wall menu boards are taking restaurants and takeaways by storm and are in high demand for the most popular eateries. With video wall menu boards you can either display larger images and videos of your offering to make them stand out. Alternatively, you can treat each individual screen or section of the video wall as its own menu. For example, screen 1 could be a drinks menu, where screens 2, 3, and 4 serve as starters, mains, and dessert menus respectively.
3. Live Weather
A highly popular digital signage content example is live weather. From localised weather reports to live weather across the world, digital signage does it all.
Most digital signage software will come with its own live weather widget which you can embed around other digital signage content or as a full-screen design. Some digital signage providers will also offer additional weather templates for your screens. These look really sleek and take away all the time spent involved in content design.
There are so many use cases for deploying weather content on your digital screens. If you are a golf club you may display weather for each day of the week or at different tee-times. If you’re running a travel agency you may display the weather next to your best-selling travel destinations. Or a gliding club may display live wind speeds so pilots know what to expect when they get up in the air. Of course, this is a non-exhaustive list and there are so many more use cases for displaying live weather on your screen.
Looking for some inspiration for your weather content? Why not take ideas from our example below.
4. Live News Updates
A content example that is particularly popular with waiting room screens and corporate digital signage are live news feeds and updates. If you are looking to keep your audience informed or make their waiting experience more interesting then perhaps this is the content example for you.
Through digital signage, you can display live news feeds from just about any news outlet in the world (Providing they have an RSS feed). For example, if you want a constant live news feed running on your screens from BBC News, you can do just that. Looking for more localised news? Request an RSS feed from your local news outlet and get live updates on screen.
Live news feeds are a great way to supplement your other digital signage content. With digital signage software, you can have your chosen news feed displayed at the bottom of your screen. This is exactly like the news updates you see scrolling through live on TV news channels.
Looking for more visual live news? Try a media RSS feed. A media RSS feed gives you the power to display your live news feeds along with the relevant images and media. Is the current headline ‘Worlds largest pig wins London marathon’? With a media, RSS feed an image will be displayed next to the headline showing the pig (For example obviously).
5. Social Media
With the world more connected than ever, social media has become an integral part of most organisations operations and marketing strategy. With this in mind organisations are finding more ways to increase their social media awareness and encourage their customers and employees to connect with them. You see this everywhere. In the footer of websites, the bottom of leaflets and even on shop doors.
Since the introduction of digital signage, organisations and users have been integrating social media with their business to the max. There are so many possibilities with social media, including social media walls, live feeds and more.
In some cases, users will encourage their customers or visitors to get involved with a hashtag. Clever digital signage software will be able to pull all the posts including this hashtag and will display it on screen. This is a great way to display live reviews or what people are thinking about your business or a particular product.
6. Live Time And Clocks
It may be a simple digital signage content example but adding a clock or the live time to one of your digital screens can add a lot of value. This is often the case for waiting rooms and lobbies. In these environments, it is quite common for people to be waiting for appointments or meetings. A live clock on screen can add a lot of value to this audience. It allows them to keep good time and ensure they are not running late or are going to miss their appointment.
Thanks to digital signage displays there are some great options for designing great ‘time-related’ content for your screen. Through a clock widget, you can smartly display the live time on a display bar or tucked nicely in a corner. Alternatively, through dynamic templates, a digital clock can transform your screen and turn it into the centerpiece of a room or large lobby.
7. Emergency Warnings
In your organisation the safety of your employees, customers, and visitors is your number one priority. With strict safety requirements fire alarms, fire doors and more have been installed to ensure everyone’s safety.
It is becoming more common for companies to incorporate their digital signage networks and screens into their safety procedures. This is often seen in digital signage for manufacturing. Thanks to digital signage software, screens and content can now be directly incorporated into fire drills and other safety procedures. This is done through digital signage triggers. This trigger could be the fire alarm. When the fire alarm is set off it triggers content to play on the screen. This could be emergency wayfinding content or could be content purely notifying people inside there’s a fire or earthquake etc.
A huge benefit that comes part and parcel with on-screen emergency warnings is that it provides additional safety information for those who are hearing impaired. This is definitely one of the digital signage content examples you will want to follow if you are looking to increase the safety of your organisation.
8. Meet The Team
In this guide of digital signage content examples, we briefly touched on this In section 1. Putting a face to the people who run your organisation is a huge bonus no matter what industry you operate in. Placing meet the team content on your digital displays is a great way to add a personal touch to your organisation and make customers and visitors feel welcome. Being familiar with staff is important as it makes visitors feel more comfortable.
This is often seen in dental practices where patients awaiting treatments can often experience high levels of worry and anxiety. However, dentists have discovered that placing nice welcoming photos of themselves and their team in their practices, it puts a friendly face to the mask and has alleviated waiting room anxiety.
There are many great templates available for meet the team digital signage content on services like Canva that deal with the bulk of the design work for you. Or if you’re feeling creative follow our example below and have a go at it yourself!
9. Live Travel Information Boards
Where would we be without live travel information eh? Long gone are the days of looking at paper posters hoping the timetable is still in date. Now, however, we can simply whip out our phone or look up at digital displays that give us all the information we need down to the second.
Having travel information that is easy to read can make your audience’s travel experience. Having travel content that can be displayed concisely and neatly is key. These live travel information boards can also be supplemented with other digital signage content/widgets mentioned in this article. For example, go a step further with your digital travel information boards and add live weather for each destination. This would look especially good in airports or ferry ports.
10. Digital QR Codes
In light of the NHS releasing their QR powered track and trace app, we have all become more familiar with what QR codes are and how they work. Your digital screens can become a powerful hub for QR code distribution and it uses go beyond the track and trace app.
When you discover QR codes and their many possibilities your digital signage game will change forever. If you are a restaurant you can link a digital menu to a QR code and when a customer scans it, the menu loads up on their phone. Alternatively, you can also include a Whatsapp QR code that allows your customers to contact your business directly. This is great if they need support, need to order, or have any questions that they need answering swiftly.
As you dive further into QR codes and how they can be used, you will soon start thinking of more amazing possibilities to improve your operation or customer service. In our opinion, this is one of the digital signage content examples you won’t want to miss.
11. Dashboards And Statistics
Metrics and KPIs are the best way to measure the success of your organisation. Whether it’s your net promoter score, weekly sales or even a percentage of emissions cut this quarter, this data is crucial in understanding organisational performance.
There are a number of ways and cases in which you may want to display a dashboard on your screens. You may want to show off your fantastic progress of moving towards being a completely green company, with charts showing decreases in paper usage and emissions, etc. Another way to use dashboards and statistics is in sales and marketing departments. These metrics and KPIs are key when measuring success. For example, a sales team may have live statistics of deals closed vs target for the week, or the amount of profit taken this quarter. Not only does this turn your digital signage into a great hub for measuring organisational success, but it can also motivate your employees to smash their targets.
12. Product Promotions
As digital signage displays are a highly visual form of communication it makes them a great channel to promote your products and services. Truth be told advertising on digital displays is one of the highest use cases for digital screens. Whether it’s upselling oral hygiene products at your dentist or enticing potential customers with the latest promotional video for a new model of car digital signage sells.
The most famous and well-known examples of using digital screens to promote products and services are Piccadilly Circus in London, or Times Square in New York. In fact, these screens have been so successful they have turned into landmarks themselves and are an iconic location for games, movies, and TV shows.
When it comes to digital signage content examples for product promotions and advertising there are literally millions of things you can do to make your product pop and stand out. However, there are a few tips we can give you to ensure your product or service promotion will be a success.
- Consistent branding – This helps to increase trust and familiarity with your brand which can increase purchase intentions.
- Put the spotlight on what you are selling – Make sure your product or service is at the centre of attention. This can be done with clever shape placements or graphics.
- Less is more – You want the focus to be on your product. Therefore, try not to clutter your content with lots of text or irrelevant images. This can make your digital signage content look confusing and your advertising is lost.
- Key messages – Choose a strong value statement to go with your product promotion. Think of Nike’s “Just do it”.
- Experiment – Creating the perfect advert won’t happen straight away and is often a process of trial and error. So have fun, make some mistakes and see where it takes you.
13. Corporate Messages
Most businesses that are successful are so because all of their staff are working towards achieving the same goals as the business. In addition to this, the staff are extremely clued up on the business’ latest activities and policies. It’s no secret that the best way to ensure this of your employees is to communicate the information efficiently and effectively. Entre, digital signage for corporate communications.
To communicate these messages effectively you need attractive on-screen that is clear, attractive, and easy to read. Numbers, figures, and statistics are highly popular and a good way to get important information across without taking up a lot of real estate on your screen. Remember one of our tips earlier was to not crowd your digital signage content with too much text or information. If your screen looks like a page from a where’s Wally book or an encyclopedia your employees won’t want to read.
14. Digital Wayfinding And Business Directories
The introduction of digital signage solutions and software has seen a boom in the way we navigate buildings. Gone are the days of looking at a map in the lobby getting to a location and looking at another map and so on and so forth. This is often an issue for delivery drivers who may have to deliver a package to a specific room in an office block with hundreds or even thousands of businesses. This leaves them knocking on each door and asking where their next location is. If only there was a better way…
Digital wayfinding is one of our favourite digital signage content examples. They have not only saved the time of many, they have improved the navigational experience in offices forever. With digital signage hardware such as digital kiosks, users can simply touch a screen, search their location and the digital kiosk does the rest. The room will be highlighted and the user knows exactly where they’re going (Without getting lost).
When making digital wayfinding content it is paramount you carefully plan it out and think about exactly how you want it to work. However, in terms of design branding and simplicity is key. You want it to be obvious that when the user clicks room 3B, room 3B illuminates on the virtual map and they can clearly see where they are going. You also want to ensure that none of your touchable content is too small or close together. If this is the case users may find themselves clicking the wrong room or location and could end up lost or confused.
15. Videos
The power of video content on your digital displays is immense. From advertising products and services to video testimonials and so much more, videos can do it all. Why use video? Medium believes that if your audience has a positive experience with your video Ad it can increase their purchasing intentions by up to 97%.
One of the main benefits of using video content is that once it’s made it can save you a lot of time. For example, if your company has made a TV, YouTube or social media advert all you need to do is upload it to your digital signage software, and hey presto! You now have great looking content on your screens.
Video is also a highly popular form of digital signage content as in most cases video exists in the same aspect ratio as the user’s screens (16:9). This means all you need to do is upload your video and relax (no resizing required!). But what about my portrait social media videos? Good question! These videos often hold an aspect ratio of 9:16 (opposite of your landscape screens). This makes your portrait social media videos perfect for your portrait screens.
YouTube is also a great method for getting great content on your screens. Most digital signage software will have a free YouTube widget allowing you to play YouTube videos of your choosing with just the URL. This is a great way to get video content quickly on your screen. We see this a lot in waiting room screens for dentists who want to display example videos of what a treatment is. Just make sure you ask the video owner’s permission first before you use the video!
Looking for advice on how to make good marketing videos for your digital signage? The Digital Marketing Institute has put together an easily digestible guide for how to do just that. In their “5 Secrets of Super Successful Video Marketing”, they compile so great points to ensure your video is a success. In addition to this, you get tips on how to optimise your video for SEO and for social media. Aim to make your content one of the Digital Signage Content Examples that everyone else will follow.
16. Customer Testimonials
This is one of our digital signage content examples that can provide a real tangible return for your organisation. It’s common knowledge that customer testimonials have a positive impact on trust and increasing purchasing intentions.
It’s in our nature to hear what others have to say before we make a decision on almost anything. Trying a new restaurant? You check the reviews. Buying a new phone? You visit YouTube to see what the latest experts are saying. That being said when reviews or what’s being said is highly positive you either get extremely excited and move further into the sales funnel, or you are converted.
Digital screens provide a great channel for proudly displaying all of your fantastic reviews to potential customers or even visitors. For digital signage for schools, this could be the latest review from OFSTED. For a travel agent, this could be your latest customer testimonials regarding your top purchased getaways.
17. Interactive Product Catalogues
Interactive product catalogues (or digital catalogues) are popping up everywhere. They allow your customers to browse your entire product library on a single screen. In some cases these can be integrated to product ordering systems where a customer can choose a product and it’s quantity and press order. The order can then be sent to the customer’s chosen address or a member off staff can collect it from the stock room.
Interactive product catalogues come in an array of sizes to meet the specific needs of the user. Some are small and can sit angled on a table to allow for a digital book-like experience. Other forms of interactive product catalogues come in larger forms such as digital kiosks. This can allow the screen to have multiple uses such as digital wayfinding.
Digital product catalogues are one of the digital signage content examples that are more advanced. It is imperative that you plan out your digital catalogue thoroughly before releasing it. This is especially the case for companies that have hundreds or thousands of products. One of the most important aspects is to ensure a simple navigation experience.
18. Live Traffic Information
Earlier we covered live digital travel boards. However, have you ever considered displaying live traffic information on your digital signage?
Thanks to clever digital signage templates digital signage users now have the option to display live traffic information for a given area or location. This information includes the severity of the traffic, the time added to journey’s and even live crash and road work information.
This information could be a lifesaver, especially if you have employees or visitors who have to drive a long way home. They may be walking out of your building to drive down their normal route back. However, they spot an hour-long delay on the motorway they usually take. If they hadn’t seen this content on your digital signage displays they may have taken their normal route and arrived home an hour later than planned.
19. Live TV
One of our favourite aspects of digital signage is its versatility. This extends to live TV. When using digital signage with live TV, you can switch between your own promotional messages and live TV or you can integrate both together.
This has been a huge boost to pubs who throughout the day may want to push their food menus, however, in the evening want to screen the big football match of the day. In addition to this, pubs could even run their own sponsors on the side of the live TV content, promoting special deals in relation to the live event.
20. Digital Information Hub
Operating in a similar manner to the digital product catalogue mentioned earlier, digital information hubs can add huge value to your organisation. In some cases they can act as an extra member of staff and help mitigate some of the heavy work load.
Digital information hubs often come in the form of digital kiosks and are commonly seen in large office spaces and university campuses. A user can go up to the kiosk if they need help. Once the user touches the screen a menu can appear. This can reveal digital wayfinding options, contact information, products, what classes are on today, today’s events and so much more. With a digital information kiosk, there are no limits.
Thanks for reading our guide for 20 digital signage content examples to follow in 2021. If you want more examples or ideas for how you can use your digital signage displays, make sure to get in contact with the team by calling 02380 981110 or click the button below.
