Hints & Tricks for Attracting Attention with Digital Signage

Being aware of your surroundings is crucial when planning your digital signage strategy. Blend in too much, and nobody notices your messaging. Make your content too flashy, and everyone averts their eyes immediately! In truth, attracting attention with digital signage and catching that first glance isn’t so difficult. It is the maintaining of that attention and influencing the viewer that is the real challenge.

Take a look at a few important tips on doing it the right way, from utilizing high-impact visuals in their proper place to diversifying your content structure to attract more “healthy” attention!

Use high-impact visuals

When we talk about impactful visuals, there are a few things that immediately come to mind, right? Colorful, high-contrast, and bright content are the first elements you think of. Indeed, these are excellent starting points to make the content pop. High resolution quality is up there on the list, as it can really make a big impact.

Still, consider other angles to the idea of impactful visuals when attracting attention with digital signage. The potential of your signage depends on your surroundings. If there isn’t much competition happening at the location of your display, even subtle animation alone will be sufficient to attract attention. Meanwhile, if your business is competing with dozens of others with flashy displays in their storefronts, you may want to adopt a different approach. Stillness; in a sea of constant motion, stillness attracts attention. Similarly, in a sea of imagery, a short message written in bold text may stick out more.

Keep the content flowing

In locations where people linger, or you get repeat viewers within a relatively short time frame, it’s important to provide fresh content consistently. Stale and repetitive information lowers the perceived value of your signage. As such, subsequent messaging may have a lesser impact.

In an ideal world, the viewer will always have something interesting to see when they’re passing by your display. This is why it’s smart to diversify your content, even repetitive stuff like sales banners. Rotate content images, switch up layout colors, and highlight different products over time to present fresh information.

Communicate simply and efficiently

Simplicity and efficiency are the fundamental principles of digital signage in general, but they become that much more important when catching and retaining attention. As you know, the smallest of challenges is to physically pull in the eyes of the audience on your display. The true challenge is to keep them looking. Short sentences on their own tell the viewer “this won’t take too long to understand,” so they give it a second or two more. Meanwhile, with highly complex layouts or small and busy fonts, the viewer simply gives up trying to make sense of it all.

Thus, use short sentences, ideally a handful of words in large bold fonts. Don’t overload the display with excessive imagery and animation without specific anchor points for the viewer’s gaze.

Utilize a call-to-action ASAP!

At best, you’ll get just a few seconds from each viewer. Within that glance, it’s important to communicate quickly and efficiently, as we stated above. More important are the contents of your message which provokes an action! Sales promotions need to immediately communicate the benefit, such as the percentage of savings, or the time left until the sale ends. Many content creators, and even online advertisers, make the mistake of taking too long to get to the most appealing part of the offer which tells the viewer to act. By that time, sadly, most of the potential consumer attention has moved on. In high-traffic areas where you get barely a few seconds, your display might as well be turned off.

If you feel your messaging simply cannot be deployed this quickly, modify your approach. For example, sharing the story about your startup’s roots cannot and should not be done in a flash. Instead, pick out the most exciting nugget of data to pull the viewer in. Signage such as “30 years of success” or “over 10,000 satisfied customers” act as flash cards which communicate the longevity and success of the business. Meanwhile, if the viewer wishes to learn more or about a specific detail, they can do that in other forms such as online or through interactive digital signage.

Diversify your content

Advertising, sales, and promotions can get tiring to see all the time. While it’s great to catch a great deal, it’s also lovely to see something different for a change. This is even more important in environments where users idle around displays for longer. You have their attention, but they may become sick of seeing a call-to-action every second.

A great way to let the viewer breathe is to inject breaks into your content. Apps like weather, time, news, and other entertaining sources are a neat way to give your displays value of a different kind. Firstly, they become more than simple promotion terminals. Second, the diverse selection of quality content adds a dose of professionalism to the way your business is perceived. 

Check out our post for using digital signage apps to easily diversify and break up your regular content. All of them offer a way to subtly inject your brand colors and style into everything. Of course, that’s just the beginning. Check out these apps and more with OnSign!