The Hidden Costs of Poorly Managed Digital Signage Content

The up-front costs of digital signage are quite high, primarily the hardware, software, and management costs. As funny as it may sound, these are not the ones you should worry about. Adding them up into a spreadsheet is a fairly straightforward process, as all the information is noted down. It’s the hidden costs you should worry about, as they sneak up on you until you begin noticing the damage they cause. Wasting staff hours, for example, is not as easily translated into financial loss, but it is doable. There are even more subtle costs, however, and we’ll cover just a few.

A waste of staff hours

Managing digital signage content can most definitely be a full-time job. In a way, it is much easier to recognize this and hire someone solely for this role when the scope of your digital signage grows enough. It's that fine line just before the need is obvious where we have a problem.

At the beginning, it's easy to manage only a handful of displays, assigning this as a secondary task for marketing or operations staff members. At a certain point, it requires more time and focus to be managed properly on this scale. Problems will begin to show. With the quantity of updates rising, so do mistakes, especially if multiple employees are given control over everything, without clear authority on who is responsible for what. Fixing those mistakes takes additional time which could better be spent elsewhere. That brings us to the next issue. 

Quality begins to slip

Just going with the flow without adapting your content structure as your operation grows will make errors more frequent. Updates may be delayed, content may even expire past its validity. In some instances, it may even involve bigger problems, as you might be advertising and promising something that does not exist.

When we translate these flaws to lost dollars, the loss isn't reflected immediately, of course. The worst part is you don't even see it, as it's subtle. Typically, customers won't give you any feedback on these matters. They'll simply learn to ignore your signage as inaccurate or not important.

Another case is investing a lot of time into quality digital signage content management, but focusing on the wrong areas. You don’t need to build campaigns from scratch every time. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel with each new idea you want to try out. Scaling is another example where a lack of focus can be damaging. Using the same resolution across all your displays is a good tip, for example. But if this isn’t the case, then at least label content fitting to specific resolutions, resulting in adaptive templates for all your displays, trimming the time needed to produce and publish content you know will fit all displays properly.

Brand degradation

Your brand image is a key ingredient for success. In some cases, it may even be the most important ingredient there is. Digital signage can enhance it just as much as it can harm it. In the beginning, poor content management simply portrays your signage as irrelevant. With time, it starts adding up and makes your brand appear sloppy, telling the customer that these aren't just accidental mistakes, but purposeful neglect. That leads to other questions, such as “if a business doesn’t even care to update its storefront, what else is it neglecting?”

Even if the content is managed regularly, if it isn't professional, appealing, and uniform, your brand may still suffer. At the very least, the potential impact digital signage could have on your audience is wasted. 

Missed opportunities and insights

If you're not testing with different campaigns, collecting feedback, tracking interaction rates, or at the very least keeping an eye on the promotions you push, you waste opportunities for improvement. These opportunities translate to dollars, and, again, the saddest part is you won't even feel it. 

With proper digital signage content management, you will be able to predict the impact future content will have on your promotions, for example. You'll know what styles customers respond to, and how excited they are about interaction. The best part is that with a well laid-out content structure with a digital signage software, you’ll be able to whip up such content with ease. By continuously tweaking templates, you can build recognizable and exciting content layouts customers will recognize in seconds. Otherwise, without clear consistency, every bit of content may end up looking like it was made by a different person each time.

Employee and customer confusion

A hidden cost weaving its way through all of the ones mentioned above is simply brought on through confusion. You can still produce decent content even if you have a weak digital signage content management strategy. Therein lies the problem, however. You won’t even notice that you overspend resources to make mediocre content. If employees must spend additional hours to figure out how to update content, which elements to update, and in what way, it all costs money in the long run. It is much cheaper to give an employee a position to focus mostly or entirely on the task, using appropriate resources, such as digital signage CMS. Here, the cost of paying someone may intimidate you, but that’s only because you don’t see the losses happening in the background.

Similarly, as we noted, content inconsistencies or inaccuracies confuse customers about your brand identity and even your messaging.

In this post we covered a few very important hidden costs of not managing your digital signage content properly. Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum, take a look at a few hidden advantages! If you don't use a digital signage solution yet, you may begin testing, learning, and building your own professional content structure with OnSign TV, for free!