Is buying a digital signage system for your company on the to-do list for 2015? If so, here are three important items to consider.
1. Correct fit – You wouldn’t buy a pair of jeans without trying them on, right? The same applies to digital signage. How do you try on a digital signage system? Get beyond the sales-and-marketing stage and ask for the names of companies that are using the system you’re looking at, then talk to the actual administrative users. If you can’t easily get a bunch of names, that’s a huge red flag; keep looking.
2. Ease of use – Give some serious thought to who’s going to use the digital signage system. Are they tech savvy? Do they know how to create content? Are they good with Photoshop, PowerPoint and scheduling software? If you answer “yes” to all these questions, then ease of use might not be quite as important to you. But if your company is like most others, the people who will use the digital signage include executive assistants, front desk personnel, HR managers, operation managers and c-suite execs; in other words, a mixed bag. Because their core skills are all over the map, you need to have a digital signage system that’s very flexible and easy to use. And those users will likely change as people change jobs, so you want a system that takes the least training possible.
3. Objectives – This is by far your No. 1 consideration; that is, to make sure the system you buy will fulfill your (or your company’s) objectives. That may sound obvious, but many buyers get entrenched in the technologies and features and lose sight of the all-important objectives. For example, if improving safety is a primary objective, then the system you buy should have ways to promote safe work practices, with safety-related templates and stock content.
Consult with SignCast to learn the other factors to consider, in the meantime, these three will get you 80 percent of the way there.