Justifying your digital signage campaign – return on investment (ROI)

Despite the falling costs of digital signage and the technologies it employs such as plasma and LCD TV screens, there is still difficulty in justifying the return of investment a digital signage campaign can offer.

Whether it is a an outdoor digital signage scheme or indoor LCD enclosures, the inability to justify the expense of a digital signage campaign is often the main reason digital signage campaigns are not approved as it is very difficult for a marketer to validate the return on investment (ROI). In other words the digital signage industry still has trouble clarifying exactly what it does.

The clearest way to establish exactly what a digital signage campaign can do for your business is to establish the goals that you want to achieve. These could be:

• Driving more customers/traffic to your business
• Improve awareness of brands, services or products
• Encourage ‘cross sells’ or ‘up sells’
• Drive customers/traffic to different areas of your store

Some people assume that digital signage can be used as a simple sales tool and that implementing it will automatically increase sales and profits. However, no advertising campaign will increase sales on its own. Customers will only but products that they want regardless of how well they are advertised. The best that an advertiser can hope for is that customers wanting particular product will choose the advertisers brand over the competitor.

Whether the campaign is indoors or is implemented as outdoor digital signage the key to establishing the ROI of an implemented campaign is to test. It is important to test digital signage campaigns against controls, in other words a store with a digital signage campaign should be compared to a store similar customer base without any digital advertising otherwise it is possible that unconnected uplifts in sales could be put down to the implementation of the signage devices.