Just purchasing and installing a digital sign won’t be enough to make your investment worth it. Of course you also need to make sure that the content displayed on the sign is aesthetic and effective. You have to also Develop Digital Sign Content, that will capture your potential customers attention.
Designing effective digital signage content costs either time or money, although it does deliver an excellent return on investment. Paying a graphic designer to create your digital display can be worthwhile, but it can be expensive, especially to get the job done well and turned around quickly.
And it can actually make less sense than designing your sign content yourself or using someone in-house, even if they don’t technically have a background in graphic design.
Here are some tips for how to design your LED sign’s content on a budget, and create something eye-catching and memorable without cutting any corners.
Develop Digital Sign Content – Source your Digital Signage Content In House
If you’re on a budget, but you’ve got someone on your team who has a good eye and knows something about appealing to prospective customers, you can bootstrap your digital sign content design. If you bootstrap, don’t just pick the youngest person on your team or have your nephew in college do it and assume they’ll do well because they’re Millennials.
Steve Jobs didn’t study computers in college; he studied calligraphy. Tap someone in sales, or an office administrator who always puts work into making announcements or holiday cards look nice. With a little encouragement they might do better than an outside graphic designer because they know your business, they know your brand, and they understand your customers.
They’ll most likely be excited to help with this and take pride in the result. You may even decide to do the sign content yourself.
Develop Digital Sign Content – Re-purpose Existing Media to Use on Your Sign
No need to completely reinvent the wheel here. You can raid your existing media file to Develop Digital Sign Content. You most likely have logos and images you’ve used to advertise your business already over other media, such as newsletters, email campaigns, and over social media.
Make use of these on your sign. You already have them made, so you’ll save time and money by transferring them over to your LED sign. Your customers and community already recognize them, so you’ll stay consistent with the messaging and style they’re accustomed to seeing from you. A lot more of this process may already be done for you than you think.
If you go with an outside hire, you or someone on your staff will mostly likely have to go digging through your media file anyway to forward everything over for them to transfer over to your digital sign.
Google Is Your Friend
As my mother used to always say: “When in doubt, Google about.” Actually she never used to say that, because my mother didn’t grow up with Google. If she didn’t know something she had to find someone who did in the phone book and call them up or drive to them.Or go to the local library and pull card catalog drawers organized by the Dewey Decimal System. So you are the luckiest person in the history of the world, because if you get stuck on any step of designing your own sign, all you have to do is Google it.
Don’t get overwhelmed by the project as a whole. Just break it down into steps and ask yourself, “What am I trying to do next?” And if you don’t know how to do it, Google “how to do (whatever you’re trying to do next).” Also use Google to find digital sign content design software and check out a couple reviews to find what suits you best. Many of these programs are designed for ease of use and have support you can take advantage of if you need it.
