Blog | Using Technology to Personalize the Digital Signage Experience

By Scala Team

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Using Technology to Personalize the Digital Signage Experience

Segmentation has always been a fundamental challenge for customer experience and marketing. How do you create content that appeals to every segment, particularly in a world as complex and varied as our own? 

In this article, we explore the synergy between emerging use of digital signage sensors, software and machine learning to drive cross-channel marketing campaigns.

We will outline how to deliver personalized digital signage experiences by integrating both in-store and cloud-based data sources. With these data feeds in place, digital signage content management systems can display more targeted, synchronized content, achieving goals such as customer experience, revenue, inventory, and more.

Pairing Digital Displays with Targeting Technology

Personalization has become a key driver for investing in technology that will enhance  customer engagement and deliver  memorable experiences. By seamlessly integrating interactive digital signage displays with cutting-edge targeting technologies, businesses can unlock a world of possibilities that improve on traditional one-size-fits-all approaches.

Interactive digital signage displays, powered by advanced customer behavior tracking and analytics, offer a dynamic canvas where content can — with the right technology working behind the scenes — adapt in real-time to the preferences and interests of the audience. Geotargeting capabilities, such as geofencing and proximity sensors, allow for optimized messaging and promotions based on a customer’s precise location. From farther away, the goal is to attract, and then as customers walk toward the display, the goal shifts to engagement, revealing more in-depth information about the offering. 

Recent leaps in artificial intelligence and machine learning make  in-store and cloud data points even more impactful, driving better content delivery and enhancing data collection processes. Through an iterative process of reinforcement learning, businesses can continually refine and optimize content delivery, ensuring that messaging is tailored around desired outcomes, whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or fostering customer loyalty.

Leveraging these innovative technologies helps digital signage solutions deliver personalized and immersive experiences that drive revenues while providing industry-leading customer experience. 

But to complete the data and content pipeline, you also need the right software.

Digital Signage Software to Track and Process Customer Data

The foundation of personalized digital signage experiences is a flexible, modern digital signage content management system (CMS). The CMS needs to support dynamic data and scale in order to drive personalization initiatives.

On top of the CMS, customer relationship management (CRM) is a treasure trove of invaluable customer data. By tapping into the wealth of information within CRM systems, businesses can gain deeper insights into customer preferences, purchasing behaviors and loyalty patterns, enabling them to craft personalized, compelling messaging.

Beyond these two most common software suites, the integration of third-party software can provide additional contextual layers, further enhancing the performance and effectiveness of personalized digital signage. Geolocation data, inventory management systems, and point of sale (POS) integrations can all contribute valuable insights, allowing businesses to deliver tailored, real-time content that aligns with pricing and inventory, local events and specific customer journeys.

Creating pipelines between these software solutions—alongside digital signage sensors/interactive digital signage—adds more context for systems to make increasingly intelligent decisions about the content to display for personalized and relevant experiences.

Real-Time Analytics for Digital Signage

Given the right hardware and software, analytics and feedback loops become incredibly valuable. Whether now or in the future, machine learning-based solutions can help connect the universe of dots from customer and context parameters, to content delivery, and ultimately sales revenues and profitability. Feedback loops can be introduced at any number of layers within the customer journey. 

Low-cost, easily implemented sensor-based customer engagement tracking measures dwell time and pathing around particular content and is driven by the same geolocation data that would be used to deliver optimal content. Additionally, you can integrate with other data context to provide more specialized information about the way that particular customer attributes might lead to different content outcomes. 

Integrating customer attributes and context, with engagement metrics and sales data completes the pipeline, enabling reinforcement learning that optimizes content delivery based on performance.

Utilizing Cross-Channel Marketing in Your Digital Signage

Personalization is the gateway to a successful transition from multi-channel to cross-channel marketing. Dynamic content management supports adaptations in content strategy, down to specific personas as they walk into the store. 

Each point of context becomes another lever for achieving targeted goals based on multiple segments and attributes. Align digital campaigns, such as email promotions and display marketing with in-store messaging to sustain and deliver the brand promise to each segment.

Results-Driven, Adaptive Digital Signage

By harnessing the power of digital signage sensors, software, and machine learning, businesses can create a seamless, cross-channel marketing ecosystem that not only resonates with customers on a personal level but also drives tangible business results.

At Scala, we offer more than the best personalized digital signage content management system; our services team brings decades of experience in design, development and deployment for many different industries and three continents. 

Whether you are at the beginning, middle or end of your personalization initiative, please don’t hesitate to send us any questions. We’re happy to help.