10 Digital Signage Mistakes To Avoid

Are you planning on implementing digital signage into your business? While digital signage provides businesses with immense eye-catching graphic benefits, it is easy to make mistakes that will compromise the success of your digital signs.

Knowing the best way to handle your business’s digital signage and the mistakes to avoid is the key to enjoying versatile, effective, and efficient digital signage. To save you from making costly mistakes in your business, we have provided ten common digital signage mistakes.

How Digital Signage Mistakes Can Affect Your Business

Digital signage solutions are growing increasingly popular across all sectors. From retail to train stations, business owners are relishing the features of this new technology that enables them to communicate information in real-time using eye-catching graphics and automated pop-ups.

Although digital signage might seem like a piece of cake, it goes past simply uploading a few pictures and sentences on a large screen to your audience. Digital signage comprises hardware, software, and techniques that need to be used correctly if you intend to reap the benefits of a successful digital sign.

When used correctly, digital signage can raise awareness of your brand through effective ads, increase sales, and even increase customer loyalty and keep your business ahead of your competitors.

When misused, your digital signage will be nothing more than a screen carrying information that no audience pays attention to.

Your brand awareness adverts will yield no tangible results, your marketing strategy will suffer, and you will miss out on an opportunity to help your business stand out.

To ensure your digital signage is successful, you must carefully implement a strategic plan to execute your digital signs properly. You also need to be aware of businesses' common mistakes when using digital signage.

Ten Digital Signage Mistakes To Avoid

A minor mistake can ruin your efforts to create an effective, eye-catching digital sign. To prevent this from happening, we have highlighted the ten most common digital signage mistakes people make and how to avoid them.

1. Wrong Screen Location

The location of a digital signage display is one of the most overlooked aspects of planning a successful digital signage implementation.

Although your digital content may be exciting and engaging, not placing the display in a location with high traffic and easy viewing angles will negatively affect the results. Viewing angles and screen location plays a significant role in your ability to capture the audience’s attention.

Placing your digital in areas with low traffic and football will result in fewer people seeing your messages. This will cause your digital signage to become ineffective and fall flat on what it can truly achieve.

Whether indoor or outdoor, you should place your screen in high-traffic areas like lobbies, hallways, entry and exit ways, and any area with heavy footfall or vehicle traffic. This will ensure that you reach a larger audience than simply showing the screen in an area where the chances of your content being seen are next to zero.

2. Wrong Viewing Angle

Another mistake you can make when implementing digital signage is mounting your screen at the wrong angle. Choosing the location of your display will determine how many people see your digital sign, but choosing the viewing angle will determine how easily they see it.

After choosing a location, you need to figure out the best viewing angle for your digital display. The viewing angle is the screen placement in a way that will quickly catch the attention of passersby.

For your digital sign to be effective, you should place the display at an angle where people’s sight will fall on it naturally. The best viewing angle depends on the screen size and mounting height.

Choosing a lousy viewing angle is often a result of:

• Choosing a screen too big or small for the location and purpose the digital sign is designed to serve
• Buying a brand of TV with low resolution
• Not taking the screen’s specification into account before purchasing it
• Improper mounting
• Placing your screen at an uncomfortable angle that tilts it far to the sides and out of the direct eye line is a rookie mistake you should never make.

What you should do:

The viewing angle of your monitor varies widely with the type of panel it uses.

If you want to enjoy better viewing angles, you should opt for LCD monitors instead of LED displays. The pixels on an LCD monitor are evenly-lit with an anti-glare feature that ensures better viewing angles.

Before purchasing a monitor, ensure you read the specification on the viewing angles. Although some manufacturers often exaggerate the viewing degrees, some brands provide almost accurate readings.

Figuring out the optimal viewing angle can be difficult, primarily since your target audience comprises people of varying heights. This factor plays an integral part in choosing the best viewing angle.

However, it is essential to note that the maximum horizontal viewing angle is 178 degrees which mark the limit, but between 30-55 degrees for touch-screen displays. The vertical viewing angle is generally accepted to be somewhere between eye level and thirty degrees below the line of sight.

3. Using The Wrong Screen Brightness

Screen brightness is an equally essential factor in using digital signage. You do not want your digital sign to light up the room like the sun and burn your audience's eyes, and you also should not turn the brightness so low that they find it difficult to decipher the message on the screen.

Controlling indoor digital signage brightness can be relatively easy, but what happens when your screen is in direct sunlight?

The brightness of your screen and external illumination can create a contrast that influences the display.

By rule of thumb, for a display to be seen clearly, the screen's brightness should exceed the brightness of the surroundings. If you make the screen brightness lower than your surroundings, the screen's content will be difficult to read.

Conversely, if you make your screen too bright, the screen will be unpleasant to look at. To solve this:

• Screens located inside should have a lower brightness than screens placed in sunlit areas
• Indoor screens placed in direct sunlight- like in a display window- should have a very high brightness to help them get noticed easier.

As a guide, you can adopt automatic brightness controls to help your screen adjust to the change in illuminance (the brightness of the surrounding). This control will adjust the screen brightness to suit the different daylight hours.

4. Choosing The Wrong Screen Size

Another common mistake you can make when handling your digital signage is choosing the wrong screen size.

Size is crucial if you want your digital sign to be effective for your business. Choosing the right screen size to display your signage legibly will play a part in guaranteeing that you not only catch people’s attention but also get them to read the information.

In digital signage, bigger is not always better. Although a bigger screen will provide a bigger surface area to display your content, some locations and instances require a smaller screen size.

Smaller screens display small content dimensions and are used for small viewing distances. Using a small screen in areas that require large viewing distances will result in your audience’s inability to read the content, thereby rendering it useless.

Conversely, using large screens in areas that require a small viewing distance can make your signage seem imposing and not legible.

Smaller screens are great for kiosks and retail stores. They are considered consumer-grade screens.

Larger screens should be used in large spaces like malls and outdoors. They can be either consumer or commercial grade monitors.

5. Overcrowding Your Content

Admittedly, digital signage is a platform to pitch your information to the public. However, as much as you would love to communicate lots of messages at once, this is a bad idea that defeats the purpose of a digital sign.

You might be tempted to fill your digital sign with as many characters as possible to pass a bunch of information across to your audience. However, the human brain can only process about 50 bits of information at once.

Filling the screen with an overload of content will create a clutter that people will find difficult to decipher. People need only to take one look at a screen crowded with texts and images before deciding it is not worth reading.

Instead of overcrowding the screen, focus on communicating important information.

With digital signage, you have only one shot at making an impression. The average human's attention span ranges from two to eight seconds, and that is how much you get to quickly attract a person’s attention to the information you are trying to communicate.

Less is more when it comes to creating your digital signage content. Stick to brief and attractive characters and designs that will help you communicate your intention clearly.

6. Repetitive Messaging

Using a digital sign doesn't mean you should continue to display the same message or content repeatedly. This can quickly get stale and uninteresting, which is terrible for your business.

One of the essential features of digital signage over conventional signage is it provides a medium to create and update new content with ease and quickly.

This feature provides a medium for breaking long contents into shorter ones. It also provides an opportunity for you to create fresh content.

Repetitive content will grow uninteresting, especially for regular customers. This might lead to stagnant sales.

To make the most of your digital signage, you should maximize the quick update feature and use it.

Create fresh content periodically. You can choose to communicate information like:

• Promotions
• New products or services
• Activities on your social media feed
• Latest news in your business or otherwise
• Traffic information
• Weather forecast
• Inspirational quotes

Optimize the automated scheduling feature and create a calendar of the content displayed. This will save you the time and effort that would otherwise have been used to upload the contents manually.

7. Choosing The Wrong Font

Understandably, you want your display to look pretty and attractive. However, sometimes your choice in font aesthetic might compromise the purpose of your digital signage.

The font you use for the texts on your digital display can make or break the success of your display’s readability.

Balancing aesthetics and legibility can be tricky, so it is essential to know that legibility comes first. This doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use the font style you wish.

When choosing your font, remember that the longer the text, the simpler your font should be. Your audience will not have the time or patience to squint at a screen to decipher the information you are trying to get across.

The Sans Serif and Serif fonts are an excellent and straightforward way to put your content in the limelight. They are legible, easy to read from a distance, and are used in daily books, meaning your audience’s brain will be accustomed to them.

Use fonts that are easy to read at a glance and from a distance. Any font more decorative than this will need to be bold to make it easier for people to read.

8. Not Optimizing Your Digital Signage Software

Treating your digital signage software like nothing more than a digital billboard is one mistake that many businesses make.

Gone are the days when digital signage was used for nothing other than uploading information. These days, digital signage software offers many features designed to help brands advance in the business world.

Don't just use your digital signage for displaying static content. Take advantage of the video features, live TV, animations, images, charts, and social media functions digital signage offers.

Digital signage displays are more effective at communicating information than traditional signage, but it is up to you to harness these features. Use the digital features to create content, design video content, automate your content, and enjoy more creative content management.

9. Poor Content Strategy

Even if you own a state-of-the-art digital signage system, without the right content strategy, it will remain ineffective.

It isn't enough to just upload content on your digital signage display. It is essential to consider the purpose of the content carefully and what goals you wish to achieve by displaying it.

No goals mean you will achieve little to no business optimization with your digital signage system. To avoid this, you should not make the mistake of not implementing a content strategy.

To create a content strategy:

• Consider the message you are trying to send across to your audience
• Consider your target audience
• Carefully choose what information to communicate and when
• Assign goals that you would like to achieve.

Doing this will help you display personalized content that your audience will find exciting, meaningful, and relatable. It will also provide a medium for you to track your success.

10. Poor Support From Your Software Provider

While you control most of your digital signage, your software is controlled by a provider. Your software provider provides content management functions and features for your digital sign, often for a regular payment.

Choosing a software provider with poor support is a mistake that will jeopardize the efficiency of your digital signage. Without a hands-on software support team to assist you every time you need help with your software, you will face regular downtime and ineffective digital signage content.

Choose a reliable software provider that will always be available to provide the support you need. Choose a software provider that offers training sessions and content management functions to help you optimize your digital signs and keep your audience engaged.

With Loop TV, you can enjoy a seamless digital signage system with unique features for compelling content. Not only do you enjoy these digital signage features for free, but Loop TV also provides a friendly support team and Youtube tutorials to help you along.

Creating Effective Digital Signage

Many digital signage mistakes are often overlooked and regarded as unimportant. While they might not show their effects immediately, they will compromise the long-term effects of your digital signage system.

When implementing digital signage in your business, look out for and avoid making these mistakes. Doing this will ensure that you enjoy a fully-optimized digital signage system.

One affordable digital signage solution is Loop TV, which offers a comprehensive digital signage platform for businesses, as well as more than 200 channels of music and non-music content. Creating digital content has been made easy with Loop TV.