In a recent post, we talked about the importance of having a digital signage content program for the long haul, which “feeds the content beast” and keeps things fresh. One way to do this that we touched on was to use localized content, especially for organizations with locations spread across a large geographic region. Whether we’re talking about digital signage in retail stores, corporate office buildings, or any other dispersed facilities, local content can do more than just provide better engagement with your audience. It can lessen the burden on your central digital signage content creation team.
Naturally, large organizations need to ensure the corporate and brand messages are consistent across all their stores, campuses, or other locations. That’s part of the beauty of a central digital content management system and a digital signage network. You can create and manage your content from one location and distributed it to signage devices across the region or the country.
However, having locations means the content that engages an audience in one city or state might not resonate with those in others. For stores, that means the products you promote in January in Montana are almost certainly different than those in sunny Florida. But “localization” of digital signage content doesn’t refer only to product ads you show at a particular venue. Content teams in large organizations are used to planning and handling those types of differences. But what about a “manager’s special of the day”—wouldn’t it be easier for a local employee to be able to push out content without having to go to corporate to do so? Digital signage is also great for sharing local news and events—like the local baseball team advancing to the regional finals or the firefighters raising money for a children’s charity. This is an incredibly valuable way of showing customers how each location is an integral part of its local community.
Digital signage allows you to easily leverage local weather data and local broadcast channels to make sure the content is more relevant to a particular audience. But what about information about local community happening and events that shoppers would find interesting? For employees, why not post content about job opportunities or even social events for employees in a particular location. (The folks in Dallas don’t care about the chance of rain in Baltimore or the schedule for renovating the third-floor kitchen in San Diego.) And in the event of a crisis, the local facility management is more apt to have the most current information and instructions that both customers and employees alike will need. So why not let local employees have a hand in creating content relevant to where they (and their customers) are. That way, you can display it on screens in the regional stores or even individual departments where it is most relevant.
By delegating some of the content creation to individuals where the physical signage is located, you allow local employees a voice that boosts employee engagement and the organization’s overall success. And at the same time, you eliminate some of the burdens on the corporate content team. Delegation of local content will require some policies and oversight, but it also requires content creation tools that enable the functionality—and that won’t require programming or graphic design skills.
That’s where Reflect Xperience can help. Reflect Xperience is a reimagined way to access and use ReflectView, our flagship platform for enterprise-class digital signage. Your local employees can access our easy-to-use, intuitive interface from anywhere with a web browser and little or no training. Best of all, Xperience provides a simplified approach for creating and publishing locally relevant content, while letting you maintain centralized control of the overall content program.
Here are just a few of the features Xperience makes available to even a content creation novice:
Messages is a new content creation and publishing feature introduced as part of Xperience. Messages provide a simple but powerful publishing workflow for inputting and activating quick-hit digital signage content, including text and images for immediate playback on targeted digital screens.
Templates make it easy to render data as content visualizations in real-time. You and your team can create templates in advance then dynamically populate them with data to deliver high production-value experiences with almost no effort.
Screen Grouping & Management lets you open up the power of ReflectView to more users, so they can leverage the Xperience interface to access and manage groups of digital signage displays.
Localized Control allows Xperience users to create and manage targeted messaging and content and easily schedule publication to selected groups of digital signage screens.
Localization is one of the most powerful tools in your digital signage content strategy. It enables employees at any of your facilities to easily create and publish rich, local, and highly relevant content while reducing the burden on your centralized content creation team. We invite you to connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter for the latest Reflect Xperience and all our solutions. Better yet, contact us to find out how Reflect Xperience is making the power of our ReflectView digital signage content management platform more accessible to local employees across your entire enterprise.