Megan Urlacher
As the New Year approaches, it's a perfect time to gather ideas for a content refresh and new digital signage strategies. We've wrapped up 12 different innovations created by our Digital Signage Agency and are gifting them to you in our annual 12 Days of Digital list.
On the first day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you... engaging, dynamic digital displays.
As bankers, a goal is to help clients learn about the products and services your financial institution offers and how they align with their financial needs. One problem: the current tools used to engage clients (AKA static signage) aren’t all that exciting, so instead of creating an appetite for discovery, your messages are being ignored.
Also known as visual communications, digital displays take the world of signage to a new level by adding engaging, dynamic screens to the branch experience. This is the only way to make a message stand out and get consumed in this screen-centric age.
Some of the advantages of these digital signs include:
- Enhancing the customer experience
- Reducing perceived wait times
- Driving sales and influencing client behavior
- Delivering more effective advertising
- Making real-time updates based on audience, time of day, etc.
- Scheduling content in advance
- Lowering costs and reduce/remove static signage clutter
- Providing 52% higher recall rate
- Delivering a high-tech atmosphere
- Enhancing messaging with animation and sound
On the second day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… a replacement for expensive, outdated paper brochures.
Does your in-branch messaging and marketing content communicate all the services and products your financial institution has to offer? If your signage isn’t selling for you and helping your clients discover how you can help them, you’re not getting a true return on the investment you put into your digital signage.
Stop spending money on printed brochures and handouts that become outdated the minute a rate changes or messaging is updated. Instead, get people off their phone screens and engaging with your promotional messaging with interactive kiosks and displays while they wait to get serviced. With these interactive displays, clients can explore all that your financial institution has to offer via digital brochures, website pages, and other interactive content.
On the third day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… the power to become a local hero.
Each of your branches serves a community of individuals and businesses, so it is important your content strategy includes some sort of hyper-local messaging that speaks to each specific branch community members. This helps to not only establish a presence in the communities you serve but also establish trust as a ‘local’ option for them to bank at.
In many branches, old bulletin boards and posters are being replaced by more eye-catching digital versions, and they’re more than just a flashy upgrade! Digital community boards can be an effective way to highlight your value to the communities you serve and differentiate your branches from the competitors. And digital community boards are even customizable down to each individual branch, letting banks and credit unions display hyper-local and relevant content with ease.
This content includes:
- Highlights of local events
- Local business spotlights and community support
- Community-focused and local imagery
- Branch announcements
- Weather and more
For example, Community First uses a community board that looks something like this:
On the fourth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… a way to increase the ROI and effectiveness of digital signage.
What displays garner the most attention? What messages are resonating most with your clients? Is your signage serving its purpose or is there something that needs to be changed? Stop guessing and start knowing what is and is not working with Incyte, a real-time analytics solution for your interactive digital signage. Now you can turn every client interaction into actionable data for your marketing or digital signage team by tracking every tap of a screen across your entire branch network.
Incyte increases your ROI on interactive displays by providing your team with a dashboard that displays all the data needed to make insightful decisions regarding the content you display on your digital signage and interactive kiosks. This dashboard includes reports that answer questions like:
- How engaged are your clients? How engaged is your in-branch staff?
- Which displays are being used most often? Least often?
- What messages are resonating? What’s generating the most business?
- What products and services are best advertised on your displays?
To learn more about Incyte, watch this short video:
On the fifth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… a new app to increase your product/service per household.
What if you could collect all the relevant client data you needed for warm sales conversations, right in the branch? If you’re interested in helping your staff better align products and services with client needs and removing the awkward sales interaction (that’s supposed to be advisory) between the staff and the client, then there’s an app for you. Called Financial Healthcheck (or FHC for short), you can gather all the information your associates need to offer a seamless, relevant, advisory-level experience.
The top benefits of FHC include:
- The acceleration of the client-associate interaction by allowing your staff to spend less time engaging in cold conversations and more time advising warm leads on products that they’ve already shown interest in.
- The ability to drive more people to the branch by demonstrating your ability to help them reach their expressed financial goals.
- A new way to gather a deeper understanding of where clients are on their financial journey and begin to identify trends and patterns that will help during strategic planning.
Take FHC for a test spin ad test your own financial health by clicking here. And to learn more about the features of the app, watch this short video:
On the sixth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… a fun way to entertain branch visitors (and their children).
Digital signage can do more than just replace static signs and display messages, it can also make the branch visit more enjoyable for adults and children alike. With apps like quizzes, games and prize wheels that can be installed on interactive displays, branch visitors can stay entertained while waiting in the lobby and children can stay occupied where their parents are with a banker.
Some examples currently being used in branches include:
- Kids Zones
- Prize Wheels & Quizzes
On the seventh day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… the ability to simplify mobile on-boarding.
As the banking industry takes more and more steps toward the digital environment, it is more and more important that your clients not only know that you offer digital banking solutions but also how to sign-up for and how to use these digital channels. Strategically placed digital displays with specially curated content are one of the most efficient ways to do this.
What does on-boarding digital signage look like?
- Interactive displays that provide a step-by-step how-to that can either be navigated by the client alone or with the assistance of an associate.
- Dynamic digital displays that promote the convenience of the digital channels you offer, why and how to use each.
- Tablets that clients can use to sign-up directly from the branch for these services.
- Signage with QR codes that clients can scan to set-up on their own device.
Above is an example of a tutorial created by the DBSI Digital Signage Agency that teaches clients how to use mobile deposit. This is content that could run on screens, video walls, interactive kiosks, and even tablets in the branch. All working together to educate clients on how simple it is to use your services.
On the eighth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… a better way to communicate with your staff and disseminate corporate messaging.
Many branches use digital just for their lobbies and client communications, but not a lot use them in their break rooms or in their headquarters. Those who don’t are missing out on a huge feature of digital signage. In the same ways that digital can be so effective with clients, its also perfect for internal communications.
Lack of communication is often the No. 1 complaint employees have about companies. Achieving good communication can be a major challenge but well worth taking the effort to improve, since it can boost employee productivity by 25% or more, by some estimates. Digital signage helps reach optimal communication.
When you have a branch network that’s widespread, keeping everyone on the same page can be difficult. but well worth taking the effort to improve since it can boost employee productivity by 25% on average. With consistent digital signage, you can keep everyone, from headquarters to each branch, well informed. And with the right content management system in place, you can promote your financial institution's events, show employee appreciation, and share news and localized content with specific regions or branches, or throughout your entire branch network.
Start sharing your company news and tips in a fun, visual and engaging way…like these examples above from the DBSI break room:
On the ninth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… consistent branding and messaging across your entire branch network.
Consistency is key in everything we do… especially when you’re trying to brand your financial institution. If every branch looks different and all of your messaging is different, you can’t expect your clients to relate to (or even recognize) your overall business and brand. Even worst, if one branch is advertising a certain loan rate or special offer and the one a mile down the street isn’t, you’re certainly not going to gain a client’s trust.
With static signs like whiteboards, bulletin boards, and printed signs, it is nearly impossible to ensure every branch is properly branded and that all the offers and messaging has been synchronized. Static signs need to be manually updated or replaced, which means you are relying on your branch staff to keep up with every change. And you’re not relying on one branch but every single branch, meaning in order to ensure consistency among offers and messaging throughout all locations, you’d have to ensure every branch is being updated in the same way and at the same time. With large networks, that’s quite the undertaking.
However, that’s not the case with digital signage. Digital displays can be operated from a branch or enterprise-level and can be updated in real-time with very little effort, making consistency among your branch network easier than ever.
On the tenth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… the ability to offer around-the-clock access to financial experts of every type at every single branch.
On a daily basis, clients are visiting your branches with hopes of speaking with an expert capable of handling their banking needs, like opening a loan.
And daily, clients leave your branches disappointed after being informed the expert they hoped to speak to is only in the branch on Tuesdays and Fridays. This adds up to a poor client experience and an increased chance they set up a loan with another provider.
So how do you solve this? How can your loan officers help clients in multiple locations without having to travel With Expert Nearby, an office-like environment where clients can communicate with any expert from anywhere using a video conferencing tool known as Pop.io.
Some of the biggest advantages of Expert Nearby include the ability to:
- Connect an entire branch network of experts
- Create more brand value
- Offer full service at all branch locations
- Improve client experience
- Reduce travel and branch staff costs
- Increase the number of client interactions
- Close business on the spot
- Increase revenue by reducing “walk away” losses
On the eleventh day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… insights into how other financial institutions used digital signage in 2019 and what to expect in 2020.
We know more and more financial institutions are transitioning away from paper brochures and handwritten rate boards and investing in digital signage technology. But we also wanted to know what’s working, what isn’t working, how much financial institutions are spending on different types of signage, the ROI of their signage, and what the biggest benefits they are experiencing. So we asked over 150 financial industry leaders about their digital signage use—and what we found out was pretty awesome. So awesome, that we put it all together in a report that you can now download for free.
To see the state of digital in 2019 and what to expect in 2020, check back January 1, 2020!
On the twelfth day, the Digital Signage Agency gave to you… a partner in your digital signage content strategy game.
Frankly, branches can be a bummer. It’s time to flip the script, and with the Digital Signage Agency as your partner in digital signage, we’ll do exactly that. We will work with you every step of the way to ensure that every branch offers the ultimate client experience by:
- Boosting branch sales, awareness, engagement, and loyalty.
- Creating better ways for clients to discover and engage with the products and services that you have to offer.
- Drawing in more clients and increasing business with eye-catching visual displays.
- Making a big impression with fun features and targeted content.
Some of the most popular services offered:
- Strategic planning, including:
- A digital discovery process
- A complete content strategy
- A kit-of-parts recommendation
- Creative support, including:
- Apps and module development
- Graphic design
- Video and animation production
- Copy-writing
- Social media integration
- Project management, including:
- Account and project management
- Coordination with vendors
- Deployment and installation
- Technical support, including:
- Content management system (CMS) demo
- Personalized training
- Support maintenance
The Digital Signage Agency is always ready to help you with a content refresh or a brand new digital signage strategy, from apps and graphic design to videos. Learn more at http://dbsi-inc.com/digital, check out the video below, and/or follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram (@DBSI-Inc) for more great examples.
