5 Examples of Digital Signage for Grocery Stores
It might seem like grocery stores don’t change too much in how they operate. Since most of us can remember, they have been stocking their shelves with food and other essential items, and customers shop by putting items in their shopping carts.
However, just because the basic model of the grocery store has not significantly changed, it does not mean that grocery stores don’t need to take advantage of useful technology to help them stand out from the competition. Think about it: not too long ago, self-checkout machines were far and few between. Now they are nearly ubiquitous in supermarkets, grocery stores, pharmacies, and even some retail stores.
Thanks to meal kits and instant delivery, it’s easier than ever to get dinner ready without going to the grocery store. And yet, supermarket aisles remain busy.
One of the best technologies available to optimize grocery stores in a variety of ways is digital signage. Digital signage has countless benefits for grocery stores that grocers simply can no longer ignore.
Today’s shoppers demand a lot from stores: value, efficiency, personalized experiences and more. The key to getting shoppers not just in the door, but also into the checkout line, is to meet these needs. As grocers adapt for omnichannel retail, digital signage software has become the smart way to create seamless in-store experiences.
In this article, we will go over what digital signage is. Then we will talk about some of the benefits that digital signage has for grocery stores. Finally, we will end with five tried and true examples of effective digital signage for grocery stores.
What is Digital Signage?
When people talk about digital signage, they can refer to a lot of different aspects of digital signage, but what it really boils down to is the use of digital screens to display content. The screens can include televisions, tablets, interactive kiosks, and even billboards.
The other piece of digital signage is a digital signage solution, such as digital signage software and digital signage hardware. Businesses can use the templates and functionalities provided by the digital signage solution to display a startling array of content, including but not limited to images, text, social media feeds, wayfinding directions, interactive apps, videos, and animations.
Using the tools available with digital signage, grocery stores can get a vast array of benefits, from optimized marketing to improved internal communications. Its these benefits that we will go over in the next section.
Benefits of Digital Signage for Grocery Stores
1. Increase Customer Dwell Time
Getting customers inside your store might be a bigger challenge than ever, but it’s not impossible. A great way to drive store traffic is by programming your signs with fun, engaging content that gets the attention of passersby.
Not only do these capture the interest of those outside your store, but they also make shoppers inside your grocery store linger there longer. Want to keep things fresh? Mix and match videos and media content to keep visitors entertained.
2. Increase Purchasing Decisions
The benefits of digital signage don’t stop at getting traffic in the front door. Displaying targeted content facilitates and expedites customer journeys in a number of ways because your content, products, and branding can literally be in many places at the same time, especially when the customer is most likely to be receptive to advertising.
Get customers’ attention and reinforce the decisions they were already in the process of considering. Eye-popping visuals really can make a difference and make your products stand out.
3. Reinforce Brand Identity and Integrate Omnichannel Marketing
When it comes to building a presence for your grocery store, it’s important to create omnichannel consistency, especially for younger shoppers who spend a great deal of time online.
You might think that this type of marketing and brand consistency is necessary for places like clothing retail stores but not for grocery stores. I mean, people are just going to buy food, not searching for a new aesthetic outfit.
In fact, it is incredibly important for grocery stores to establish brand identity and have an online presence. It may just be food, but in this digital age where branding has such a big influence on consumer decisions, grocery stores need to work on brand consistency and online presence as much as any other type of store.
The goal is to get all of your marketing channels to work together to seamlessly provide a consistent user experience. What does this mean? A consumer should be able to experience the same feeling when they visit your website or social media feed as they do in your grocery store.
How do you do this? Integrating your social media content into your brick-and-mortar locations.
This is also an effective way of making your content work smarter and not harder. If your social media platforms already have good, user-generated content and engagement, bringing that connection into your physical stores will enhance the entire process.
Engaging, real-time content makes the shopping experience that much more fun for customers. Consider adding elements like social media walls, which could feature live Tweets, a gallery of your store’s latest posts, a social dashboard, or even results filtered with campaign hashtags.
Digital signage helps your branding without having to create brand new content. It gives younger generations a more connected shopping relationship between digital and in-store branding. Plus, you’re not spending money generating new material; you’re just reusing old content in new locations. A win-win for any brand.
The added bonus to this is that it keeps your content relevant and gives you the ability to update your campaigns instantly; it’s important to be able to swap out your messaging as quickly as trends change.
4. Entertain and Inform Customers
While the obvious goal of digital signage is improving sales, the indirect way of achieving that is by entertaining your customers and providing them with information relevant to their shopping experience.
Information empowers shoppers, making them more likely to complete the sale. This could include adding content to digital signage that explains vital product info, cataloged inventory, whether the product is in stock, best-selling items, etc.
5. Boost Sales
The primary benefit of digital signs is in the role they play in boosting overall sales. In contributing to purchasing decisions, increasing dwell time in the store, entertaining customers, and providing more context for products and services, digital signs indirectly boost sales. But they also do so in more direct ways, as will be enumerated in some more concrete examples below.
5 Examples of Digital Signage for Grocery Stores
1. Digital Menu Boards
Digital menu boards are an effective way to direct traffic to your food court. Traditionally, grocery stores used paper menus to promote food choices and take-out items. In comparison, digital menus stimulate customer interest with high-quality images of available items. What’s more, you can make real-time edits to the digital sign depending on the time of day.
Moreover, digital menu boards can have a great effect in reducing the pain of waiting in line by reducing perceived wait time. Perceived wait time is the amount of time that it feels like you are waiting rather than the actual amount of time you have been waiting.
Digital menu boards can provide points of interest and entertainment for customers so that they feel like time is passing by quicker while they are waiting in line. This can greatly improve the customer experience.
2. Inspire On-The-Fence Shoppers
Not everyone goes into a shop with a well-planned grocery list. Take advantage of hungry browsers by sharing easy and inspiring recipes throughout your store. Update recipes by time or day of the week. Try quick dinner ideas during evening rush hour and meatless options for Mondays. You can even include aisle numbers to make it easy for customers to find each ingredient.
3. Share Time-Sensitive Information
Digital signage for grocery stores makes it easy to deploy new promotions, provide stock and aisle updates or share alerts across multiple locations. Moreover, you can manage the content remotely and update it in an instant. The sooner your customers know about special deals, instant savings and even rainchecks, the more satisfied they’ll be with their store experience.
4. Improve Employee Communications
Grocery stores often have many employees, and it can be extremely beneficial to your grocery store to find a way to communicate with these employees in the most effective way.
Since digital signage is able to communicate through many different types of digital content, including apps, infographics, urgent alerts, isle updates, product delivery information, staff on shift, and much more, digital signage has proved time and again to be an extremely effective way for grocers and managers to communicate with grocery store employees.
This not only improves the employee experience since people will be more confident in what they have to do due to more effective communication, but this can also improve the customer experience greatly since urgent messages can indicate customers in need of help or assistance throughout the store.
Improving employee experience can be extremely beneficial for grocery stores where turnover is consistently pretty high. Keeping the employees happy is good for business and good for the employees.
5. Emphasize High-Margin Products
Take advantage of digital screens by providing wayfinding that directs your customers to areas with high-margin products. After that, use videos, social posts, and other content to keep them engaged and browsing when they reach the aisle.
What is Needed for Digital Signage?
Now that you have read about the benefits of digital signage and some concrete ways that you can employ digital signage in your grocery store to achieve the best effect, you might be wondering what exactly is needed to integrate a digital signage system into your store. Integrating digital signage in a grocery store is certainly a major undertaking, but the rewards are well worth it.
First, you will need to get digital displays. These can include televisions, tablets, LED walls, and more. Instead of buying multiple screens, all of the same time, businesses often find it best to tailor the type and size of the screen to the use that it will be put to. With multiple screens of multiple functionalities and different sizes, you can strategically implement digital signage throughout the store to the best effect.
The next things that you will likely need are wall or ceiling mounts for much of your screens. Mounted digital signage is typically much more visible so your customers will actually see the content that you display. Mounted digital signage also saves valuable floor space and typically looks more professional.
The final piece is getting a digital signage solution. While some people will end up paying large upfront and ongoing costs to digital signage companies, this option might not seem attractive or even feasible for some.
Luckily, Loop TV offers a high-quality digital signage solution, complete with a media player and all the necessary digital signage software needed for content management, content creation, playlist scheduling, and content display. The best part is that it is completely free, so you can reap all of the benefits of digital signage without the huge cost.
Optimize Your Grocery Store
In this digital age where brand identity, brand consistency, and high-quality visuals are so appealing to shoppers, it is no wonder that digital signage is quickly becoming a staple for all sorts of businesses, including grocery stores. It would be a mistake to assume that the grocery store model does not need improvement and optimization.
In this article, we have covered some, but not all, of the many uses of digital signage for grocery stores (simply because there are so many uses!), and much of the work of digital signage can be left up to you. You know your store and your customers better than anyone else, and so you are in the best position to creatively use digital signage in the most beneficial way for your business.