5 Examples of Digital Signage for Salons
It is no secret that the beauty salon business is highly competitive. Surviving (and hopefully thriving) in a competitive market means that your salon will likely want to take advantage of the most cutting-edge methods for getting more foot traffic in your stores, increasing the customer experience, and seeing a great ROI.
Digital signage has become an indispensable tool for successful businesses of all sectors. There are several ways that salons can take advantage of this technology in a way that will highly benefit the business.
In this article, we give an overview of digital signage and the basic requirements needed to set up a digital signage system in your salon. Next, we go over some of the general benefits you will likely experience when using salon digital signage. Finally, we end the article with 5 concrete examples of tried and true methods for salon digital signage that you can implement in your business.
What is Digital Signage?
Digital signage refers to the use of digital screens, such as televisions, LED walls, interactive kiosks, and tablets, in conjunction with digital signage software and hardware, in order to display digital content to customers and staff. The options are seemingly endless when it comes to the type of content that you can display.
Here are a few examples: digital menu boards, social media walls, animations, interactive content, videos, eye-catching text, images, apps, and so much more! Moreover, the types of screens that you can display your digital signage give you a lot of freedom.
You can choose anything from a billboard to a small tablet and everything in between. This allows you to strategically place your digital signage in front of your salon and outside your salon with different-sized screens in order to maximize the efficacy of your content and curate the customer experience.
What is Needed for a Digital Signage System?
The first thing that you will need is a screen or multiple screens. As said previously, these can be televisions, tablets, LED walls, and much more, depending on the uses you plan to use them for.
Next, you will likely want to get a wall mount. Mounting your digital screens to walls make them more visible and accessible to customers, and doing so frees up valuable floor space. Moreover, mounted screens simply look more professional than screens on the floor. An exception to this would be a digital signage kiosk, though the general rule still holds.
Next, you will need a digital signage solution. These come in two types: cloud-based digital signage and hardware-based digital signage.
With cloud-based digital signage, you will be performing content management, digital signage playlist construction, content design, and content display on an off-based server through the cloud. Companies that offer this type of digital signage solution will typically charge you a monthly fee for their services.
The other option is hardware-based digital signage. With this solution, you will be sent a digital signage media player along with all the digital signage software and templates you will need to do on-base content management, playlist construction, content creation, and content display.
This option typically has a higher upfront cost but avoids the monthly fees. However, some high-end digital signage solution providers like Loop TV offer their hardware digital signage solution for free with the added benefit that you can make extra money by displaying ads interspersed with your digital signage playlist.
Once you have the screens, the mounts, and the digital signage solution, you are all set for getting a digital signage system set up in your salon. Of course, you may not yet be convinced that you need a salon digital signage solution, which is why the rest of this article is all about the benefits and uses that you get from employing digital signage in your salon.
Benefits of Salon Digital Signage
1. More foot traffic
Digital signage has a lot of advantages over static signage, and one of those advantages is the ability to display eye-catching content inside and outside your store. Posters simply will not cut it anymore in this competitive environment. People are so used to seeing static signage that it barely registers in their visual field.
This is a problem because the signage you have outside your salon is like a first impression, and we know how important first impressions are. That's why digital signage’s ability to create eye-catching signs, integrating bright and visually pleasing images, text, animations, and videos is the proper way to make a first impression.
People will be much more interested in your store if it looks visually appealing, and that's why digital signage can be a great way to create foot traffic and have your store stick in your potential customer’s minds, even if they choose to go to your salon on a different day.
2. Greater customer engagement
Since digital signage can give you the functionality to showcase social media feeds and provide interactive displays for your customers, digital signage is a great way to increase customer engagement. And customer engagement is extremely important since it helps foster loyal customers and increases the customer experience.
3. Optomizes in-store marketing
Marketing does not stop once the customer enters the store. That is just one part of the customer journey. Once inside, you can use eye-catching visuals like you used to draw the foot traffic in to sell your products and services. Just as people are no longer impressed by static signage outside the store, so too are they with static signage inside stores. Digital signage is a great way to keep your customers entertained and enticed by what your salon is offering.
4. Increase sales
While secondary goals will be to raise brand awareness, increase foot traffic, improve the customer experience, and foster customer engagement and loyal customers, the primary goal that all of these goals are working toward is to increase sales. Because of all of the benefits of digital signage, it is highly likely that you will see the payoff on the bottom line.
5 Examples of Salon Digital Signage
1. Digital menu board
When you hear “digital menu board,” you probably think of restaurants, and it's true that restaurants have made great use of digital menu boards to highlight their food, entertain their customers and reduce wait times, both real and perceived.
The fact is, this kind of strategy can also work magic for beauty salons and greatly increase the client experience.
When your customers come into your small business, they can be presented with a digital screen outlining all of your services, along with prices. The style of the digital display can perfectly match the aesthetic and vibe of your salon, and moreover, the services you provide can be made more appealing by accompanying pictures of your great work.
Customers will likely find this type of display much more professional looking and visually pleasing, and as they see how great many of your services are through pictures or other means, it is likely that they will purchase more items and services from you, maximizing the amount of profit you can make with each customer while simultaneously making their experience better.
Moreover, digital menu boards are a great way to reduce wait times and perceived wait times. No one likes waiting around, but with a digital menu board you can provide entertainment for your customers, and the perceived wait time of customers who are entertained will likely be less than those who are not entertained. But real wait time can be reduced too.
With a highly visible, clear, and aesthetic digital menu board, clients will likely have a much better idea of the services that they desire, minimizing the time that it takes for the client to tell your stylists what they desire. This will minimize the overall wait time for customers since the process will move along more smoothly and more quickly.
2. Show off your work
A great in-store marketing strategy using digital signage in salons is using these screens to display the great work that your salon has performed for past clients. Clients will enter your salon and be dazzled by the amazing work you have done, whether it is hair coloring, hair cuts, manicures, and whatever else your salon offers.
When people see the great work that you have done, they will be much more likely to want to get the same or similar work done for them. They might come in for one thing, and upon entering your store and seeing the digital displays, decide that they want multiple things done.
Moreover, showcasing your great work will foster greater trust in your clients. The work that is done in a beauty salon, whether it is a full makeover to a slight trim can be a seriously nerve-wracking business for your clients. After all, it's the appearance they will be presenting to the outside world that is on the line, and even if your salon has great reviews, it is likely that there will still be fear in the clients that they will leave your store unhappy with the results of your work.
Displaying your work on digital screens can help lay these worries to rest, as your clients will be able to see that time and again you have performed stellar work, and they will approach your services with a more relaxed and trusting outlook. You are going to perform your good work either way, but this can make a huge difference in the overall customer experience.
3. Social media wall
A social media wall is a great in-store marketing tactic that also has the benefit of increasing customer engagement, fostering brand loyalty, and spreading brand awareness. A social media wall is a display of real-time social media feeds featuring posts that clients have made about your business.
When potential customers see that other people have had great experiences, they will be much more likely to trust you with their beauty needs. Moreover, if they see that other people have posted about your business, it is more likely that they will also make a post.
This breeds customer engagement because they can make a post and see it pop up right on the social media wall in real-time. Moreover, it shows that your business cares about what people have to say.
Finally, it spreads brand awareness because with more people posting about your business, more people hear about your business, and so people who otherwise would not have known about your salon then become potential customers.
4. Showcase your stylists
Digital displays are a great place to highlight the stylists working in your salons. This could include shout-outs to stylists who have been performing well to something more informational and intimate. You could have a playlist of your stylists’s pictures along with their credentials and a blurb about why they got into the beauty business.
This helps create an intimacy between clients and employees that otherwise might not have been achieved. It's no secret that an ideal scenario is one in which a client finds a favorite stylist and returns time and again because they want that stylist to attend to their beauty needs. Well, these kinds of employee introductions through digital signage are a great first step in creating that sort of relationship between client and employee.
5. Highlight special offers and other info
Digital signage is a great way to highlight special offers or new products that you might be trying to upsell. It offers eye-catching displays that will likely entice customers, and moreover, it is highly dynamic.
The goods or services that you want to highlight are liable to change. Instead of printing a static sign whenever you want to showcase a new product is costly and ineffective. Digital signage provides you with the functionality to update the highlighted products and services whenever you wish, and they will likely look a lot better than static signs too.
Optimize Your Salon with Digital Signage
As you can see from this article, there are simply so many benefits that digital signage can provide for your salon. From marketing to increasing the client experience, digital signage has the potential to revolutionize the way your small business presents itself.
And shouldn’t an establishment like a salon, so centered around making other people look beautiful, also look beautiful? That's what digital signage can do for you.