The Benefits of Digital Signage for Grocery Stores

There are 63,328 Supermarkets & Grocery Stores businesses in the US as of 2022, which means that the grocery industry is highly competitive.

Because of this, it is essential that grocery store owners ensure that their grocery stores stand out from the competition, offering a better customer experience than the competition and maximizing revenue from the customers that do come in their doors.

Digital signage is a technology with the potential to revolutionize the way that grocery stores market to and communicate with customers. There are tons of benefits that come with integrating a digital signage system into your grocery store or supermarket.

In this article, we will discuss many of the most significant benefits of digital signage for grocery stores, so you can be informed about the power of this technology and surpass the competition.

What Is Digital Signage?

Digital signage refers to the use of digital screens in conjunction with digital signage solutions, typically including digital signage hardware like media players and digital signage software for content creation, content management, playlist curation, and scheduling, to display digital content.

What truly makes digital signage such a powerful and dynamic tool is the sheer number of different types of media that can be displayed. Using digital signage, your digital signs can display images, text, videos, animations, interactive apps, wayfinding instructions, social media feeds, promotions, branded content, and so much more!

Moreover, you have tons of options when it comes to the different types of screens you can use for digital signage. These can include consumer-grade televisions, commercial-grade screens, LED walls, tablets, digital signage kiosks, and even billboards.

After reading what digital signage is capable of, it should be no surprise that there are a lot of benefits that come from integrating this technology into a grocery store or supermarket. Below, we take a deeper look at what these benefits are!

Benefits of Grocery Store Digital Signage

1. Generates More Foot Traffic for Your Store

One of the most difficult tasks of a grocery store owner is to try to ensure that potential customers choose to come into their store rather than that of the competition’s. In other words, the task is to generate more foot traffic from the available pool of potential customers.

Traditionally, grocery stores have used static signs to try to entice customers to shop at their store, but the fact is that static signs simply do very little to catch the attention of potential customers. Sure, these signs might help people who have already decided to shop at your store find your location in shopping centers and other places.

However, the goal is not to just cater to already loyal customers but to build off of this base to pull in more customers and more foot traffic. For generating foot traffic, digital signage is far superior to traditional signs. This is because they are typically far more eye-catching and visually appealing.

With traditional signs, you are stuck with static text and maybe a logo, but with digital signage, you can use images, text, videos, and animations to make the prospect of shopping in your store incredibly enticing. Another thing to consider is the first impression that your store makes on customers.

Just as first impressions are incredibly important when it comes to how humans perceive people they have just met, with implications for future interactions (or the avoidance of future interactions), the first impression that a store makes on a customer or potential customer has a significant effect on how that customer will perceive the rest of the shopping experience.

Thus, you want to use all of the tools at your disposal to make a great first impression. One of the best tools for this end is digital signage. By making your store look highly appealing with visually pleasing digital signage outside the store, you will not only draw more customers into your store but also these customers will be predisposed to have a better experience in your store than they might have had otherwise.

2. Better Customer Engagement with Social Media

One of the best ways to foster customer loyalty is to increase customer engagement with your business, both in the physical store and online. In this increasingly digital world, it is essential for successful businesses to have a good online presence which would ideally include social media accounts.

With digital signage, you can display social media feeds in real time. There are a number of options when it comes to how to approach this, and none of the options are mutually exclusive.

You can display social media feeds of people who have tagged your business in a post. If people see that people are making posts about your business online, then they might be encouraged to do the same. In this way, you can let customers do some of the work of spreading brand awareness and exposure for you.

Additionally, you can display your own store’s social media account on digital screens. Many people might not know that your business has social media accounts, so if they see on your in-store digital signage that you are posting good content, they may very well give you a follow.

Getting customers to follow your account opens up a new avenue for marketing and customer engagement. Some examples of “good” content might be posts about promotions, posts with coupon codes, polls about what food or food brand customers would like to see in your store, free giveaways, and much more.

Digital signage provides the link between your physical store and your online presence, and as we have discussed, there are many benefits that come with this connection. Ultimately, as customers become increasingly engaged with your business, they are far more likely to become loyal customers who shop at your store time and time again.

3. Drive Sales with Irresistible Promotions

As any good business owner knows, marketing does not stop when a customer enters the store. In fact, generating foot traffic is an early step in the customer journey. Marketing your products in your store has the potential to greatly increase sales.

When it comes to in-store marketing, there is truly no better tool than digital signage. Digital signage is incredibly eye-catching, so customers will actually see the promotions. It seems safe to assume that if your business is offering promotions, you want your customers to take note of them and act upon them. To this end, digital signage is far superior than static or traditional signs and posters.

By using videos, images, text, and animations, you can make your promotions appear highly attractive so that customers won’t be able to resist. One really good example of digital signage promotions should suffice to show the power of this technology for in-store marketing.

Often customers come into a grocery store not sure of what they want to buy. What if your store used digital signage to display recommended recipes, including pictures of the final delicious dish. You could also add aisle numbers and wayfinding directions so that people can easily find their way to the ingredients listed in your recipe.

You could even offer a bundle discount if a customer buys every ingredient on the list. Of course, you could do the same with a traditional sign, but that would be highly impractical.

You would have to print out a new poster every time you put up a new recipe, but you will want to keep the recipes fresh so that customers do not come back time after time and see the same recipe, so you would have to spend a lot of money printing signs and posters with recipes simply for a final product that would not look nearly as good as it would on a digital screen.

4. Improve the Customer Experience with Digital Menu Boards

Lots of grocery stores and supermarkets have cafes, canteens, and bakeries on their premises. In fact, people buying premade food is a great source of revenue for these businesses.

These can be even more profitable if grocery store owners start to do what many restaurants are already starting to do. This is to use digital signage to create a digital menu board. Digital menu boards have a lot of advantages over traditional menus and paper menus. Firstly, it's far more visible, so customers can have an easier time deciding what it is that they would like to eat.

Moreover, digital menu boards are great for highlighting your food with mouth-watering graphics. For menu items that you are trying particularly hard to sell, you can add pictures or videos of the food, and this will undoubtedly affect the number of people who end up buying that food.

Another benefit of digital menu boards over traditional menu boards is that they can be updated easily. Instead of needing to print a new menu every time you add a new dish or limited-time specials, you can simply use your computer to edit the menu board.

Additionally, you can schedule the menu board to change according to the time of the day. It's likely that there might be different foods on offer depending on whether it is breakfast time, lunchtime, or dinner time, and digital signage makes changing the menu according to these times quick and easy.

5. Revolutionize Employee Communication

Numerous experts agree that good employee communication is essential to successful businesses. One of the ways that businesses of all types are optimizing their internal communications is through the use of digital signage.

Using digital signage for employee communications has a ton of benefits since they ultimately increase the reception and comprehension of information being relayed. With digital signage, you can spread messages to many employees at once in a way that they will be sure not to miss.

Moreover, communications need not only be written. With digital signage, mass communications with employees can include images, graphs, text, videos, and animations, making the information conveyed highly understandable and attention-catching.

Good employee communications benefit the business, the employees, and the customers. It benefits the employees who can better do their jobs when they have all of the necessary information readily accessible.

This in turn benefits the customers because these employees will be better equipped to help them with their needs. Ultimately, this all benefits the business since an improved experience for the customers will result in more loyal customers and more sales.

6. Generate an Alternative Source of Revenue

Not only does digital signage provide ways to increase revenue through powerful in-store marketing functionality, drawing more foot traffic into the store, and increasing the overall customer experience, but it can also be a source for an additional stream of revenue.

Tons of companies would love to be able to advertise in a grocery store, where the ads would be exposed to swaths of individuals in a location where many of the products advertised could actually be purchased right from the shelves of the grocery store. Thus, using your digital signage to display advertisements from other companies and businesses can be a highly lucrative endeavor.

Of course, finding advertisers will take a certain amount of work, but that is where digital signage companies like Loop TV have stepped in to devise a method for businesses to make additional revenue off of advertisements, while also getting all the benefits of a high-end digital signage solution.

The digital signage solution offered by Loop TV is completely free–yes, free!-- and in addition to high-quality digital signage software and hardware, the media players provided by Loop TV come with pre-downloaded advertisements that can get you paid for showing them in your store. It’s a setup that almost sounds too good to be true, but the thing is that it really is true!

Optimizing the Shopping Experience

As this article shows, there are so many reasons why grocery stores should integrate a digital signage system into their establishment.

With the potential to revolutionize the way that your store interacts with customers and employees and so many creative ways to drive sales and foster customer loyalty, it is no surprise that businesses from all sectors are taking advantage of this technology.

For grocery stores that want to stand out from the competition in an increasingly competitive industry, digital signage is practically essential.