The Benefits of Digital Signage for Hotels
Digital signage is a technology that has the potential to revolutionize the ways all businesses market to and interact with customers, and hotels are certainly no exception.
Digital signage is essential to make your business stand out in an industry that is steadily becoming more saturated with competition. In 2016, there were 83,886 hotels operating in the United States, and by the beginning of 2022, there were 132,000 hotels operating in the US, an astronomical jump with no corresponding population increase of such magnitude.
In this article, we will give you the lowdown on how hotels can benefit from digital signage, so you can take the first step toward leveling up your establishment and outperforming the competition.
What is Digital Signage?
Digital signage refers to the use of digital screens, in conjunction with a digital signage solution, to display content to potential customers, paying customers, and employees. However, this simple definition should not fool you into thinking that digital signage is in any way elementary. As we will show, digital signage is an incredibly dynamic and powerful tool when used correctly.
Much of the power and dynamism comes from the types of content a business like a hotel can display. Using a high-quality digital signage solution like that offered by Loop TV, you can display a wide range of content, including videos, high-quality images, text, animations, social media feeds, wayfinding directions, interactive apps, digital menu boards, employee communications, and much more.
Moreover, the types of screens you can use for digital signage are also many and varied, allowing you to strategically use different types of signs for different purposes. Some examples of screens that can work for digital signage include consumer-grade TVs, commercial-grade screens, video walls, LED panels, tablets, digital signage kiosks, vertical displays, and even billboards.
As you can probably imagine, there are a ton of benefits for hotels that come with integrating a digital signage system into the establishment. Below, we go over some of the most important advantages that come with hotel digital signage.
The Benefits of Hotel Digital Signage
1. Outdoor Digital Signage Helps Drive more Foot Traffic to Hotels
Getting new customers to stay at your hotel requires good marketing through a number of channels. With the ever-growing influence of the web, it is incredibly important to have a strong social media presence, as well as a listing on sites like google and yelp with a number of reviews.
Later, we will talk about how digital signage can help hotels on this front, but for now, we will focus on another type of marketing involving outdoor digital signage. The type of marketing we are talking about has to do with digital signs placed outside of the hotel.
Just about every hotel has some sort of signs, and the truth is that people are so used to seeing the same old static signs that these hardly make any impact on their awareness. Hotel signs should be more than just a way for people to know that they are at the right building.
Signs have the potential to further marketing efforts, but in order for this to happen, these signs need to catch the awareness of people walking, running, or driving by so that your hotel is the establishment people first think of when figuring out a place to stay or when recommending a place to stay for visiting friends or family.
Digital signage is perfectly suited for these aims. With a nice outdoor digital sign, you can take full advantage of digital signage functionalities to make sure that no one misses your hotel. Unlike static signs, digital signs can display moving images, videos, animations, text, and much more. Because of this, digital signage can be extremely eye-catching and visually pleasing.
It's good to think about the signs that you have outside of your hotel as the first impression your establishment makes on people who see it. Just as first impressions are important in social interactions, so too are first impressions important when it comes to people deciding what hotel they want to stay at.
By making that good first impression with your attention-grabbing sign, you can be sure that the amount of foot traffic you will start to see coming into your store. Of course, digital signs cannot do it alone.
Often people will take interest in your establishment, and then the next step in their customer journey will be to look your business up on the internet. Digital signage is one essential part of a marketing ecosystem, and when it is done correctly, so many aspects of that ecosystem will also work better.
2. Digital Signage Concierge Makes Improves Customer Experience
Many people who are staying at a hotel will be new, or at least not completely familiar, with the city that they are staying in. In the old days, people would often ask a concierge about where to eat, party, get groceries, and many other things located outside of the hotel.
Now, when everyone has a smartphone, it might seem like concierges are becoming obsolete, but this is not so. The best concierge is no longer an employee, but an interactive digital signage kiosk.
With interactive digital signage kiosks located in places like the lobby, people can get recommendations for the best restaurants in town, bars that only a townie would know about, and where to find the best shopping, among many other things.
The advantage is that people can search for as long as they would like, and often the kiosk will also have lists of the best taxi services, as well as the locations of each place a person might want to go so that people can best weigh their options knowing that they have all of the relevant information.
This does not mean that your establishment must do away with all human concierges. Not at all. It just gives people the option to figure things out by themselves with a highly intuitive system to help them out.
Often questions raised with browsing the options on the digital signage kiosk can be referred to a human concierge, who might build upon the information that the customers already have.
Ultimately, using digital signage concierges will greatly improve the customer experience. If people are easily able to find fun things to do in the city, this will reflect well on the hotel where they are staying, and this means happier customers, more-repeat customers, more good reviews, and more new customers.
3. Digital Menu Boards Improve Sales for Restaurants, Bars, and Cafes Located Inside the Hotel
Many hotels have eating and drinking establishments located inside their premises. These can range from casual cafes to upscale dining. These establishments can be a considerable source of revenue for the hotel, and for that reason, it is important to talk about how digital signage can increase sales and improve the customer experience at these eating and drinking establishments.
Digital menu boards are already being used by successful restaurants and bars all over the country, and there are very good reasons for this. One of the best reasons is that digital menu boards are highly dynamic and can be very visually pleasing.
Unlike traditional menu boards or paper menus, your digital menu board can feature mouthwatering videos of your best dishes, as well as highlighting goods you are trying to promote.
If someone is trying to decide whether to eat at the hotel restaurant or take their business somewhere else in the city, these attractive images and videos can do much to sway their decision toward the hotel restaurant.
Digital menu boards are also highly versatile. You can change items on the menu with a click of a button instead of printing new menus or menu boards every time a new dish is being served or an old dish is retired. This saves money and time,
Moreover, you can change the menu display at different times of the day. With Loop TV, you can schedule your digital menu board playlist to change for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and late-night snacks. This is much more efficient than having multiple menus for different times.
All of these factors can improve the customer experience, but one more thing must be mentioned. Digital menu boards are great at making customers feel like they are waiting for shorter periods of time. No one likes to wait around, especially when their bellies are grumbling for food.
Sometimes a restaurant cannot help but make a customer wait, but here is where the distinction between real wait time and perceived wait time comes in. When people are entertained while they are waiting, time seems to go by faster. So, even if the real wait time does not decrease, the perceived wait time will decrease if waiting customers are entertained.
Digital menu boards can be designed to be very aesthetically pleasing and can provide some increased entertainment. But there are also other options too. Loop TV has tons of streamable channels that you can display on your restaurant TVs. With this great content keeping the customer’s attention, wait times will seem to fly by, and this will greatly improve the customer experience.
4. Hotel Wayfinding
Many hotels have tons of facilities, such as spas, gyms, swimming pools, rooftop bars, and much more. Often customers won’t know about all of these facilities, and if they do know about the facilities, they may not know how to find the specific one they are looking for.
With hotel wayfinding digital signage, you can make guests aware of all the facilities and services that your hotel offers, as well as directions on how to find those facilities. For many customers, consulting a digital wayfinding station will be much more preferable than asking a receptionist for directions.
You could even have wayfinding instructions on each floor so that customers do not need to walk all the way to the lobby to find information on where to find what they are looking for.
Overall, digital signage wayfinding can greatly increase the customer experience, because people will not only find what they are looking for more easily, but also because customers may become aware of incredible facilities that they did not even know about.
5. Digital Signage Can Get Customers Engaged with Social Media
As we mentioned earlier in this article, a successful marketing strategy includes marketing on a variety of channels. One of the most important channels is social media. When customers engage with your hotel’s social media, this opens up a new path for marketing and connection.
A hotel can use digital signage to highlight its social media feeds on various platforms. When guests see that your hotel has social media and that you are posting useful content, they will be much more likely to follow and interact with your account.
Another great way to utilize social media for marketing purposes is to let guests do the marketing for you. Guests can be encouraged to tag or mention your establishment in posts relating to your hotel. Someone might be enjoying a cocktail from the rooftop bar, and if they make a post about it, you certainly want that post to mention where it is that they are enjoying such a nice drink.
To encourage interaction on social media and word-of-mouth marketing, you can feature posts about your establishment on digital signage, so guests can see their posts pop up on the screen in real time. This is great for spreading brand awareness and getting customers engaged on multiple channels.
The Optimized Hotel
As we have shown in this article, there are many concrete ways that digital signage can benefit hotels. Hotel digital signage is an essential part of the marketing ecosystem, and it also has the power to greatly improve the guest experience in a variety of situations.
Loop TV offers one of the best digital signage and streaming solutions available on the market, and the crazy thing is that it is absolutely free. We are dedicated to making sure that businesses can get the most out of this powerful technology. Your success is our success!