The Benefits of Digital Signage for Salons
With more than 979,000 salons operating in the United States alone, it is a well-known fact among salon owners that this industry is incredibly competitive. In a saturated market, digital signage is one of those technologies that, if used correctly, can revolutionize a business.
Salons can expect great returns from digital signage marketing, as well as greatly improve the client experience at their salon. But these are just a couple of the many benefits that a salon can get from utilizing digital signage.
Here are some of the best benefits that salon owners can get from integrating digital signage into their salons.
What is Digital Signage?
Digital signage refers to the use of digital screens, in conjunction with digital signage solutions (including digital signage software and hardware), to display content to potential customers, established customers, and employees.
This definition is certainly simple, but this should not lead you to underestimate the sheer dynamism and power of this technology. One of the aspects that make digital signage so powerful is the sheer amount of variety in the type of content that you can display on your screens.
With a digital signage solutions, you can display high-impact content that includes videos, high-quality images, animations, social media feeds, interactive apps, wayfinding instructions, promotional material, digital menu boards, and so much more.
Another factor that adds to the versatility of digital signage is that there are so many different types of screens you can use to display digital signage content. Some examples include consumer-grade TVs or commercial-grade screens, weather-proofed screens for outdoor viewing, vertical displays, LED walls, tablets, digital signage kiosks, and even billboards.
Now that we have expanded on our initial simple definition, it should be clear that there are so many ways that digital signage can be used in salons. Now, let's look at some of the best benefits that your salon can get from using digital signage.
Benefits of Salon Digital Signage
1. Digital Signage Gets More Foot Traffic for Your Salon
Getting new customers into your salon requires a multi-pronged marketing strategy, where marketing is conducted through various channels.
Ideally, these channels will form something like a marketing ecosystem, where each channel feeds back into other channels, and through these connections, the marketing on all channels becomes more powerful and persuasive, and as a conglomeration of all these channels, the marketing strategy becomes more effective.
An example of an omnichannel marketing strategy would be one that includes social media interaction, search-engine-optimized blog posts or web content, optimized for the nearly ubiquitous mobile devices, good reviews from customers on sites like google reviews and Yelp, and a powerful in-store marketing apparatus.
This would be a pretty extensive marketing ecosystem, and each part described above can benefit from various digital signage techniques (covered later in the article). But there is one essential element of the marketing ecosystem that is missing from the list above. That missing thing is the physical sign or signs you have outside of your store.
Just about every business has a sign outside of their store, but, when you think about the various signs that you have seen, it is likely that you will find that most of them have been largely ineffective. Sure, the sign let you know that you were at the correct business, but signs can and ultimately need to be much more than that.
The sign outside your store is a highly valuable part of your marketing. With a sign, whether this is your intended purpose, you are spreading brand awareness, representing your brand identity, giving signals about the quality of services or products your business offers, and generating or losing potential customers.
The fact is that so many businesses fall terribly short when it comes to creating a good sign. This is mostly because people are still stuck in the mindset that traditional, static signs are the only option. “Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?”
But it is precisely this kind of thinking that leads to innovation stagnation, and people can see that. What they can also see and appreciate is when someone is doing something different.
When it comes to outdoor signs, digital signage is absolutely unbeatable. With the functionality to display images, videos, logos, texts, and animations, you can make completely dazzling, eye-catching content that will stick in the minds of people who walk by.
With digital signage, you have the ability to better represent your unique brand identity, and this is not something that people ignore. You can think of outdoor digital signage as the first impression you make on customers and potential customers.
Just as the first impression is so critical in social interactions, so too is the first impression of a business essential to a customer’s decision-making process. With outdoor digital signage, you can be sure to make a memorable first impression.
Even if people do not need a salon appointment the day they see your digital sign, you want to be sure that your business is the first place they think of when they do need or want a salon appointment.
In this way, digital signage can greatly benefit the amount of foot traffic your business gets, especially those tricky first-time customers who just need to experience your salon to become loyal customers.
2. Digital Signage Improves Customer Experience By Keeping Customers Entertained While Waiting
Often, customers will come into a salon and be told that they will have to wait before they can be taken care of. Of course, no one likes waiting, and salon staff do not like making people wait. However, the waiting process is often unavoidable.
Customers come to expect it, and often they will not hold the waiting process against the salon or their staff, but does this mean that a salon should not do everything that it can to make sure that the waiting process is as pleasant as possible?
Salons absolutely should make sure that the waiting process is as pain-free as possible. The waiting takes place in their establishment, so if they can make sure that customers have a good waiting experience, the overall customer experience will greatly improve. And for businesses in the service industry, customer experience is absolutely essential.
One of the best ways to make sure that the waiting process is good for customers is to provide customers with things to keep them entertained while they wait. This is where the distinction between real waiting time and perceived waiting time comes in.
Real waiting time is the actual amount of time a customer spends waiting, and real waiting time often cannot be avoided. Perceived waiting time is how long customers feel they have been waiting, and when people are entertained, perceived waiting time goes way down.
So entertainment is crucial, but it is clear that this is not a priority for many businesses. Sure, there may be a few magazines laying on a table for customers to look at, but this is not enough.
A great solution is to use digital signage and streaming solutions to provide entertaining content for customers to watch on TVs placed in the waiting area. Loop TV offers tons of music and non-music channels that can be streamed right on your TV. All of Loop's content is fully licenced and totally free, and you can customize the content to play what you want, when you want. If you want to take the waiting process seriously, then you cannot go wrong with Loop TV.
3. Digital Menu Boards Help Sell More Products and Services
When you think of menu boards, your mind probably automatically thinks of businesses in the food service industry. But just about all businesses in the service industry have menu boards. It's that thing that lists all of your services along with the prices.
Many salons make use of static menu boards, but in doing so, they are completely missing out on the revenue-enhancing opportunities provided by digital menu boards.
Digital menu boards are highly eye-catching and versatile. Many people come into a salon looking for just the standard fare. However, I’m sure salon owners wish that more people would choose some of the pricier options and treatments.
Well, a static menu board simply does very little in motivating people to pick the higher-priced services or products. But with a digital menu board, you can add dazzling graphics of the amazing results that come with the higher-priced options.
When people see what they could get by reaching into their pockets a bit further, there are many people who will reach and without the extra motivation otherwise might not.
What we are getting at here is that digital menu boards are not limited to giving a list of products and services. Digital menu boards are, rather, an incredibly powerful tool for in-store marketing.
Moreover, many salons sell beauty products, and the sales of these products can certainly add up. However, most salons do not market these products as effectively as they could. Often, products are not even listed on the menu board. A lot of this is due to the fact that the product stock is often changing, but that is not a problem for digital menu boards.
With digital menu boards, you can update services and products with the click of a button. When people see that the products are on the menu, your salon is sure to find many more people looking to purchase.
The menu board does not do it itself. Staff can play the role of explaining the benefits of each product and giving personalized recommendations. But the key is that listing products on the menu board will lead to customers taking the initiative and asking about products, rather than employees recommending products people did not ask for.
There is an important difference. People do not like to feel like they are being sold something by a salesman. But if they take the initiative and ask about products, they feel like it is an individual decision and are therefore much more likely to purchase those products recommended by the salon staff.
4. Social Media
Now, you might have been wondering how digital signage ties into the other marketing channels we talked about earlier in this article. Well, the answer is that digital signage can be leveraged to promote customer engagement on social media. It essentially forms a connection between the online presence of a business and the physical shop.
Digital signage can allow you to feature real-time social media feeds. If more people follow your social media accounts, then this opens up more channels for communication and marketing. When people see that your feed is displayed on your digital signage, they may for the first time become aware that your business has social media at all.
Moreover, if customers like what they see (i.e. that you use social media to inform customers about promotions and deals), then they will be much more likely to follow your accounts. Additionally, you can show a feed of people who have made posts about your business.
It is very common for people to post photos after hair appointments, especially if they like what the stylist has done. Wouldn’t it be great if they tagged your business in their posts? It would be because one of the most effective forms of marketing is word-of-mouth marketing.
If you highlight posts about your business, then others may feel inclined to make their own posts. You can show how your business interacts with the posts too, showing that you are interested in what people have to say about your business, and that you are committed to forming a community.
By leveraging digital signage to form social media connections, you are actively promoting your brand image and forming important connections with clients.
Stand Out from the Competition
As we have discussed in this article, there are so many benefits for salons that integrate digital signage into their stores and marketing strategies.
By creating great content and displaying it on your digital signs, you have the opportunity to gain many new customers, improve the customer experience, engage customers through multiple channels, sell more products, and ultimately distinguish your business as the go-to salon in your area.