4 Must-Haves for a High-Performing Digital Signage Network

You’ve invested the time and money into an extensive digital signage network. But is it working as well as it should? Is it accomplishing the goals you initially had for it? Do you even have any way of knowing?

With such a big investment, you want to make sure your network stays healthy and maintains a consistent ROI. Sure, you want to make sure it is sound from an infrastructure standpoint, but you need to define what healthy means in the context of a digital signage network. That’s true whether you’ve just brought the network online or it’s been in place for years. Then once you reach that plateau of health, you’ll want to fine-tune it – and that means knowing the steps to take to continually optimize its performance.

In an ideal world, of course, you’d have found this information and incorporated it in your initial network design at the beginning. But whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking to achieve even better results, it’s never too late to put a solid set of recommendations into action. The goal of this eBook is first to frame the “must haves” that signal your network is performing properly, then to show you how to ratchet its performance yet another notch.

1.0 For Starters, You Have to Measure Your Network’s Performance

If you aren’t measuring the effectiveness of your digital signage network, you won’t have a baseline against which to judge any future performance improvements. And no matter what the current state of your network there is always room for improvement.

Say you suspect your network isn’t healthy. Without data to support you, you might start looking for solutions without first knowing the underlying problem you’re trying to solve. Digital signage is extremely complex, both in its actual structure and in the number of departments it touches inside an organization. Often the network is owned by marketing, but team members from procurement, IT, and many others are involved in implementing and maintaining it. Yet it isn’t unusual for one group to travel a long way down the road to implementation with its own plans before ever consulting the other departments. When that happens, you end up with conflicting ideas of what the goals of the network are, and therefore differing opinions on how to measure its health and performance.

To avoid this, it’s important to have conversations about the data that you want to see from your network. And, yes, this will certainly entail more than one conversation. The kind of data you want to collect is going to affect everything from how the network is structured internally to the kind of content and how frequently you play it on your screens. Having these conversations up front and then regularly will keep data collection top of mind and these disparate departments plugged in.

Consulting other stakeholders, such as IT and store management teams, will also help you avoid issues down the line, like not being able to scale your network or not having the right tools you need to measure how it is performing against the goals you set for it.

2.0 Digital Signage Network Must Haves

Overall, measuring and analyzing your network performance data lets you shift the conversation from, “This is running fine” to “This is good, but how can we make it even better?” But before answering the second question, you need to know what it means to be “running fine.”

As a general rule, there are four hallmarks of a healthy digital signage network — that is, a network that is even capable of performing as you expect it to. Before you can begin to judge the effectiveness and performance of your network against your goals, these four aspects must be true. If not, you need to step back and ensure these basics are in place before trying to evaluate the basic effectiveness of the network, much less improve or optimize said performance...Finish the rest of this 7-minute read, '4 Must-Haves for a High-Performing Digital Signage Network' by visiting: https://cri.com/news-and-insights/4-must-haves-for-a-high-performing-digital-signage-network