3 golden rules for nailing festive advertising on LED displays

The Christmas season is one of the single biggest shopping events of the year, so you may well have already sorted the content for your LED digital displays well in advance. If not though, now is the time to start! There’s now only a matter of weeks to go until Christmas Day, so the nation’s shopping behaviour has already begun to pitch steadily upwards in preparation. During this period of increasingly hectic activity, your retail LED digital displays are one of the most potent tools at your disposal for getting your shoppers through the door – so here are our 3 top tips to help you make the most of them.

Choose a distinctive call to action

It’s a long-established truth that the most successful marketing messages tend to be the simplest, so it’s worth taking the time to firmly establish yours before you start rolling it out. It’s impossible to run a successful marketing campaign unless you know exactly what you’re aiming for, so a working out a clear call to action needs to be the very first item on your to-do list – unless you’ve done it already!

Now, while calls-to-action can often vary wildly between eCommerce stores, they tend to be fairly straightforward for brick-and-mortar stores. Namely: buy now! It’s obviously a message that you’re going to be sharing with a tonne of your competitors, so it’s a good idea to spare some thought to how you’re going to make it unique. On that note, the more specific you can make it, the better. For example, you could choose to highlight specific or limited-edition products, or buy-one-get-one-free, or limited time discounts.

Whatever you opt for though, you’ll have to be selective. Stick to one or two calls to action at most. If you have too many, your customers will start to confuse or forget them, diluting their effectiveness.

Be laser focused on demographics

It might sound obvious, but it’s still worth saying – make sure you clearly define your target audience in advance, so that you can speak to them as directly as possible. Every aspect of your displays needs to work in harmony on this point. Everything from the language of your copy to the colours and graphics you choose for your display – it all needs to speak directly to the target audience.

If you’re aiming for a traditionally demographic – like pre-teen children, for example – you’ll need to ensure you use simple language and brighter, more vibrant colours to capture their attention (and imaginations). Affluent adults, on the other hand, could be attracted more strongly to more sophisticated imagery and muted but complex colour combinations like gold, purple and silver. (Really, it depends on what you’re selling them!) Every element needs to complement the other, because if anything is out of step with the copy, imagery or ‘feel’ of your advert, then the message won’t connect.

And of course, you’ll need to ensure that if you’re targeting a new audience, that you’re not departing too much from your own established branding and colour scheme – so that potential customers can recognise you at a glance. It all makes for quite the balancing act, but it’s well worth all the time it takes to get it exactly right.

Get creative!

Studies have shown that more creative store windows have a clear advantage over their less creative counterparts, in terms of converting passers-by into loyal customers. This is where your knowledge of your target demographics will come in handy – you already know some of the best ways to reach them, so now the question becomes: how can you do that in a distinctive, memorable way? Investing in a bit of competitor research can help you identify the kinks in your strategy; what are they doing well, what are they doing poorly, and what are they not doing at all?

This is where the medium itself can help too, since LED digital displays offer you so many more ways to engage your customers than standard static window displays. The possibilities are almost literally endless – you can use motion pictures to transport onlookers to almost any locale, from a packed city to a calm ocean to the boundless eternity of space. You can intrigue them by depicting your product or service in an unexpected setting or situation, or capture their imagination with a single memorable image to draw them in.

Humour is also a hugely versatile and highly effective tool in your arsenal – potential customers are much more likely to remember your product if you made them laugh. Just remember the other factors in play; your viewers may well end up seeing segments of your advert at a time, or spot it being repeated in a variety of locations, so brevity, repetition, and the lack of sound are all elements that you’ll need to take into account.

All that should be enough to spark a few ideas! If you’ve got any questions though, or you need a bit of expert advice, we’re only too happy to help here at Scanlite. We’ve got a great post on content inspiration for your LED signage that’s worth checking out.

Alternatively, just get in touch with one of our experts directly, and we’ll be only too happy to see what we can do for you. We know our digital signage solutions inside out, including the many ways in which it can be used to achieve your goals as a business, so to find out how we can help you, feel free to give us a call today on 01253 302723, or email us on sales@scanlite.co.uk.