The lobby is where a visitor to your office or hotel is where a visitor gets their first impression of the place. If the impression is favorable, they are likely to view whatever comes next in a much more positive light.
One of the best tools for making that good first impression is the strategic use of digital signage. Digital signage, if used correctly, can give your lobby a modern feel, and it can do so much more than that. The best part is that digital lobby signage is easy to implement, and the returns far exceed the cost of investment.
With traditional custom lobby signs, it can take a lot of time and money to change branding, directories and other important information. But if you don’t keep your entrance current, you could be losing out on business. In contrast, digital lobby signage solutions ensure your branding is always current and eye-catching while saving time and money.
Digital lobby displays can help you improve the experience of both visitors and staff. Identify what you want to accomplish with signage for your lobby, then choose the content that you would like to display, such as calendars, wayfinding directions, or directories. Below we list just a few of the many ways that digital signage in your lobby can help your business:
Unlike traditional signs, digital signage allows you to avoid the printer and enables you to update your information quickly, efficiently, and most likely, in a more understandable way. This saves both you and your customer a lot of time, and it saves you money from the recurring costs of printer services. Moreover, you don’t have to be a professional designer to create great content. If you go with a dependable digital signage solution like that offered by Loop TV, you’ll have access to templates to guide you through creating your content.
Traditional lobby signs are static, so once a visitor has taken a look, they’re ready to move on. However, digital lobby displays are dynamic, interactive, and adaptable. A single lobby screen can show a wide array of digital content, such as images, text, social media feeds and social media walls, interactive apps, video walls, news feeds, wayfinding directions, web pages, animations, and much more.
Businesses with a reputation for being modern and tech-savvy tend to be perceived as efficient and effective. Adding digital lobby signs gives your entire space a modern, elegant look that’s also practical.
In addition to serving necessary functions, digital lobby signage delivers a more seamless experience for your visitors and guests. Digital lobby signs provide not only information they need, but also supplemental information they didn’t think of asking for.
Whether you share your online reviews or the latest promotions and corporate news, lobby displays can actually help your business – and your tenants – gain exposure. When you use unique content and a persuasive call to action, it’s easy to get people talking about you.
Digital signage gets a lot of credit for being an excellent marketing tool, but digital signage can be used for other means like communicating with your employees, and it does this quite effectively. Using digital signage for internal communications is a great way to centralize information, reach many people with one source, convey information in a more understandable way, and get your employee's attention much more effectively than traditional modes of communication like email.
In order to get your digital signage up and running, you will need digital lobby displays, like a lobby TV or an LED lobby screen. In fact, you could even use a tablet for some functions. The next step for building your digital signage system is to get a digital signage player or digital signage software from which you manage your digital signage content and get that content onto the screens. Once you have all of that setup, you can use TV scenes or other forms of digital display to implement some of the ten great examples of digital signage in your hotel or office lobby.
Lobby displays featuring a building map or directory help customers and guests find their way without seeking help at the front desk. It’s particularly helpful for managing foot traffic and streamlining movement from parking structures and entrances. Lobby directory signage is particularly fitting for hotels, commercial real estate, and school campuses.
If it’s the first time a visitor is entering your lobby, a positive review can go a long way. Reviews immediately establish trust and can even promote greater purchase activity. What’s more, when clients see 5-star reviews from sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, it sets the stage for a positive customer experience. Don’t forget to include a call-to-action to leave new reviews. This will prompt visitors to create their own positive reviews that will help spread your message even further.
You can even display your live social media feed so that visitors can see what people are posting about your business. This can also be a way to promote word-of-mouth marketing because people will want to post about the hotel while they are there so that they can see their own posts pop up on the lobby display.
Waiting in a lobby can be a painful experience. Utilize the functionality of digital signage to display entertaining or informative content. You can really pull from a wide pool of resources since you can display just about any type of digital content on your digital signage displays.
More and more hotels are adopting technologies that offer a personalized and on-demand guest experience 24 hours a day. Today, guests expect interactive guides on in-room TVs as well as apps to check-in, book a local show or order room service. In the same way, digital signage can function as a digital concierge from the moment your guests arrive, but without an app download. Show your guests maps of local restaurants, shopping, and other attractions. Display a local weather feed to help them plan their stay.
The office lobby is usually the first area your employees see when they walk into work. This makes digital office lobby signs an ideal internal communications tool. Another reason that digital signage is such a good communication tool is that it has many different types of media at its disposal, allowing it to easily convey complex information in an understandable way. Additionally, companies large and small can display news and announcements, employee achievements, KPI dashboards, or company social media feeds so that employees can go into work feeling more a part of the community and better prepared to take on their tasks for the day. It’s a worthwhile effort, as effective internal communications have been proven benefits for employee engagement and productivity.
Many hotels these days have a restaurant on their premises. Whet your visitor's appetite for your restaurant’s food by displaying a digital menu board in the lobby, complete with mouth-watering pictures. Maybe it isn’t even a full restaurant, but a complimentary breakfast offered by your hotel. A digital menu board is still very helpful in this instance because the customer will know what to expect from the breakfast the next day. They can then plan accordingly.
It's incredibly important to get feedback from your visitors or customers so that you can improve aspects of your business. With digital signage, this has never been easier. Place an interactive display that allows visitors to give feedback with a few taps of their fingers. Often visitors will not give feedback because they don’t think that it will make a difference or they don’t feel like they have the time.
By entering their feedback into an interactive digital display, they will likely take this to mean that you are taking their suggestions more seriously than if you gave feedback to someone at the front desk or received a generic follow-up email asking them how their experience was.
Digital displays will also generate much more customer feedback because they are prompted to give their feedback while they are still in the establishment, rather than being somewhere else where they cannot be bothered with an email survey, and because they know that it will take minimal effort to voice their opinions.
If your establishment hosts any events for visitors or customers, then there is no better way to inform them of these events than with digital signage which gives you the ability to update your information with ease. Moreover, there is only so much a concierge will tell you because they rightly believe that much of the information they share will not be relevant to you. Instead of having the person at the front desk list off everything that is going on around the office or the hotel, simply put all of that information up on a digital display. If something perks a visitor's interest, they can ask the concierge for more information.
People like to know what facilities are available when they check in to a hotel but often forget to ask the concierge. Make the customer experience better by having a display screen featuring all of the great facilities your establishment offers, as well as the hours that these facilities are open so that the customer does not try to go to, for example, the pool only to be disappointed that it is not open at the hour they arrived.
Paper directories grow old fast. Personnel change, working hours change, people switch offices, and numbers go out of use. It will greatly improve the customer experience if you employ a digital directory that helps guide your visitors to the right person or department they are trying to contact or meet. It will also save you time since updating information is made so easy with the right digital signage software.
We said that we were going to give 10 examples but this last one is just too good to leave out, especially since it is an aspect of digital signage that is too often overlooked. One way that your business can make extra money is by featuring advertisements from other businesses or brands on your lobby's digital signage.
Lobbies, especially hotel lobbies, are a great place for marketing. People are often new to the city and are looking for things to do, places to eat at, and often a good place to enjoy the later hours. This makes a hotel lobby an incredible place for advertising. You won’t have to search far for businesses that will be willing to pay for their advertisements to be displayed in your lobby.
There are so many benefits of using digital signage in your lobby that it's a route that seems near impossible to pass up. The lobby doesn’t have to be a boring place. Instead, it can be a place where customers are entertained and informed.
The thing about digital signage is that there are so many ways that it can be used creatively, truly giving you the reins when it comes to implementing this tool in ways that you believe will best benefit your business. As always, its important to always assess our marketing strategies so that we can continue to adapt and improve. Digital Signage gives you that freedom.
