Top 5 Innovative Branding Ideas for 2022

The world is always evolving and in 2022 there are some great new ways for you to brand your business. Some of the Top 5 Innovative Branding ideas are rooted in classic marketing, while others weren’t even possible a few years ago!

Brand Your Business with Your Own TV Network

Here’s a great example of something that didn’t exist up until recently, yet is a cost-effective way of making an impact with your visitors. Forget about cable TV, or digital signs, the new trend is towards having your own custom TV Network. What does that even mean… “Custom TV?”

Well, simply put it’s a screen that displays what looks like traditional TV, while having filters and controls that the business can access. It gives customers something great to watch without the risks of regular TV. All of the benefits without the detriments.

Custom TV providers like It’s Relevant TV and Rele.TV license the content for commercial use, also keeping you clear of any copyright issues you may face when showing videos from private streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.

And on top of it all you are able to have your own brand and own promotions on the screen for your customers to see. And that’s where the best marketing strategies come into play with Custom TV. You can reinforce your brand and give customers a great experience while they are in your location.

Brand Your Business with Swag

Everyone loves a T-Shirt; Or a pen, a bag, or anything else that they get for free. Finding some innovative items to put your brand on is a great strategy to extend your brand. T-shirts and pens used to be the go-to’s but today more and more businesses are moving towards pocket hand sanitizers, phone wipes, tablet styluses, and other useful items that people will want to hold onto. There are a ton of mainstream online businesses like Vistaprint and Custom Ink, but don’t forget to check local suppliers as well.

Brand Your Business Through Sponsorships

Some of the best branding you can do is through showing what you support. So instead of buying a billboard on the highway and giving all of those funds to a media company, try searching out the local little leagues and school-run organizations. The advertising will cost you a lot less, and the money isn’t only buying you an ad or a banner, but goodwill as well.

Brand Your Business By Creating an Event

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, whether you realize it or not, you and your team have expertise that matters. You can be fixing cars, treating people medically, baking cupcakes or offering tutoring services. Regardless of your industry, there is always room for an event.

You can have an open house to showcase your work process and allow others to appreciate what you do. You can hold a seminar at the local library to team people an aspect of your business to spark their interest in other things you offer. Events are great because they solidify you as a prominent source of information. They also can help you generate a lead list of attendees who will be more open to future communications from you than some random person who sends them an email.

Brand Your Business By Donating Branded Materials

This dovetails nicely with the swag-strategy. You can donate branded pens, pencils, bags, water bottles etc. to local organizations that contain your target market. If you have a bakery that serves school age kids, donate some #2 pencils to the school system with your name integrated into them. If you have a restaurant you can donate mugs or cups to local hotels so visitors can discover your establishment while they are visiting.

Ad-Free TV for Your Business

Keep ads out of your business!

Business owners are looking for solutions to remove ads from their TVs. Whether you operate a restaurant, retail location, medical office or car dealership, you’d likely prefer an AD-FREE TV option for your visitors to enjoy. But cable TV is riddled with ads, and streaming services like Netflix aren’t legal to use inside of a business. So what can you use that gets rid of the ads, is legal, and will still entertain and inform your visitors?

There are a few “custom tv” options out there today that can help you achieve these goals. They are all services that have secured content for commercial display to save you from licensing worries, but they are not created equal. The services differ in the following ways:
1. Size of Content Library
2. Variety of Content
3. Cost

If you don’t care to read about all of the details and would rather skip to the punchline, we believe that It’s Relevant and Rele.TV are the best options for Ad-Free TV.

1. Size Matters (for content libraries)

Q: What’s worse than seeing a TV filled with countless ads?
A: Seeing the same programs over and over on an endless loop

Many companies that provide tv services to business operate with a limited library of content. Content is costly, and many of the largest custom TV operators purchase their content to use forever. And they only purchase just enough content in order to keep their expenses low and maximize their profits. This leads to a lot of looping channels, and unsatisfied viewers.

As a business owner you want to find a company that works with TV networks and content producers regularly to make sure you have fresh content year round. The more content they have the less “loopy” you will feel watching the TV.

2. The Greater the Variety, the More People You Will Please

No matter what you do you can’t please everyone all of the time. But if you use a TV provider that is only offering a limited set of content, or only a handful of channels to choose from, it’s even harder to make your visitors happy.

Many industry folks think that their visitors want to hear about their industry while they wait. But it’s just not true.

Just because you are at a car dealership waiting for your car to be repaired, or at the doctors office waiting to be seen by a doctor, does not mean you want to hear about car or medical stuff the whole time. People in those situations are typically happier when they can take their minds off of the fact that they have to be there. Location owners can do their visitors a great service by putting a variety of content in front of them.

A lot of services tout their ability to remove outside ads from TV, but they also remove TV programming from the TV at the same time! A lot of times these services are referred to as “digital signage” and they have pretty much tossed the baby out with the bathwater. They use a television to display a looping set of videos or image slides (signage) instead of TV programming. And who wants to watch a sign???

3. Ad-Free Doesn’t Mean It’s Free. You Still Get What You Pay For

The third thing to look out for when selecting an Ad-Free TV provider for your business is cost. Cost is typically the top of the list for most businesses when considering their options, but the TV is one area you do not want to skimp on.
Here’s why:
1) The TV shapes visitors impressions of your business environment.
2) The TV can be a great tool to communicate with your visitors.
3) What’s on the TV can generate more business for you, or take business away.
4) Positive waiting experiences lead to better online reviews.

A lot of business owners gravitate towards “Free TV Services” for their businesses. And who wouldn’t want something for free? Well the old saying “you get what you pay for” holds true here. Free TV services typically have limited content, and are often ad-supported. And if you can’t control the content and/or advertising, it’s not worth it. Not even for “free”.

There are a number of services you can find for under $100 a month that will give you better content, an ad-free experience, and provide ways to promote your own business on the TV. We recommend taking a look at It’s Relevant TV and Rele.tv for feature-rich ad-free TV options.

These platforms include licensed television shows without the commercials that usually accompany them. So the content is high quality, but the focus remains on you, and providing your visitors with a great experience. And unlike the majority of television, these are built for your business, not for advertisers.

Best Ways to Get Positive Reviews for Your Business

In the age of the internet many people like to “Google” a business, medical office, or restaurant before they visit it. It’s human nature to want to get an idea of what you’re “in for” before you visit somewhere you’ve never been. And the internet has made it easier than ever before to find out just what to expect.

Your potential customers will find two things as they search for you:
1. The stuff you are promoting about your own business
(What you want them to know)
2. Reviews that others have left about your business
(Some things you may fear them hearing about)

What You Want Visitors To Know

Every business owner wants their visitors to know the “good stuff” about the business. You want to share why the business is preferred by so many, how many honors, records, or awards you may have, and how much recognizable members of your community love what you do. A lot of this can be achieved through carefully crafted media. Media takes many forms, but most businesses these days start with a website.

Your Website
Your website is a place you can share all of the above, all while keeping within your brand identity. You can share photos, videos, testimonials, product details, hours and information all on a website designed to look and feel like your business. Not only can a great website promote the business itself, but it can add to it. Examples of this can be found in restaurants, retailers and medical offices that have added online ordering, curbside pickup, and appointment setting. All of these conveniences can make customer experience more positive.

Your Business Environment
How to people feel when they walk in? What kind of conveniences are in place for your visitors? If they have to wait, what are you doing to make their waiting experience b? All of these questions look at your business environment. The physical space in which your visitors see and feel. There are many things you can do to create a more positive environment, but we suggest starting with the simple things like putting in comfortable seating and making conscious choices about what to put on your TV.

Your Advertising
How you portray yourself in the public eye will inform how people think of you. Advertising has long been a way to shape public perception. That’s why it’s so often used in politics and branding. Whether you are creating a billboard for the highway, or a TV commercial to air, there is great power in advertising. The more times people hear something the more they embrace it, so think of advertising as the way to get your controlled messaging across.

Now advertising has come a long way in the past few years, and it’s not all about paid slots anymore. Airing a TV commercial on local cable can be really expensive, especially if you want to replay it a bunch of times. We’ve found that creating your own TV network within your business is a much more cost effective way to take advantage of the TV medium, without having to spend money every time you want to air the commercial. Platforms like It’s Relevant TV offer businesses an unlimited number of playbacks of their own ads within their businesses– while mixing them with TV content matched to their audiences. It’s a great way to create a comfortable and controlled environment for your visitors.

Improving Online Reviews

Every business owner wants their visitors to know the “good stuff” about the business, yet so many review sites seem to be filled with more bad than good. It’s unfortunate, but human nature favors something psychologists call the negative bias. It’s the notion that we are drawn more to the negative than the positive in many situations. Simply put, one negative review can do more to hurt you than 1 positive review can to help. You may even feel that 1 negative review does more harm than 5 positives do to provide good, because negativity is so much more powerful in society.

So how can you avoid these hurtful negative reviews? The best way to do this is to provide your visitors with positive experiences. Easier said than done right? It is, but it can be easier if you follow a few best practices:

Do the Best You Can To Start
Always put your best foot forward. Do what you can to make people comfortable in your space and address things you feel might be problems before they become them.

Communicate to Your Visitors
You want to let your visitors know that you care about them. Let them know what you are doing to make their visit a great one. We recommend highlighting things they may not know about on your TV or through another display. “Skip the line next time with our new mobile app”.

Get Timely Feedback
Don’t assume that you’ve done everything right. No one is perfect, and every business can improve. But it shouldn’t be a guessing game. The way we can all best improve is to solicit feedback from our visitors.Getting feedback from people while their experiences are freshest in their minds is vitally important.

There are a few ways you can do this. Send an email or text message immediately after someone visits if you have that info. If you don’t it’s even easier to post a message on your TV with a QR code that visitors can scan while they are there. Once they scan it they can answer a brief survey and you can get direct feedback, while they are still in the building.

Review Their Feedback
Getting great feedback is the first step, reading the feedback and understanding it is the next step. It’s best to have a member of your staff assigned to this role so that it is done regularly. This is not an old fashioned “comment box” mentality, opening the box up once a month and looking at some anonymous notes that you can choose whether or not to act upon. In today’s society people expect you to act quickly.

Act Upon Feedback & Communicate Back
After you have reviewed the feedback, and whether or not you intend to act upon it, you should communicate back with your visitor. Don’t wait more than 24-48 hours to get back to people that have left you feedback. You want to show your visitors that you value their opinions and they time they took to message you. If you do intend to make a change or if you have a solution for them personally let them know so that they feel that you have solved their issue.

Why it is So Important to Ask for Feedback

There is also an added advantage to soliciting this feedback. Often times when someone has a bad experience they want to tell someone. If they tell a friend it may cause their friend to not visit you in the future. And worse, if they go online and write a review it may cause a whole group of people that don’t even know them to not visit you. By focusing their feedback back to you not only can you address it directly and do your best to help, but you are also diverting the negative review away from the public eye, and keeping it private.

Free TV for Medical Waiting Rooms

Looking for a full-featured TV service for your medical office waiting for free?

There is no such thing as a free lunch, but is there a good free TV solution?

We all know that free isn’t usually free. There is typically a catch. We’ll examine the things to look out for in this article, but if you want to cut to the chase, TV services like this one, are as close to free as you’ll get; with features that make it worthwhile, and tools to even offset the cost.

Many of the self-proclaimed “free” TV services are giving you TV while they are taking something away from your office. Let’s examine some of the ways that “free” service can actually cost you:

Most free services will put pharmaceutical ads on and confuse your patients into thinking you are endorsing the drugs on the TV. This can lead to a lot more patient examination time having to answer a bunch of questions that were generated in your waiting room.
Most free services have limited content that they provide. Many of the TV providers are operating with a limited library of content. They will continue to loop the same set of videos over and over, making your patients feel like they are waiting even longer than they really are. It can lead to poor online reviews and overall attitudes.
Most free services have boring content. While many of the medical related TV services provide specialty videos and seem great on the surface, the content can be very off-putting to your patients. Medical content played over and over has been known to create a nervous/anxious atmosphere for folks as they wait. No matter what your medical profession you want to create a healing environment, not one that makes people feel worse when they come in.

Free isn’t always the best option

We all know the phrase “you get what you pay for”, well when something is “free” what are you getting? When something is branded as “free” it’s likely taking advantage of you in some way.

Is it too good to be true?

A free TV plus videos that you pay nothing for may seem like a win, but beneath the surface there is almost always something else going on. Because as a medical office with a waiting room, you have something these service providers want; a captivated audience.

Those folks who are waiting in your office are taking in what you provide them on the TV. It’s your choice what you want to provide them. Would you rather share messaging for outside businesses, drug companies and emerging brands, or would you rather have it focus on you and your partners? You have the choice.

Recommended Read: “Top 5 Reasons a Free TV Service is Bad for Medical Offices“

Free Waiting Room TV that’s paid for by a local partner

You don’t want someone you don’t know to be controlling your TV and reaping all of the benefits from it. So there is an alternative that lets you pick your partner, have the partner pay for the service and you keep control.

It’s Relevant TV, provides custom TV networks that does just that. It offers medical offices a $0/month Sponsor-Supported package in which you choose a trusted company, organization, or partner to cover the cost. In exchange, you feature their brand and messaging on your TV in a way that is mutual, non-intrusive, and most-importantly; safe for you and your patients.

If anyone should be making money off of the TV in your business or medical office, it’s you, or a partnered brand.

Do I Have the Licensing Rights for Using TV in My Waiting Room?

This question is becoming much more common these days as motion picture companies, television studios and others are sending threatening letters to business owners. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in– if you operate a medical office, restaurant, retail establishment or car dealership, you can be held liable for showing television content that you don’t have adequate permission to display.

And it doesn’t matter how you are playing this content, whether it’s on a DVD, or through a popular streaming provider like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ or YouTube. Showing that content inside a business is likely against copyright terms, and could put you in legal jeopardy. Hulu’s Terms & Conditions for instance clearly state that their service is NOT for commercial use. Therefore, you cannot use it in a public or business setting- even in a waiting room.

Did you receive a threatening letter from a licensing company?

While there may be many valid points in a letter you’ve received in the mail from a content licensing organization, you should read it carefully, and realize that there is not one licensing body for all content. In a lot of cases these letters are designed to scare you into using a service that they are selling. Many of these services will offer a solution that shows a limited library of uninteresting content, looped on your TV day in and day out. You don’t need to trade away interesting television for “safe” TV when there are options out there that are both safe and interesting.

Just know, you are not obligated to use any specific licensing service in your business or waiting room. You just need to be sure that whatever service you are using has secured commercial playback rights for the content you are showing.

There are TV Providers that Include Business Display Licensing as Part of the Service

While Hulu, Netflix, Sling, Pluto and other streamers do NOT provide commercial licensing at the time of this article, there are other providers who do. And that’s what you want to utilize in order to keep your in the copyright-clear. It’s Relevant TV is one service provider that was built with integrated commercial licensing from day one. It’s cost-effective, easy-to-use, and features a growing library of over half-a-million videos. In addition to being the best streaming option for businesses, it’s also the best cable replacement on the market.

Top Waiting Room Digital Signage Systems: Finding the Best

We all know that a good waiting experience can lead to a great visitor experience. And great visitor experience is the surefire way to get incredible online reviews. So, what are you doing to make the experience great?

The Best Customer Experience

Your visitors’ experiences begin in your waiting room, and what you have in the waiting room can influence patient/customer mindset for their entire visit. If you stumbled upon this article through an online search, you probably already had it in your mind to employ a digital signage system. Digital signage is exactly what it sounds like; a sign that displays on a digital screen instead of being a static print.

Digital signage systems use televisions to display your messages, text, images and even videos for your videos to see. But not all systems are created equal. In fact, most of them are known to create a repetitive experience that leaves a negative impression on your guests.

People enjoy watching TV. The vast majority of Americans spend multiple hours a week in front of their TVs, because they want to watch. But even though digital signage is seen on TV, it’s not TV. At least, not the TV people would look forward to watching.

When’s the last time you said, “I’m going to go sit down and watch a sign”?

Probably never.

So why would you force your visitors to watch a sign as they wait? Especially when they are forming their opinions about their experience from the moment they walk in.

“Oh, well our patients barely even wait, they are only there for a few minutes”
We’ve heard that one a lot. But even if everything goes perfectly and your patients are only waiting just a few minutes, why not give them the best experience possible? 3-minutes of enjoyment certainly beats 3-minutes of boredom.

This is why we recommend looking at Custom TV over Digital Signage. Custom TV can integrate all of the things you wanted to get out of Digital Signage, and more, while keeping TV on the TV.

Custom TV for Businesses, Offices, and Waiting Areas

The pioneers of Custom TV can be found at a company called It’s Relevant TV. Based just outside of New York City, It’s Relevant licensed top television programs and effortlessly combines them with your own messaging, images and videos. It gives your visitors the best of both worlds; the ability to see and understand what you want them to, while having a positive experience from the start with great programming they will enjoy. They even have self-install kits that make it easy to transform your TV without any advanced technical knowledge.

What if Your Waiting Room TV Goes Out?

Coloring Books for Adults

There are a lot of different ways to go about setting up a waiting room in your business, no matter what kind of business it might be. But as we’ve noted on previous occasions, the most effective way of improving the patient waiting room experience is by installing a TV and choosing content to show. Most waiting rooms have TV at this point, which tells us two things: first, that it’s a tried-and-true concept, and second, that patients (or customers) at this point expect to see TV.

As wise as it is to set your waiting room up in this fashion however, a TV can also go out at any time. Whether the machine itself stops working or whatever content you’re showing on it is for some reason compromised, it is always possible that this little patient distraction can go dark. This isn’t a huge problem, and more often than not it’s one that can be fixed fairly quickly. With that said however, it is still a good idea for every place of business with a waiting room TV to have a few fallback options in place.

The following make for simple, affordable backups plans that can keep patients occupied and even entertained in the event that the TV goes out.

High-Speed Wi-Fi

One simple truth today is that many patients in waiting rooms will be looking at their phones as much as any TV to begin with. This doesn’t help you if you’re running business-related information or advertisement on TV of course. But when it comes to providing something for people to do while they’re waiting, high-speed Wi-Fi will be appreciated. While the acceleration of 5G adoption may be moving us closer to a point at which people rely more on public networks than Wi-Fi, we’re no there yet. So, ensuring that your waiting room has a strong connection (provided it won’t interfere with any aspects of the business) is a very nice gesture to patients.

Board Games

Not long ago, stocking a waiting room with board games might have seemed like a dated option. Now, however, these same games are trendy. This is in part because of a spattering of celebrities who have become somewhat famous for enjoying their board games (naturally leading fans to follow suit). For instance, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe evidently loves board games, according to one write-up on the actor’s interests. According to a broader list of interesting movie star hobbies, Fast & Furious actor Vin Diesel and acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino enjoy board games as well. There have even been reports that former President Barack Obama likes a tabletop game now and again. All of these influences — plus an apparent desire among younger generations to find ways to socialize in person — has made board games trendy again. Thus, having a few popular games stashed in a waiting room makes for great outreach to a lot of possible patients. Many will enjoy playing even portions of games while waiting.

Puzzle Books

The only downside to board games is that they’re often hard to finish in a waiting room (even if as noted many will enjoy playing even for a short time). Puzzle books offer a similar form of casual entertainment to people waiting with less of a concern about finishing, or having someone to play against in the first place. The only problem with this idea, naturally, is that books fill up, meaning any business taking this step needs to be diligent about replacement (no one wants to pick up a waiting room puzzle book only to find it mostly filled in already!). The good news is that puzzle books of all kinds are quite affordable, and it’s manageable for offices to stock up on extras to have on hand.

Adult Coloring

Not entirely unlike board gaming, adult coloring has become explosively trendy in recent years. In this case it’s less because of celebrity attention (though there are certainly some famous figures who are in on coloring), and it has nothing to do with a desire to socialize. It is actually primarily about coloring’s association with mindfulness. Many have come to see coloring as a soothing activity that can ease stress and promote calm, and as a result there are now people of all ages who regularly take time to color. Here, as with puzzle books, you may run into a slight hassle having to restock books. On the other hand, you can also find lots of coloring templates that are available for free online — meaning you also have the option of printing out stacks of papers for people in your waiting room to use if they please.

Ultimately, TV remains the best option, and should be the top priority in all waiting rooms. But for those times when the TV may go out for whatever reason — or for those patients who might simply be looking for something else — these are some other interning options to consider in addition to television.

COVID-19 Vaccination Sites | Communicating With Your Visitors

Vaccination sites require visitors to wait 15 minutes after getting the COVID vaccine; that’s 15 minutes you could be using to your benefit as a vaccine provider.

The TV provides an opportunity to communicate with your patients while they’re sitting around waiting for time to pass. Whether it’s getting first-time visitors to come back for other reasons or encouraging more volunteers to donate things like plasma; you have a prime opportunity to educate those people-in-waiting. This article is all about the best way to take advantage of that time, and it all starts with the TV in your waiting room.

The Best Waiting Room TV for Vaccination Sites

The best waiting room TV for medical offices isn’t cable, nor is it a medical display; that goes double for “FREE” medical TV services. The best TV software for your clinic is It’s Relevant TV. It’s Relevant is geared towards patient comfort, providing hospitals, clinics, and medical offices with a means to keep their visitors entertained. Entertainment here is key, because medical displays are NOT fun. They’re boring, and often times unsettling.

It’s Relevant helps pass the time by putting something fun on the TV.

IRTV brings a variety of engaging content to the table separated into a list of 40+ unique categories. The categories are like “channels,” which can be turned on/off based on the interests of your visitors. So whether you’re someone who likes celebrity interviews and cooking, or prefer home gardening and automotive, there’s something for all audiences.

It’s Relevant TV features short-form content. This increases the liklihood of your visitors seeing something that will get their attention.

More importantly, It’s Relevant gives you the freedom to upload your own videos and messages. Playing your messaging alongside content that your visitors are genuinely interested in watching is the best, most-effective way to get those messages across. Because It’s Relevant isn’t just a medical display, you can count on the only medical-related messaging being your own approved videos. This is important, because you’re not always in control of what shows up on your TV when it comes to other services. With IRTV, you’re in control.

Getting It’s Relevant TV for your Vaccination Sites

You can find out more about It’s Relevant TV here. Chat with the TV experts about any questions you have regarding custom TV networks, or schedule a demo to see the technology firsthand. Custom TV software is the future of medical office television as more and more clinics are seeing the advantages to canceling cable in favor of a customizable, personally-branded network.

Using a Smart TV as a Cable Alternative in Your Medical Office

Are you looking to get rid of cable TV in your medical office or waiting room? You don’t even need a cable box anymore with so man affordable smart TVs out there now. More and more owners and office managers are becoming grossly aware of cable’s rising costs. Their monthly cable bills just aren’t worth the mediocre content and the risk of upsetting patients. With a smart TV armed with choice apps, you have much more control over your TV’s content. Content, in this case, is really what makes a smart TV stand out over cable; because what you choose to put on your TV will determine its success.

It’s Relevant TV is the Best Smart TV App for your Medical Office

It’s Relevant TV is the TV programming you were looking for when you decided to get rid of cable. IRTV has the content (half-a-million videos), the variety, (40+ categories), the customizability (upload your own videos & messaging), and features such as social media integration and Competitive Ad Block.

In 10 Words or Less: It’s Relevant is innovative TV that visitors enjoy watching.

It’s Relevant TV sets itself apart from waiting room TV software that is strictly medical, or boasts “patient education videos.” For reasons described in this article, you might be surprised to learn that well-intended medical content does more harm than good. It all boils down to patients finding medical content boring, or even graphic and unsettling at times; which if you’re stuck in a waiting room for however-long, it can be pretty stressful – especially if it loops every 5 minutes. Medical-related content can be appealing to doctors and office managers looking to put something “fitting” on their waiting room TVs, but they get carried away and forget that visitors most often find it a lot less interesting than they do.

TV Tip: Don’t fall for the “Free Waiting Room TV” scam.

The Smartest Thing you can do with your Smart TV

The It’s Relevant TV app is the best in custom television for medical office waiting rooms because it’s patient-focused, and designed to generate success for your practice. Start your search at itsrelevant.com, chat with the TV experts there, and see what a custom TV network can mean for your waiting room. It’s Relevant is available on many smart TVs including Amazon’s Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku.

Related: “Top 3 Waiting Room TV Services for Medical Offices.“

Retail Digital Signage: What Can You Do With The TV In Your Store?

As technology grows, more and more business owners are exploring their options when it comes to retail digital signage. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon to see TVs in clothing stores, furniture outlets, and shopping centers; wherever people tend to gather, you can usually count on a TV screen being close by — that’s because TVs are eye-catching, and strangely comforting. Forward-thinking business owners using that to their advantage and building retail TV networks for their stores. This article takes a closer look at the technology that is taking retail digital signage to a whole new level.

Retail Digital Signage: How Effective is it?

The average adult is believed to watch about 4 hours of TV a day. That’s a lot of screen time. But because of that, human beings are naturally drawn to colorful, moving, or otherwise animated displays. Often when we see a TV, our guard is lowered — if only for the sake of seeing what’s on, and choosing whether or not to keep watching. Unlike banners or traditional paper signage, digital signage is bold and inviting. People notice it more, for obvious reasons, and all it takes is a properly-placed TV to host it.

How do you Get Customers to Engage with What’s on Your TV?

Getting customers to notice the TV and watch the TV are two very different things. That brief window of opportunity when they notice the TV and are choosing whether or not to keep watching is the golden moment. What determines their choice usually relies on a few factors:

1.) What’s on the TV? Obviously, this is the most important part. “Digital signage” users tend to just show ads that showcase sales, or reminders for customers to sign up for X or become a member of Y. This is smart, and it’s a great way to utilize the TV, but if all you’re showing is JUST marketing messages, your customers will see it as “just another ad” and tune it out. However, the solution to this is easy; instead of using digital signage, create a custom TV network. A custom TV network will mix in fun and entertaining videos with your marketing messages and your customers will be MUCH more receptive to your ads.

2.) Where is the TV on display? Second to what’s on the TV is where you choose to put it. Is it hanging on a crossroads pillar between sections? Is it part of a living room set acting as the TV? Or is it above the checkout for customers to see while waiting in line? All of these are great. You want it to be in a place that customers can consume what they are watching for more than a few seconds before feeling they are obligated to move.

3.) How are your customers feeling? This one is slightly more difficult to account for, but what’s going on inside a customer’s head plays a big part in whether or not they’re receptive to your messaging. Are they upset? Annoyed? Or bored? A captive audience doesn’t mean that they’re appreciative of your ads. Echoing point #1, mixing in content that might uplift a customer’s mood or alleviate their boredom can go a long way towards improving visitor experience, which improves your chance of making an extra sale.

The Best way to Utilize Retail Digital Signage

You might have gathered that the best way to use retail digital signage is by combining your marketing messages with content that your customers will enjoy watching. Not just any content; you want content that is fun, interesting, and not-necessarily related to your brand, but will put your visitors in a purchasing mindset. Ideally, you also want that content to be on the short-side, since your customers are mostly lingering and waiting. You want videos that anyone can start/stop watching at any time, and are short enough that people are more likely to see something that interests them.

Shorter Videos = More Variety.

Accomplishing this through retail digital signage alone is nearly impossible, that’s where a retail TV network comes in handy. A retail TV network combines the best aspects of digital signage + television; bringing them together in a unique and effective way. Imagine your digital signage board being part ad, and part TV; with occasional ads playing in between or next to engaging videos. That’s how It’s Relevant TV approaches retail TV networks.

The Best Retail TV Network is It’s Relevant TV

It’s Relevant TV licenses over half-a-million short-form videos spread across 40+ customer-favorite categories. As a store owner, you don’t need to being anything to the table except for your own goals and aspirations. It’s Relevant TV allows you to easily create marketing messages — which you can upload into the system and have play alongside countless entertaining videos. The technology is fully-automated, meaning that you can set-it and forget-it knowing that your TVs are delivering a mix of ads + interesting content. Additionally, It’s Relevant can be used to promote your social media, or barter ad space to other local businesses in order to generate even more revenue.

IRTV is the most feature-rich custom TV network on the market. Chat with the television experts at itsrelevant.com and get an online Zoom demo to learn more.