What are some ways to serve targeted content when you’re dealing with public spaces and a bunch of demographics at once?
One of the most difficult challenges in serving up relevant content is successfully creating and displaying targeted content when there is a multitude of demographics. The problem with a diverse space is that the connections between these demographics are not always extremely obvious. In some settings, such as the outdoor recreation section at a major sports store, it’s clear that the audience for your content will most likely be someone who enjoys spending time in the wilderness. This information allows for a strong content strategy around the theme of outdoors, adventure, and exotic trips. This serves as immediate inspiration. However, current technology allows a more focused approach. We can narrow down messaging by a specific day, time of day, or event-based messaging. A recent snowstorm can trigger warm weather apparel or snowshoes, and the week before the Fourth of July could be focused on family camping. This further helps connect the objective of the messaging to the end viewer.
Although a content strategy focused on demographic qualifiers work and has had to work in traditional mediums for years, technological advancements allow us to further target specific demographics. Using the same sporting goods retailer example, we could look at different technologies that could further focus the message. Imagine if a retailer was using geo-fencing to identify dwell times in a particular area of the store. Now imagine if a shopper spent a designated threshold of time at an end-cap focused on camping nutrition.
Knowing that the dwell time for this individual is longer, the content strategy could shift from drawing in attention to longer format informational messaging about the product. Now let’s imagine the retailer had a loyalty application that tracker purchased behavior. If we connect this database to the messaging logic, we might be able to serve us specific content about a product that customer has a higher propensity to purchase.
These types of strategies bring what used to be a one-to-many content approach, closer to a one-to-one content approach. This is a logarithmically based approach that will further support the ROI we already see on digital signage today.