PowerPoint is dead: Communicate better with Digital Signage

Welcome to the new age of engaging your employees and customers.

In an age where we have smart marketing communication software, smartphones, smart watches and smart homes, why is your business still struggling to showcase your brand, communicate your value, and engage your employees and customers on an outdated PowerPoint presentation?

PowerPoint has often been the go-to tool to create presentations – companies use it every day to solve a variety of communication needs from meeting presentations to front office displays to lunch room monitors. It may be a free tool that features static images and text on a screen, but it isn’t bringing your brand to life and getting your employees and customers excited about who you are and what you do, or can do, together.

When you think about your employee and customer experience, consider the level of engagement that each audience has with your brand. A study of U.S-based financial executives by Forbes Insights and SilkRoad revealed that an engaged workforce has a direct impact on the customer experience and in turn the success of an organization.

Are you sharing company information, employee successes, community events, etc.? Your answer may be ‘yes’ but if you’re sharing this information on a computer monitor via a PowerPoint presentation, your answer might as well be ‘no’.

The challenge is, your PowerPoint presentation is out of date almost as soon as you hit the save button. And the cost you invest in one of your employees, or yourself, plugging away to create a 20-slide, mediocre presentation for you to run on a computer monitor in your front lobby to show your customers who you are and what you do, turns out to be a massive waste of time and budget. Let’s face it, for effective communication with real people, PowerPoint is dead.

To prove it, we recently heard from a real estate brokerage that hired an employee to work for $20 an hour, 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 8 weeks... that’s $4,800! This scenario is common to many other stories we have heard in different markets. The employee was to build a PowerPoint presentation as part of the business’s communication strategy to engage staff, agents and customers for just one office location. The presentation would run on a TV in their front lobby and showcase a slide about their agents, a few slides for current listings, a few slides for open houses, and so on. So what’s the problem? Well, to start:

• The presentation would be out of date as soon as a property sold, or an open house ended.
• Showcasing many agents in one presentation is LONG and boring. Versus dynamically highlighting an agent birthday, welcome new agents and acknowledge top performers of the week on a real-time, automated basis.
• And how do you repeat this model to numerous offices? That $4,800 multiplied out sure gets expensive compared to the cost of digital signage software for real estate.
• Also, the visual design was limited to the ability of the creator. People are visual learners, the layout and design to intrigue their eye and make a memory in their mind is an art and a science. This was a big miss for the office that was using just a PowerPoint.
• The worst part of this real estate office effort to better communicate in the office…general staff feedback was, oh that’s it?

Sad but true, a PowerPoint on a TV run by a person isn’t the smartest move.

What’s the solution? In the case of the real estate brokerage, their intentions were good, their execution was limited to the tool they settled for. Their vision of hiring the employee full time to update and manage their communication strategy and plan, curate content, and refresh the PowerPoint on a weekly basis was falling short on ROI. That’s before they investigated digital signage and how a low-cost solution could not only fit well within their budget but also showcase real-time, automated information on beautiful, illuminated digital displays throughout their office. Such as solution frees up staff time to do more meaningful work that a busy office always needs help with.

Digital signage isn’t just for real estate offices looking to showcase their listings in their front windows or feature open houses on mall kiosks. Digital signage is for:

• Factory employees to stay informed of new HR policies or Health and Safety tips;
• Community centres to keep residents up to date on news and event information in their area;
• Transit authorities to communicate schedules, delays, and emergencies to passengers;
• Hospitals and clinics to promote wellness, share emergency information, or to direct traffic via interactive maps.
• And that’s not all…

You should be spending your time thinking about what you’re communicating and to whom, not how you’re going to do it. The opportunity for you to share information and data, target communication to the appropriate audience in the appropriate location, on clean, organized and branded templates is available to you and extremely cost (and time)-effective when you consider the latter.

A blog in The Business Journal referred to dynamic digital signage as fresh, immersive, and a way to clearly distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Isn’t it time you took your business communications to the next level?