It’s not abnormal to think “I’ll save money or it’ll be better if I do it myself”. It’s a common thought that comes across our minds as individuals, consumers, or business owners. However, what we often fail to realize is that when it comes to marketing a business, there are many areas that require a finer touch than we realize or have the skill to provide.

The same holds true for realizing the full marketing potential of your digital signage, and how much work, expertise and knowledge of best-practices go into designing content, along with the proper frequency of change and variety to make your business stand out.

When businesses invest in digital signage, there are a few internal roles that will probably assume the role of “Sign Manager”. It will likely be the business owner if you’re very small. After all, the owner may handle everything from signing checks, to cleaning the breakroom…..why not add marketing extraordinaire to the list?

If you’re a medium-sized business, you might delegate this task to one of your employees. Maybe it’s someone in Marketing or Operations, maybe it’s your most techy employee, or maybe you have a friend, cousin or spouse that’s agreed to take it on. Whoever it is, it’s them and not you, and boy are you glad! If you’re a larger company or have the budget, you’re either assigning it to your internal marketing person or outsourcing it to a local graphic designer/agency or maybe a marketing agency.

While the above options are all possibilities, what do they really cost when considering variables around time, money and effort?

If you’re the business owner taking this on, how much is this costing you when breaking down your value as an employee by the hour? Is it $50/hour, $75/hour, $100/hour……..maybe more? How much time will you spend learning the sign software, understanding best practices, learning content design software if your sign doesn’t have a sophisticated design element built in? How will you determine and manage frequency of change? After all, consistency and having a large library of designs that look good and market your business is critical to recouping a solid ROI on your sign. We know, it’s enough to make your head spin.

If you’re assigning responsibility to an internal person, the same hourly expense must be determined. Albeit, the employee’s time probably isn’t as expensive as yours, but do they really have the experience and bandwidth to take things on? How motivated or determined will they be to learn signage and design software? Do they understand best practices and marketing principles associated with marketing a business? How long will they stay engaged and motivated to consistently change the sign several times per month without you looking over their shoulder? Do you drive the sign strategy and they execute? Do they own everything? Is their time more valuable to you when spent on what you actually hired them to do? So many questions and before you know it, your sign’s had the time and temperature on it for six months straight. What a nightmare!

Finally, the business of outsourcing can be a good one but often costly. While graphic design or marketing firms are available everywhere, their rates are usually pretty high. A marketing or design strategy for signs is usually just one component of a larger piece of business. If you can find a design firm to contract with you on an hourly rate, you’re usually looking at a rate of $50-$200/hour, depending on the size of the business. These charges can add up quick and there’s no telling what the quality of work will be. Even if these businesses are turning around work that strikes the nail on the head, you’re still responsible for getting the content to your sign, scheduling it, etc., which still involves your time and effort at the end of the day.

The value that Project Content provides is just the right mix of industry, marketing knowledge and affordability. Through our custom content and sign management plans, we’ve crafted options around access to stock content & messaging that looks great, providing the resources to design custom content when you need it, and even providing resources to deploy the content to your sign, managing the content, playlists, scheduling and everything else, for one very reasonable monthly fee.

The Solution

The value that Project Content provides is just the right mix of industry, marketing knowledge and affordability. Through our custom content and sign management plans, we’ve crafted options around access to stock content & messaging that looks great, providing the resources to design custom content when you need it, and even providing resources to deploy the content to your sign, managing the content, playlists, scheduling and everything else, for one very reasonable monthly fee.