Digital Signage: Hyperlocal Delivers Relevancy

In the quest to attract and hold attention, consider what you can do to deliver information that your audience cares about.

A new buzzword is making its rounds in professional media circles these days that’s pertinent to successful digital signage. That word, “hyperlocal,” at first glance seems a little strange, but when you consider what it’s driving at it should make all the sense in the world to marketers who concentrate their efforts on digital signage.

The prefix “hyper,” in this instance meaning extremely, is added to the familiar concept of local to draw the distinction between something that’s in your city vs. something that’s in your neighborhood or something that’s in your vicinity vs. something in close proximity.

Squeezed by new competition from non-traditional media, such as blogs, Web sites and even mobile phones and PDAs, the pillars of local media, including newspapers and TV stations, have begun dabbling in hyperlocal news coverage on their Web sites to win back audience and remain competitive.

For marketers relying on digital signage to advance their communications goals, hyperlocality is an important concept to grasp and leverage. Imagine you are given the responsibility for marketing at a retail store specializing in camping, fishing and hunting equipment. Some informal research showed 80 percent of customers fish, hunt and camp in the country. It also revealed 60 percent of those customers take a fishing, hunting or camping trip within five days of their visit to your store.

In this example, it’s clear that the county where the store is located and adjacent county would be considered “hyperlocal,” especially when compared to all of the destinations an outdoorsman could visit –everything from a hunting expedition in the wilds of Alaska to a rubber rafting trip on the Colorado River.

With those two critical pieces of information –where the customers go and when they go there- it would be relatively simple to build in “hyperlocal” outdoors information into the shop’s digital signage playback to help build and hold the attention of patrons. For instance, state or county conservation department data might reveal lake levels, average water temperatures and other information for area lakes likely to be visited by fisherman shopping at the store. Similarly, weather information and forecasts are widely available that could used to help shoppers determine conditions before they head for the great outdoors.

The same concept could be applied to other retail businesses, schools, hotels and nearly any other digital signage application imaginable. For any given digital signage application there is likely to be some sort of available “hyperlocal” news, information or data that will give patrons an incentive to look at the digital sign and in so doing see the other marketing information that’s also being presented.

This all boils down to building digital signage content that is relevant to the intended audience. A great place to start building relevancy is determining what’s of interest to the people entering your establishment. In many cases, an element of what’s interesting will be related to your “hyperlocal” locality. Use that to your advantage when developing digital signage messaging. Not only will you attract the attention of your intended audience, but you’ll give them a reason to take a second or third look.