Property-Wide Digital Content Can Elevate the Hotel Guest Experience

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Last Friday we talked about providing a better hotel guest experience for tech-savvy travelers, starting with attention-grabbing digital signage in the lobby. In fact, having a network of digital signage throughout the common areas can give the property a cutting-edge appearance and engage guests in many ways. Let’s think about the kinds of content a hotel might want to run on that digital signage.

Show Guests the Way
Welcome guests and guide them with digital maps and directories. As guests make their way to and from their rooms, touch screen displays in the common areas provide a familiar interface for them to navigate through your hotel.

Get Them to Their Meetings on Time
If visitors have arrived for a conference, small-format signage in the hallways can help get them to the right place at the right time. Manage your meeting room schedules in real time from a desktop PC, laptop, tablet or smart phone.

Entertain and Inform in the Restaurant or Bar
Use commercial-grade signage TVs for news and sports, and integrate your menus, promote daily specials, announce happy hours, deliver important alerts and more.

Offer the Best Fitness Classes in Town
In your fitness center, use video walls, large-format 4K UHD displays or hospitality televisions to offer a variety of interactive fitness classes 24/7. We partner with Fitness on Demand™, a leading delivery platform of hundreds of premium high-definition workout classes by the industry’s best instructors. Your guests can experience a diverse array of fitness classes at their convenience.

Entice Them into Your Salon and Spa
Use attention-grabbing stretched displays and razor-thin displays to set the ambience for a relaxing and rejuvenating escape. Include tranquil images, promote, cross-sell and upsell services and spa products, showcase the latest hair trends for inspiration, and introduce the stylists and massage therapists with their pictures and short bios.

Generate Additional Revenue with Advertising
Sell advertising space on your digital signage to inform guests about local tourist attractions, restaurants, nightclubs, car rental services and other businesses of interest.

Running digital signage in hotel common areas is easy with a platform such as webOS for Signage. WebOS for Signage works with the displays’ embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) and enables high-quality content creation and remote management, while eliminating the need for media players and onsite servers.

Next Friday we’ll take you to the guest room, where tech-savvy, device-enabled travelers can enjoy an accommodating and memorable entertainment experience that’s second to none. See you then.

Bring your Campus tour to life

When prospects tour your school in the summer, they’re facing an empty, unwelcoming campus.  Choosing which school to attend is a huge step in a student’s future, and they have to know they’ll be happy there for the next four years. Don’t let prospects walk away unconvinced.

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Whether prospective students have already received acceptances, or are evaluating schools to apply to, you need to make a great first impression to ensure their enrollment. Don’t lose students at the last step of the process because of the season. When deciding which school to attend, I wanted someplace I could envision myself. Because I visited in the summer when much of campus was closed it felt deserted and uninviting. Students that get this impression from your school are enrolling elsewhere. Eliminate this issue by using new technology to display a vibrant campus and inspire touring prospects.

Show off your campus with digital signage over the summer months:

  • Advertise what’s open during fall and winter semesters that may not be open over the summer, such as your bookstore.
  • Display what your campus looks like when fall and winter semesters are in session.
  • Show all your school has to offer outside the classroom by advertising upcoming events and activities.
  • Your cafeteria is the heart of your school – promote all menu options with images that whet appetites.

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An empty campus over the summer term means new opportunities. Digital signage allows you to show all your school has to offer. From typical student hang-outs to the possibilities of campus life, showcase an inviting school with lots of social opportunities.

Make your tour the best it can be year-round.

Tech-Savvy Guests Are Looking for More in Hotels

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As we saw at HITEC this week, improving the guest experience is key to creating a standout hotel. Hospitality professionals browsed the show floor looking for solutions: What do hotel guests want and how can we better provide it?

What do we know about today’s hotel guests? From our perspective we know that many are tech-savvy. They’re accustomed to incorporating digital technology into all aspects of their lives – from mobile phones, tablets and laptops, to smart TVs and voice-activated home assistants. They depend on display screens for information and appreciate the immediate gratification of a digital experience. And they bring this expectation with them when they travel.

To meet and exceed the expectations of these guests, hotels are making the most of multi-featured, commercial-grade hospitality TVs in the guest rooms, and innovative digital signage solutions in the common areas. The end goal is to make it easier for hotels to serve their guests and communicate the messaging that will make their stay more enjoyable.

Let’s start with the lobby. A hotel lobby makes a strong first impression. It’s the first thing guests see, and it’s where innovative digital signage displays can create a wow factor and help define the hotel’s brand by communicating its strengths, values and services. The latest display form factors are attention-grabbing, fit just about anywhere, and content can be easily managed from a central location. Video walls, touch screens, razor-thin screens, curved screens, stretched screens and transparent screens can all be incorporated into a property-wide digital signage network.

Digital signage can maximize opportunities for guest-driven interactivity that can result in requests for more information, reservations at the restaurant and booking of spa services. Common-area displays give the property a cutting-edge appearance and can engage and inform guests in many ways.

Next week we’ll dive into the types of content a hotel might want to run on digital signage throughout the property. Stay tuned.

Now Playing: InfoComm 2018 LG Booth – Full Tour

InfoComm 2018 was fantastic. Plenty of excitement at the LG booth, and some awards too, including a 2018 Commercial Integrator BEST Award and a 2018 Digital Signage Magazine Best of Show Award for our Transparent Color LED Film. Year after year, LG continues to bring to market new innovations that offer end users and systems integrators alike opportunities to drive business and increase their bottom lines.

If you weren’t at InfoComm, or if you were and want to share some of the excitement with your colleagues, the video below will come in handy. It’s a full LG booth tour hosted by Gary Kayye, founder of rAVe [Publications], and Garry Wicka, LG’s head of marketing.
 

In the 23-minute video you’ll see and hear about:

55-inch Transparent LG OLED Concept
Open Frame LG OLED Signage, with exciting news for integrators
1.5 mm Indoor Direct View LED Signage
55-inch LG OLED Wallpaper
55-inch HD Dual-Sided In-Glass LG OLED Wallpaper
86-inch Ultra Stretch Displays
65-inch 4K LG OLED Wallpaper
65-inch 4K LG OLED Video Wall Panels
Interactive Digital Boards
88-inch Ultra Stretch Display
Full Suite of Thin Client Computing Solutions
Indoor and Outdoor Ultra Bright Displays
webOS SoC Partners
Smart LG OLED Hospitality Televisions
Hospitality Room Air Purifiers
LG Solar Panels
55-inch, 0.6 mm Even Bezel Video Wall

 

You’re in for a treat. Sit back and enjoy.

Daypart Scheduling: Not Just for TV, Radio and QSRs

Blog060818_880x440TV and radio stations understand the importance of knowing who their audience is at different times throughout the day. And they schedule their programming and advertising accordingly, to engage the right people with the right content at the right time.

QSRs schedule their offerings by time of day with menus that, if on digital signage, change instantly. If there’s not much of a menu change after lunch, they can add small graphic animations later in the day to “suggest” particular items, offer special pricing and cross-sell.

With digital signage, daypart scheduling is a fine strategy for making sure your content is targeting specific demographics that are most likely to be patronizing your business at specific times, or for highlighting offerings relevant for the time of day. All while providing a better, more personalized customer experience.

Let’s say you have a large home improvement store. You know that your early morning customers are mostly contractors, so you can target your content to those trades. In the afternoon it’s home owners and retirees, and on weekends plenty of do-it-yourselfers – great times to promote your home repair classes and seasonal sales.

Maybe you’re a hotelier. Your lobby is a perfect spot for dayparting and you can do it all on a single display. In the morning promote your coffee shop, airport transportation and local attractions. In the afternoon switch to lunch info, spa services and happy hour. In the late afternoon and early evening feature the restaurant (with mouthwatering hi-res images). After dinner the cocktail lounge and local entertainment.

We see dayparting in numerous businesses. It can be very effective in shopping malls, retail stores, financial institutions and just about anywhere digital signage is used.

With astute observations, creative thinking and good content management you can use dayparting to knock your digital signage ROI out of the park. Here’s a great opportunity to involve your employees as you ponder these questions:

  • Who is your typical customer in the morning? Afternoon? Evening?
  • How many demographic groups can you identify?
  • Does anything change on the weekends?
  • What products/services are most appealing to those demographics at those times?
  • For each demographic, what do you want them to do?
  • Based on the particular demographic, what is an appropriate message?

Use your answers for inspiration then create your content and run it on schedule. There are many digital signage content management software solutions that enable flexible daypart scheduling, or you might prefer to partner with a content provider. Whichever you choose, choose carefully based on your needs, goals and working preferences.

And don’t forget – digital signage content can be tweaked, rearranged or changed completely as often as you wish. Nothing is set in stone (or print).

Recommending Digital Signage for Education? You Have Four Audiences to Consider.

As a reseller or systems integrator, when you recommend a comprehensive digital signage solution for an educational facility you need to think about the needs of everyone involved:

Students

Today’s students are digital natives. They want an exciting class time and an engaging learning environment that increases productivity and concentration. They want personalized learning that fits their level of content absorption and encourages them to research and study. They want easy material sharing for seamless in-class activities and discussions, and a clear view of resources from teachers and other students.

Teachers

Teachers want to provide a high-quality education, with clear supporting materials. They want efficient delivery of materials according to each student’s level, and convenient sharing of resources between teacher and students, or among students, to facilitate collaboration. They want to organize course material not only for teaching but also for reference by other teachers and students. They want to easily update the material and set it up quickly for the next class.

School Administrators

School administrators want a technology-oriented facility that supports teachers and students with a wide range of information. They want an organized environment for administrative staff to support the students’ families with efficient paperwork and requests. And they want a smart school image that reflects its fast adoption of technology and attracts student enrollment.

IT Directors

IT directors want durable and reliable technology, with simplified maintenance of hardware and software. They want easy installation and compatibility with their existing network provider’s system and content management solution. They also want responsive service with prompt personal attention to deal with problems, compatibility issues and support for special features.

How can digital signage meet these needs?

An Elevated Appearance – Large-format displays and video walls can create a high-tech, visually stimulating appearance that will appeal to students, alumni and visitors alike.

Dynamic Educational Content – Using digital signage, instructors can easily prepare and provide a broad range of educational content to support student involvement and greater lesson comprehension.

Real-time Content – Availability of real-time content and video sharing via digital signage makes the teacher’s job easier and more efficient even in tele-education applications involving multiple locations. Every student receives the same content at the same time.

Seamless Classroom Communication – Teachers and students can share content from their devices (BYOD) to the digital signage display over a Wi-Fi network. This greatly improves collaboration in classrooms and lecture halls.

Interactive and Self-paced Learning – Students’ individual use of interactive whiteboards in class can provide personalized learning where each student can progress at their own pace. Such an environment can result in higher levels of student achievement.

Easy Campus-wide Communication – Digital signage with embedded SoC can enable centralized content management and faster, Greener updates of educational materials and displays. This results in a much more effective administrative process and cost/time efficiencies.

Emergency Alerts – A campus-wide digital signage network allows an administrator to quickly push important information out to a single display, a group of displays or every display on the network.

High Reliability and Easy Integration – Commercial-grade digital signage is engineered for long hours of continuous operation and includes a commercial warranty and comprehensive support. A campus-wide solution can be flexible and work with the system the facility wants to use.

Digital signage can excel at getting the right information to the right people at the right time. As educational facilities transform into tech-centric environments, instruction and communication will have no limitations.