8 Digital Signage Strategies for Lobbies and Receptions

In many businesses, the lobby is the first point of contact for many potential customers, clients and visitors. From the corporate office, to hotels or hospitals, the lobby is where visitors make their first impressions and find their bearings.

As such the first impression in your lobby or reception area is often key - whether you have smiling staff, clear information or a clear uncluttered layout. Increasingly businesses are using lobby TV displays for a variety of purposes.

We'll take a look how you can use lobby displays to improve both your internal productivity and the visitor experience.

First up...

What is lobby digital signage?

Any use of screens within a reception or lobby area can be seen as lobby digital signage. There are many ways that TV or screen displays in lobbies can be used, including:

• Video walls - These large and impressive screens are a great focal point and can be used to display a wide variety of content from looping promotional videos or welcome messages to social media walls.
• Wall mounted TV screens - Affordable and easy to use, wall mounted TVs are often used to display looping content or to just play the news.
• Touchscreen kiosks - Often seen in hotels, healthcare facilities or increasingly in corporate offices, touchscreen digital signage screens are great to speed up visitor checkins.
• Wall projections - Content doesn't need to be on a screen... It can also be projected on a wall. Of course you'll need to factor in light and viewability for the best results.

Lobby displays are often designed to be simple and to either welcome visitors or to help them navigate your facility. However, depending on how your reception area is used, you can use digital signage software to share much more information and improve the experience for everyone, including your employees.

These are our top suggestions for strategies to improve your reception digital signage.

1. Share key information

Your goal is to: Offer key information about your location protocols or services.
Use cases: Health and safety protocols in hospitals, factories or industrial facilities; Highlight facilities or services available in hotels and resorts; Display conference room scheduling information, Transport information in airports, train stations and other transport hubs.

When arriving at a new place, visitors will often head straight to the reception to get their answers. But increasingly digital signage can be a used to direct people to the right location or preemptively answer those questions, freeing staff up to do more than answer the same questions repeatedly.

Even in a corporate setting, digital signage can be used to share more information with your workforce. In fact, 78% of companies don’t use ‘business television’ (i.e. digital signage) to connect with their staff. Yet digital media in public venues reaches more customers than videos on the Internet or Facebook.

There are many ways you can share information on digital signage, such as:

• Building directories - Highlighting specific departments or areas of your building on your digital displays.
• Instructions or protocols - Whether you need everyone to sign in on the touchscreen kiosks, or if all visitors need to wear hard hats, say it clearly on your signage.
• Times, schedules and more - Share check-in times for new arrivals, display countdown timers until the next talk in the main hall, or show flight or public transport information.

You can use any slideshow player apps to create this content, or there are plenty of apps to integrate into your digital signage such as our flight schedules app.

You can also use tools such as our Quick Post app, which allows you to effortlessly create professional looking welcome screens or information based signage. Or, import your content from sites such as Canva, Poster My Wall or Google Slides.

2. Display user generated content

Your goal is to: Highlight reviews and testimonials to instil trust in your brand.
Use cases: Hotels and tourism services; Corporate services such as law or finance; Food and beverage hubs such as food halls.

More than ever we rely on reviews to help us make a purchasing decision, and this is more important the more we're looking to spend. Rather than waiting for your potential customers or visitors to lookup your reviews online, why not make it easy for them and share those reviews right there in your lobby TV display?

While displaying your TripAdvisor rating is a common strategy among hoteliers or restauranteurs, it's an overlooked strategy in the corporate world. When it comes to legal or financial services, people want to know they can trust the brand and their advisor before they need to make a potentially costly decision.

Lobby digital signage allows you to display your latest reviews or testimonials, or highlight recent awards on your signage while visitors are waiting. This preemptive objection handling can be priceless when it comes to closing the deal.

User generated content, or UGC, is often key to client or customer decision making - and if you've gone to the effort of collecting those reviews, why not share them?

ScreenCloud digital signage allows you to connect your TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, Facebook, Yelp or almost all social media platforms.

3. Wayfinding and facilities management

Your goal is to: Make it easy to navigate your location; Optimize use of facilities and bookings.
Use cases: Workspace management in offices, co-working spaces, colleges and hotels; Locating departments in office blocks or retail centers; Transport schedules and gate information.

Wayfinding can mean a lot of things, including getting around and finding a specific location. But wayfinding can also include things such as room bookings, or getting to the right place at the right time.

Using digital lobby signage for wayfinding can mean displaying meeting room availability in your co-working space, or highlighting when a specific lecture will be taking place, and where, in a college campus.

Digital signage also allows you to give your audience the power to book meeting rooms, or access more information from the signage. Adding QR codes to your displays means that people can click and access information on their own devices in real time.

4. Showcase live data

Your goal is to: Display real time information from production dashboards, to local traffic or weather.
Use cases: Live events; Public transport hubs; Industrial and manufacturing centers; Hospital waiting times.

Access to real time information is an important part of many features of modern life. From logistics hubs or factories, through to catching a train or getting to an appointment on time.

Your lobby TV can be a great opportunity to display this type of data to your visitors or workforce.

As an example, in hospitals we might want to know how long the average waiting time is for appointments.

Or, during shift handover in a logistics warehouse, you might want to know how many trucks have been dispatched, or how many pending orders are waiting for fulfilment.

Your lobby digital signage can also be a place to display more fun and engaging real time information such as social media mentions of your brand, or content from your company Slack channel.

5. Promotion and advertising

Your goal is to: Build awareness of a product, service or event to boost potential revenue.
Use cases: Highlighting product offerings in customer facing environments; Displaying ads from your advertising partners; Billboards or DooH networks.

Lobbies are often waiting areas, and this means potential for attention. And while you might be using your lobby TV screens for some of the other purposes on this list, there is no reason why you can't have multi-purpose displays and monetize your screens.

Typically you'll see promotional content in lobbies such as:

• Cinemas and theaters
• Airports, train stations and other transport hubs
• Gyms and fitness centers
• Shopping malls and retail arcades
• Hotels, spas and resorts
• Food halls and hawker centers

But there is more opportunity than ever to share promotional messages and monetize your screens. If you have TV screens in your reception area and a potentially captive audience, you can sell ad space or use your space to promote your own products and services.

Vengo is an app which pays you for displaying on ads on your spare advertising space, so you don't even need to work at finding advertising clients.

And if you manage multiple locations then this opportunity offers even more potential. The more screens, the more eyes, the more potential for revenue.

6. Entertainment (not just the news)

Your goal is to: Share entertainment in waiting areas.
Use cases: Hospital or healthcare waiting rooms; Hotel lobbies; Airport or train station waiting areas; Corporate office lobbies.

One of the biggest blockers of digital signage is companies not knowing what to show on screen. Usually they'll simply put a 24 hour news channel on and forget about it. But who really wants to sit in a waiting area watching the same slightly depressing headlines on loop?

Digital signage gives you the opportunity to curate more engaging live streaming content from sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, social media platforms or even your website.

This is where digital signage zoning comes in handy too. With zoning you can create a dynamic screen that creates sections for all of the content most important to your audience.

7. Introducing the team

Your goal is to: Present a 'human' face to visitors and introduce your team members and what they do.
Use cases: Professional services such as banking/finance/legal etc; Corporate offices with multiple offices and distributed teams; Gyms and fitness centers; Educational facilities.

Your lobby screens can be even more welcoming by including headshots, stats and facts about your team members. A good example of this might be in a gym, where you present a short bio of each of the personal trainers on the team, their specialisms and a link to their session booking form.

But this can also be an excellent way to introduce team members in more 'traditional' working environments.

Some examples might be:

• Sharing bios of team members or managers from your other office locations.
• Highlighting awards, qualifications or certifications of your team members.
• Celebrating birthdays or personal achievements of your team on screens.
• A short bio of each team member with a QR-code link to their booking form.

There are many ways you can share team bios with ScreenCloud. The easiest way is with our Meet the Team app. But you can also use our Quick Post app, or even stream content from your Instagram gallery.

An awesome office dashboard created by our partner Dash. 

8. Improve the company culture

Your goal is to: Build a sense of team in the workplace, improve your employee engagement and reduce employee churn.
Use cases: Offices and co-working spaces; Industrial and manufacturing centers.

There have been many studies into the challenges of attracting high quality employees, improving employee engagement and reducing churn. Many of these studies conclude that recognizing the efforts of your individual employees can be very beneficial - or simply wishing them a happy birthday!

To showcase your company culture through digital signage you’re rich in options. YouTube playlists which show off team days out, through to social media dashboards and internal intranets; all are possible through your latest TV screen display. Even creating a fun birthday message, or the announcement of a new office dog could do wonders for making employees feel like they belong and have a work community that cares.

Choosing your lobby digital signage software

While lobby digital signage is growing in popularity, not all digital signage software is the same. Many organizations still use USB sticks with content loaded, which requires manual updating each time you want to change the content. And some digital signage software might offer cloud-based operation, but without features such as remote device management (RDM) or high-level security.

ScreenCloud's industry leading digital signage software is designed to make both content creation and screen management a breeze.

You'll find over 80 apps and integrations and hundreds of design templates in our tools alone. And with easy integration with popular tools such as Canva, Google Slides and Microsoft Office you can connect and share your own designs with just a few clicks of a button.

ScreenCloud also features enterprise grade security and remote device management, allowing you to troubleshoot and fix screens without even visiting the location. A priceless feature for your busy IT department...

Find out for yourself why ScreenCloud powers lobby digital signage for global brands, hotel chains, healthcare facilities and transportation hubs.

Try a FREE 14 day trial, or book a demo today...