It’s a common trope that people love people and ideas - not logos. Customer trust in brands is at an all-time low. According to Nielsen,  “92% of people will believe peer reviews or even recommendations from  people they have never met, over what a brand would say.”

And yet we still see campaigns led by brand-first messaging that has  little or no relevance to the people reading it. In digital signage  campaigns, this is even more obvious. We’re in the throes of a love  affair with screens. While books and written mediums are in decline,  we’re looking at our TVs, smartphones and laptops more than ever.

The gap between the screens people want to view and the effectiveness  of them is the content. Sure you could stick a screen up on the wall  with your latest ad campaign and hope people see it, but what if you  made the information truly useful, convenient or authentic?

Screens are powerful and customer trust is powerful, so joining the  two together creates something really rather special. Here are five ways  to do exactly that.

Dashboards are one of the most underutilized ways to build customer  trust from digital screens. First, you have a ton of options: social  media dashboards that share real-time updates from your fans, project  management dashboards, statistics from your website or product sells, or  even voting dashboards on your most popular products.

People trust in data. Real-time data especially, can’t be fixed. When  you pop up a dashboard on the wall, it’s very easy to build trust.  Unlike an ad campaign, it’s very difficult to fake data or try to paint  your brand in a better light.

Check out the dashboard apps on offer in our App Store which help do exactly that.

You already share testimonials on your website, right? But have you  considered pushing them up to your digital screen? Written testimonials  are effective at building customer trust, but image and video are even  better. All you need to create a great testimonial is a simple notice or  image creator (check out Noticeboard for a lite option), an image of your best customer, and a few words from the horse's mouth, as they say.

This creates a quick, yet powerful, piece of proof that your company  delivers as it says. The beauty of digital signage is that you can  easily update testimonials every few weeks or months. Just add in a new  slide, delete the old ones, and you have a constant, fresh and most  importantly, believable, stream on what people think of you.

Social media is another shortcut to taking the words of your  customers and getting them up on screen. If your customers are taking  pictures with your products, snapping away within your restaurant or  telling their friends about your offer, that’s great marketing potential  for your business.

User-generated content (things shared on social media by customers)  is proof that your business can be trusted. It’s 100 times more powerful  than you telling customers you’re trustworthy, so why not let them do  the hard work for you?

There’s a reason why people work for your company. Often, this is  only visible from the inside. Some of the most recognizable brands in  the world (think Innocent, Buffer, Google and Facebook) are partly  successful because of how they treat their staff. Others have great  policies on charity initiatives or doing things simply for social good.  Whether it’s your staff or your favorite charity you’re treating well,  it's an important tell that should be shared with customers. It’s easy  to think that customers are only interested in what you’re selling them,  but it couldn’t be further from the truth. What customers are really  interested in is the people and proof behind the brands they’re buying  from. Consider all aspects of your brand and then use them to build  powerful digital signage campaigns.

5. Balance advertising with useful information

One of the big benefits of digital signage is that power to marry  advertising with information. TV has been doing this for centuries -  blending ads between content, but viewers have learned how to tune it  out. With digital signage, you have the option to refresh the medium.  Say you share an ad on your latest product or service, but split the  screen down the middle so that the rest is filled with a live travel  board or news feed. Your viewers are eager to engage with the screen, if  they want to know what’s going on in the world or not be late, that is.  You get more eyeballs on your ad than could likely be achieved with a  banner ad or TV display, and at the same time, your audience receives  information they actually want to see.

The true secret of effective communications is finding the small gap  between what everyone is doing and where there is a gap. Right now, very  few brands are utilizing the power of digital screens paired with  useful, relevant content. There are plenty of people doing digital  signage plus advertising and plenty doing informative content through  print, blogging or social media but without digital signage.

Harness the gap and it becomes easy to build trust with customers. Get started today with your free 14-day ScreenCloud trial.

How to use social proof, testimonials, company insights and advertising to build trust with customers through powerful digital signage screen campaigns.

We share the gap between building trust and the latest marketing medium.

5 Ways to Build Customer Trust with Digital Signage

5 Ways to Build Customer Trust with Digital Signage

5 Ways to Build Customer Trust with Digital Signage

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