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Advertising Graphic Design Marketing

5 Ways To Use Digital Signage in Church Marketing

The term ‘digital signage’ is just a smart way of talking about the screens that are used to show content, from adverts in stores, through to weather and news in office lobbies. In churches, many are looking to invest in digital signage solutions that can be used to inform, entertain and share information.

You may already have a few screens around your church, but perhaps you’ve not been sure what to put on them. Or maybe you’re thinking of investing in new screens, in order to give your church a digital uplift.

Either way, it’s important to focus firstly on what they can do for your marketing.

Great marketing transmits the values of your brand and helps visitors to absorb them, often without them even realizing.

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Here are five ways you can use digital signage within your church to aid and help share your marketing:

1. Showcase new campaigns

The reason most marketing campaigns lose velocity is because they don’t reach enough of an audience. When you create a new marketing campaign, it can be difficult to subtly drop it into a service, around the important notices, information and events that you need to discuss. This is where screens come in. Digital signage screens fill the gaps usually left redundant.

While visitors are waiting for a service they can read all about your new initiatives. As they leave, they can scan for the next event or session they want to attend.

2. Create community

Your church visitors are your biggest brand advocates. Chances are, they’re spreading the word through online communities even when you don’t know about it. Digital signage pulls together the voices of your community into one place. Through screens that show social media feeds such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or create rich social media dashboards. Social media helps your church extend its reach right outside of the doors and into the minds and homes of a much wider audience than physical activity alone.

Screens are a great way to show off your social channels, encourage more of your audience to use them and to create content in an invigorating display.

3. Tell stories

Church-Digital-Signage-Faith-Community-ChurchStories are often the foundation of marketing. They transmit a message in a more colorful way that can be appreciated by all audiences – old or young, male or female. Use digital signage to tell your stories.

A simple iPhone can now be used as a video recorder, helping you to film testimonials, clips and activities within your church to share on screen. Take images and upload them in a series to your social channels, documenting a project over a series of weeks.

Digital screens take snippets of your message and bookend them into one comprehensive story.

4. Set up advertising

Allow your patrons to advertize on your digital screens to share skills and news with other visitors. Use the screens for your own advertising, allowing you to promote new training sessions, services and your most creative campaigns. You can also add your logo to each slide or image advertising a service or incentive, allowing you to become more memorable in the minds of your visitors.

Advertising on screens is natural, having been used in television and now the internet across desktop and mobile too. This makes it a key channel from which you can work out your message and share it with your audience – who will be ready and waiting to pay attention.

5. Go digital

For churches who struggle to attract younger visitors, digitizing your offering helps to transmit information in a new format. Not everyone who visits your church wants to read lyrics from a print-out or scriptures from a book. For whatever reason (or even just the generational one) some will feel more comfortable accessing information on screen than they will in print.

The screens can be the first welcomer to a younger audience, allowing them to get a feel for your marketing and who you are without necessarily having to have human contact. Ideally, it’s people who make up your church, but letting the screens say hello first, in order to welcome and make younger audiences feel at ease, can help lead the way to new relationships.

(Post photos courtesy of Faith Community Bible Church & ScreenCloud – Thank you!)

 

Remember, these ideas are just a jumping point. Once you start you can incorporate feedback from your visitors to find out what works and what they want to see. Each church is different, but by working out a digital signage marketing strategy and going for it, you’ll be able to learn and reiterate quickly.

 

Mark-McDermottAbout the Author:

Mark McDermott is Co-Founder of Digital Product Studio Codegent whose passion is to build world-class digital products. Mark is also CEO of ScreenCloud and spends much of his time empowering individuals to get their underused screens full of beautiful digital content.

Contact Mark on hello@screen.cloud or on Twitter @mr_mcd

 

 

 

Categories
Advertising Graphic Design

Maximizing Digital Signage at Church

It’s not out of the ordinary to have projector screens & LCD or Plasma TVs in your auditorium or through your church building, but many churches miss the opportunity to capitalize on the reach that these screens have.  For instance, we have screens in our auditorium for lyrics and scriptures during service. Before service, we use them as a 20 minute countdown to service starting.  During that 20 minute countdown, we have various screens on a 7-second rotation.  They include silencing your phone before service, moving backgrounds with our logo, follow along with us and download the YouVersion Bible App, and our monthly new-membership dinner.

HorseshoeWe also have 4 LCDs in the foyer.  2 that duplicate the countdown happening in the auditorium, 1 that’s designated for kids check in, and 1 that’s designated for our Horseshoe information center (we call it the horseshoe because… well, it’s shaped like a horseshoe.  Also, during service, when we say “Sign Up At The Horseshoe in the foyer,” just about every new visitor can figure out where that is any why it’s called that.)

For the Horseshoe TV specifically, we like to change up that image every week, but not have it rotate – just static.  It’s a single image that either tells what’s happening this week at Life Church, or it’s information about what you can do at the horseshoe (sign up for an event on the iPads, order a CD or DVD of this week’s service, etc.)

When we have a specific registration focus, the Horseshoe TV will say “Register for Life Groups (our small groups) here!”

If we have a training session during the week or on a Saturday, I’ll put the name of the session and the room where it’s being held.  I also include arrows to point the way.  We do have signage in the building, but I’m a fan of strategic redundancy.

I like to use unsplash.com images for the background of the horseshoe TV.  They’re colorful and high resolution, so I can use just a portion of the image if that’s what suits best.  In this case for design, I’m looking to maximize contrast (so it can be read across the foyer even with all the lights on) and maximize font size.  I also like to include our ‘L’ icon in some way if it doesn’t detract from the design.

Here are a few of the horseshoe designs we’ve used, and at the bottom you’ll find the layered photoshop files that you can use.  Our horseshoe TV is 1080p widescreen (1920×1080 px) and your photoshop file should be RGB color because it’s going to be shown on a screen (rather than CMYK if it’s going to be printed.)  We run ours from a USB stick that slides in the back – the only cable running to that TV is for power.

In the future, we may get an Apple TV so we can remotely change the image, or series of images, but until now, that hasn’t been necessary.

PSD Files:

Horseshoe TV Buy DVDs

This Week at Life Church Horseshoe TV

Hospitality HorseShoe Screen

This week at Life Church