5 Strategies for Using Digital Advertising to Elevate Your Hotel Conference
Hosting a successful conference depends on incorporating memorable experiences for attendees and guests. Hotel digital displays and LED walls offer a unique opportunity to feature event advertisers and promote digital out-of-home (DOOH) brands in a way that not only drives revenue for events but captivates attendees and guests with bold messaging and storytelling.
Let's explore five strategies for leveraging digital display advertisements to impress attendees and guests and elevate your hotel conference experience.
Strategy 1: Center on the Attendee Experience
Effective event and DOOH advertising means putting the attendee experience first. LED walls play a role in capturing guest attention, but should never distract from the overall conference experience.
To optimize digital displays and LED walls, take time before your conference to survey the space. Determine sightlines, dwell times, choke points, flow of traffic, and high-traffic areas. Understanding the space will inform the proper placement, design, and flow, and help better define the focus of each LED wall and digital sign.
When it comes to screen content, there's a delicate balance. Too much visual noise, and you cloud your message. Too simple, and it fails to make an impact or capture attention. The goal is to engage the viewer without making them feel disrupted, which brings us to our second strategy.
Strategy 2: Reinforce the Vibe
Context is key in designing conference experiences. Use digital signage and LED wall content to enhance the environments in which they are placed.
Does your corridor feature a lot of light, distinct architecture, or lush greenery? For greater impact, consider approaching each space with a set designer’s eye. Equip advertisers with spatial information and request that the content they provide reflect and enhance the unique spaces in which their event or DOOH advertising is featured.
Does the space contain a quiet sitting area? Slow down transitions and use calming colors to reinforce the purpose and feeling of the room. This kind of careful consideration can help elevate the overall experience and give attendees and guests a more positive impression of brands.
Strategy 3: Tell a Story
Often, one of the most effective strategies for digital signage advertising is storytelling. Humans are wired to engage in stories. In fact, brands that engage in storytelling in their marketing are reported to see a 30% increase in conversion rates. Once you've determined foot traffic patterns in your survey, leverage that knowledge to progressively engage attendees.
Drive down a highway for a period of time, and you'll often see a series of billboards imploring you to visit a gas station, a fast food restaurant, or a tourist destination. Some ads are individual, some are sequential. The same approach can apply to a conference corridor.
Rather than displaying all your messages individually, think of billboards. Consider using progressive storytelling to spread messages across several digital signs on a designated path. Approaching digital signage in this way can make it more memorable and impactful.
Strategy 4: Orchestrate Your Content
When you know where your signs are placed and what content is designed for each screen, it's a lot easier to program when and where specific messages will be displayed.
But how can you guarantee that your digital signs will display the correct advertising content at the correct locations? Access to a cloud-based content management system (CMS) allows for local and remote management of all screens across the event space and enables you to better orchestrate messaging sequences and control theming across spaces.
For more on this topic, we delved into the technical side of CMS in our article, ‘The Hassle-Free Way to Improve your Digital Signage Strategy and Increase Profits.’
Strategy 5: Conduct a Pre-Event Stress Test
While planning your content is essential, what happens if things don’t go exactly to plan?
This is why it is important to conduct rehearsals and stress test equipment and content before going live. This way, should you run into issues during testing, you can make adjustments and fix any issues prior to, and not during, the event.
Consider having a contingency plan in case things don't go as expected. For instance, one common issue with syncing digital content across screens stems from unreliable Internet & WiFi connectivity. Work with the hotel’s IT team or their dedicated internet and WiFi provider to confirm there is dedicated bandwidth for permanent and temporary digital displays. This will make sure that the Internet & WiFi used by event attendees won’t interfere with or negatively impact your digital advertising performance.
Work with Experts.
Implementing these five strategies will help you leverage digital signage and LED walls to create engaging and profitable guest and attendee experiences.
Of course, selling and orchestrating digital signage advertising and sponsorships can be time-consuming and complex. Consider partnering with Xpodigital and taking advantage of our fully managed services and reduced capital expense revenue sharing model to alleviate the strain on your teams while creating memorable conference experiences for attendees.
To learn more about Xpodigital's fully managed digital signage advertising services, meet with one of our experts for a complimentary consultation.
