The problem with calling Otegaru Net digital signage is that many people are confused about what digital signage is. And even if you sort of know what it is, that doesn’t mean you know how you can make it work for your business. Don’t worry! You are not alone. People in the digital signage industry haven’t been able to agree on what to call digital signage since the beginning, and are even further apart when it comes to agreeing how to use it.
Let’s just forget about “digital signage” and think about Otegaru Net as a tool for building community. Isn’t that what you want to do at your place of business? If you run a restaurant, bar, cafe or some other service focused business, then you would like more new customers and more repeat customers, wouldn’t you? Research has shown that it is usually cheaper and easier to get a customer to give you repeat business or more business, than to acquire a brand new customer. So how can Otegaru net help?
First, what is that makes a customer want to be a repeat customer? When a customer receives your product or service, they are evaluating their entire experience at your location both consciously and un-consciously. McDonalds doesn’t just sell hamburgers, they are selling the experience of getting a the product you know, quickly and cheaply, every time. What is the experience you are selling? And how are you communicating that to your customers? Much of this is communicated by the presentation of your product, the service of your staff, and the atmosphere of your location. Otegaru offers another tool to help you communicate with your customers, and to reinforce the non-verbal communication you are already working so hard to achieve.
Meeting your customer’s expectations in terms of what they got from you (product, service, price, etc) may be enough to make them want to come back next time, but obviously your chances are even better if you can exceed their expectations. When people have fun, they want to come back and experience that feeling again. Not only that, but they’ll bring their friends, and then you are getting both repeat customers and new customers. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Here are some examples of how Otegaru Net can help:
1. Take a photo of a customer who is having a birthday, and put it up on Otegaru Net in an attractive “Birthday” template. This is a cheap and easy way to do something special for a customer. Customers just love seeing themselves “on TV”. Other customers enjoy seeing someone excited and having fun. It all adds to the “fun” experience of being at your location and sends the message that this is indeed a community.
2. Set Otegaru Net to automatically show the latest tweets from your official location Twitter account. Then by simply retweeting mentions of your location by your customers, you are demonstrating to everyone at your location whether they use Twitter or not that this is a community and you are listening to your customers.
3. Put up a video to find new staff. Be sure to mention how you are looking for someone who loves the community that is growing around your location. Not only are looking in the best place – right where people who love your location are – but you are also telling everyone that you have a community and that it’s important to you to find the right people to keep making it better.
We will cover more ways to use Otegaru Net in later posts, but for now just remember: “Otegaru Net is a tool to help you build community.”
