Customer engagement decreases every time someone interacts with a platform that doesn’t engage or pique interest in some way. People have a natural tendency to tune out advertising or sounds and images they’ve seen or heard repeatedly. It’s why parents don’t pull their hair out when they hear a crying baby after the first month. In other words, if your content is repetitive or boring, no one is going to pay attention to it, and therefore, your message won’t get the views it needs to be valuable.
Convenience store retailers need to leverage infotainment or they might as well put up a blank screen. Infotainment means different things to different people, but here is what the experts at Shep have learned.
Make it relevant.
Content should be local whenever possible, so it is relevant to the time and place where the viewer is. Traffic, community news, weather and sports are all great topics as long as they are localized. Bad content feels flat, but local, engaging content will feel dynamic.
There is also a place for more lifestyle-oriented content like trivia, games and lifestyle news, but leveraging local content more effectively engages your customer. And, as an added bonus, it positions your brand as in touch and part of the local community. Customers are more likely to look at the bigger screen on the dispenser than the smaller screen in their pocket if the content you provide is relevant to them at the moment they view the content.
Want to make it even more engaging? Shep leverages local broadcast partners that are already known and trusted in the community. This means your content is not only relevant, but it’s also vetted. It positions your brand as local, safe and familiar.
Make it short.
Every content segment should be short. And we mean short. For weather, 15 seconds is long enough, and no segment should be more than 30 seconds. By the time someone decides that they no longer want to watch, you should have moved on to the next segment.
The bottom line is if it’s something a customer can get on their phone, they are going to get it on their phone. You want to make the content fast moving so they don’t have time to pull their phone out before the next reel plays.
Be strategic with merchandising.
Obviously, the goal of a screen at the dispenser is not solely to entertain a customer, but also to sell them something besides fuel. Shopper marketing messages are a given, but how and when you display the message matters. If it’s all merchandising all the time, customers will retreat to their phones and tune out your content.
Your content should be made up of 25 to 30 percent infotainment, with the rest focused on merchandising for items sold in your convenience store. There are effective ways to connect the types of content, too. For example, place a message for an ice cold dispensed beverage right after a weather segment on a hot summer day versus a message for a warm cappuccino after the morning news segment.
Sound like a lot of work? It can be, which is why a company like Shep Digital Solutions can help manage your digital presence and keep your content cohesive, engaging and relevant while you focus on managing your store. We can also help integrate with broadcast partners’ technology to automatically update their content on your screens multiple times a day, keeping it fresh and captivating.
