Digital signage
for SMBs and small business

1. Somebody has to put it on a wall. Not an engineer — a bracket, four screws and a socket within reach. This is where small businesses lose the most time, because the socket is never where the screen should go. Decide the position from where customers stand, then solve the cable; doing it the other way round is how screens end up above head height, where nobody reads them.

2. Somebody has to write the words. No template writes your prices, and this is the part that does not shrink with better software. Twenty minutes once, then two minutes a week. The businesses whose screens stop working are almost never the ones with the wrong hardware — they are the ones where nobody was ever named as the person who writes the words.

3. Somebody has to decide when it changes. Daily, weekly, or twice a year: all three are valid, but the answer has to exist before you buy, because it decides whether you need scheduling at all. A shop changing its window once a month does not need automation. A café with a lunch menu does, and pretending otherwise means somebody stands on a chair at noon.

What genuinely does not land on you: no server, no installer visit, no quote to wait for, no minimum contract, and no training you have to attend before the first screen works. That is what the phrase is meant to cover, and it is a real difference from how this industry has traditionally sold to businesses your size.

The useful test before spending anything: name the person who writes the words. If the honest answer is «nobody, we will see», the screen will show the same thing in March that it showed in January, and no plan fixes that.

Keep a tally sheet by the till for three days. Almost every small business finds the same shape:

• One question dominates. Opening hours, whether you do a particular thing, or whether an appointment is needed. It usually accounts for more than half the tally.
• Each one costs about a minute. Not because the answer is long, but because it interrupts whatever was happening and someone has to come back to it.
• They cluster at the worst moment. The same hour as the queue, because that is when people are in the shop.

Thirty of those a day at a minute each is roughly two and a half hours a week of someone's time, spent saying something that could be written once. That is the payback figure for a small business, and unlike a sales uplift it does not depend on assuming anything.

The tally has a second use that is worth more than the first: it tells you exactly what to put on the screen. Not what you would like to promote — what people are already asking. Businesses that fill a screen with offers and businesses that fill it with answers get very different results, and the tally sheet is the difference between guessing which you are.

One caveat, because it is where this argument gets oversold: the questions do not disappear entirely. Some people ask because they want to speak to someone, and a screen will not change that — nor should it. What goes away is the repetition during the busy hour, which is the part that costs.

Put a sheet of paper by the till tomorrow and mark a line for every repeated question. Three days is enough. That sheet is both your business case and your first month of content.

Whoever is on shift does not correct the person paying them. They would see the poster for a promotion that ended in February and say nothing, because it is not their job and because pointing it out is awkward. The customer says even less: they do not mention that the board price no longer matches the menu, they just notice it and draw their own conclusion. Between those two silences, a mistake can live for months without once being mentioned.

And these things do not fail suddenly: they age. A price or an offer does not stop being true overnight. It is correct on day one, arguable on day twenty and false on day forty, without anything ever going off. Nor is the damage that somebody gets annoyed: it is that the place starts reading as neglected — a conclusion nobody says out loud and that you therefore cannot argue with.

What replaces a reviewer is not more discipline: it is an end date set as you write it. Deciding when something disappears takes five seconds at the moment you are creating it, and is impossible to remember three weeks later in the middle of a Saturday. It is the only way the old stuff falls away on its own in a place where nobody is ever going to have time to go and take it down.

Straight with you: none of this makes the content good. It only stops the expired part from still being up, which is half the problem — and the half that does not depend on having ideas.