Digital signage
for your industry

Ratio	Typical of	What follows from it
High — hundreds pass, a handful come in	High-street shops, takeaways, gyms	The screen belongs in the window and its only job is interruption. Six words, one price, readable at walking pace.
Even — most people who pass are coming in	Supermarkets, shopping-centre units, petrol forecourts	The window is wasted effort. Put the screen where the decision happens: the aisle end, the counter, the queue.
Low — everyone who arrives is expected	Clinics, dental practices, offices, driving schools	Nobody needs persuading to come in. The screen exists to make the wait bearable and to answer the question people are too polite to ask.

The mistake this catches is a common one: a dental practice putting a bright promotional screen in the window, where it is read by people who will never book, while the twelve patients sitting inside stare at a wall. Same money, same screen, wrong side of the door.

If your business sits in two categories on this list, work out the ratio first and open the page that matches it. Templates are not tied to a sector — anything here can be used in any account and changed later.

The three, in the order people ask for them:

• Whether you are open now. Not a timetable — a yes or no. A timetable asks the reader to know the time and do the arithmetic; standing outside in the rain, most people do neither.
• What the cheapest normal thing costs. Not a price list. One number that tells someone whether this place is for them. Its absence is read as «expensive», which is rarely what was intended.
• Whether they need an appointment. The single question that stops people entering, across every service trade, and the one that is almost never answered outside.

Together those three take about fifteen words, and they answer more visits than anything sector-specific that could go alongside them. The trade-specific ideas in the pages below are worth having — after these, not instead of them.

There is a reason they get skipped that has nothing to do with laziness: they are obvious to the owner. Someone who has run a shop for six years cannot see that the answer to «are you open» is not visible from the pavement, because they have never approached their own door as a stranger.

Ask someone who has never been to your business to stand outside and tell you those three things. Whatever they cannot answer is what belongs on the screen first, whichever sector page you read next.

What goes on a screen facing inward is nothing like what goes on one facing out:

• Today's list. Bookings, jobs, deliveries, the order of work. Currently on a whiteboard that is correct in the morning and wrong by noon.
• The thing everyone asks. Every workplace has one — where a part is, which room is free, who is on this afternoon. It is asked ten times a day and answered by whoever is nearest.
• What changed since yesterday. The single hardest thing to communicate to people who work different shifts and never overlap.

The economics are different too, and simpler: there is no conversion to argue about. If it saves each of four people ten minutes a day, it has paid for itself within the month, and that calculation does not depend on anyone's behaviour but your own team's.

One warning, because it is the usual way these fail: an inward screen must be updated by the people who use it, not by the manager. The moment it needs a request to change, it goes stale in a fortnight and quietly becomes wallpaper — exactly like the whiteboard it replaced, but more expensive.

Before thinking about the window, look at what is written on paper in your back room. If something there is rewritten more than once a week, that is the screen with the shortest payback in the building.