You can create a solid ad that captures people’s attention and makes them check out your business. You can stop there if that’s enough for you…but what if you could make ads that helped convince people to buy once they were there? Digital signage isn’t just for one-off ads that are over as soon as the image changes. Telling stories in digital signage can capture customers’ imaginations, and help them imagine buying from your business.

Stories Build Comfort

This means that during photo and video shoots for your advertising, you should get coverage for material that can work for multiple indoor ads, or a combination of outdoor ads and indoor ads. Alternately, for more tight-knit communities, you can space out stories over time.

Think about it this way: customers like connecting the imagery across multiple ad spaces. A one-off ad is difficult to remember. We’re social creatures and we like to keep track of causes, effects, and motives. We read into other people’s thoughts. An ad that customers can follow across multiple spaces helps them connect a character or narrative to your business.

Love them or hate them, the Geico caveman and gecko are characters people are always interested to see. They have endearing ads, but even in one of the entries that doesn’t work so well, we’re still following a light narrative of what these characters are doing and where they are.

Keep Stories Simple

Customers recognize and invest in repeated characters. Make sure they’re recognizable (without using any offensive stereotypes). It feels personal when customers can build a story out of your advertising.

An outdoor ad of characters looking at Christmas trees can give way to an indoor ad of the same characters decorating a particular tree at home. Customers will link the two stories together. They obviously decided on a tree, drove it home, and now they’re decorating it. It’s not a complex story – it won’t win any Oscars. In fact, simple stories like this are best because they’re easy to digest.

What it will do is invite customers to identify with the characters. They’ve seen them in more than one place, they’ve read a human story into their actions. And if they’re identifying with characters who are buying from your store, they’re going to feel more comfortable following suit. Telling stories in digital signage works.