Many thanks to Cameron Hayter, from the digital signage agency Freehand, for providing this guest blog…

At Freehand we spend most of our time designing bespoke and innovative Digital Signage to help our clients in the retail sector engage customers – by positioning screens in eye-catching places, with unique content which not only advertises their product or campaign, but captivates the audience and retains attention. A website also helps!

However, we are located away from the high-street in the middle of Dunsfold Park with very little public footfall. So, how do we captivate our clients?

Social Media!

Freehand are often involved in interesting projects; such as a Star Wars themed window-display for Selfridges, and a unique display in Fortnum & Masons promoting Alice Through The Looking Glass. We take advantage of this by sharing our work on our company Twitter account. This allows us to have a free online portfolio of our work which is easily accessible by our clients, prospective customers, fans and everyone in-between.

We wholeheartedly believe proper utilisation of Social Media is the absolute minimum requirement for any company looking to grow in 2018, with Facebook having over 2 billion users, and Twitter averaging over 330 million active monthly users – with each having their own highly effective advertising tools, making your audience engagement near-limitless.

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But how do you engage an audience?

Well, the first step to engaging your audience is to understand your audience – to identify who it is you want to reach out to. Take Freehand, for example. We work closely with Retail Marketers, Brand Visual Merchandisers and Shopfitters in order to sell, design and install our bespoke Digital Signage into their retail environments.

We actively target these people using the correct terms, keywords, hashtags and with – most importantly – captivating content. Just like our Digital Signage projects, we try to tailor our content to be as interesting and eye-catching as possible – using images of our completed work, infographics, DVD designs from our authoring team as well as seasonal gifs for Halloween and Christmas.

It is important to spend time creating content for your audience, as simple text posts will be lost in the sea of other content. You need to be eye-catching, relevant, and like people say – you have to stand out from the crowd.