We’ve been covering, tracking and following the digital signage market for well over 10-years now. And, it’s gone from good, to great, to fantastic to incredible. In those 10+ years, there’s never been a negative sales year and, in most years, the digital signage market has enjoyed double-digit growth. It’s grown from a few giant players in the market (remember Scala and Wireless Ronin?) to one with a plethora of companies offering vertical-market-specific products.

But, we’re still missing the most important, and most profitable, part of signage — creating content.

Content Creation is the “killer-app” for digital signage. Once relegated only to the big advertising agencies, content creation for digital signage is now a service that all of us should be participating in. The data supports it and the networks can manage it. Easily, too.

Take Signagelive for example (and, no, they aren’t a client of ours — I am just using them as an example as they have a beautiful, simple, network-based system of content creation). With Signagelive’s engine, you can create digital signage content using Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite, Canva, Flexitive, PowerPoint and even Google Slides — yes, Google Slides. And, it’s 100 percent compatible with any HTML5 system. So, nearly anyone and everyone can create digital signage  content. This has become the proverbial, low-hanging-fruit.

Everyone knows the most effective and engaging content on digital signage is content that is dynamic and changing — think about it, if you go back to a website over and over in the course of a week or a month and nothing changes, eventually you stop going. The same is true for digital signage. If the screen’s content is static, eventually no one notices any more as they’ve seen it so much they can easily, subconsciously, tune it out. So, the secret sauce in digital signage is, well, dynamic content.

And, you can charge for this. Over and over and over, again. Think about your dentist’s office with a sign, a doctor’s office, the local coffee shop, restaurant, bar or even the college campus in your town. They all, now (or soon will) have digital signage and, in most cases, the role of keeping up with content is relegated to someone for whom it’s their part-time job. And, in many (or possibly in most) cases, it’s not a professional graphic designer. So, sell that as a service.

Oh, by the way, some big-time players in digital signage have even started offering this as a stand-alone service — Almo ProAV and NEC Display just to name a couple. Both have a team of graphic designers who will plan, design, execute and deploy your creative content for you — and you can even white-label this service as your own. So, whether or not you need better content or want to sell content creation as a recurring-revenue service, they can help. But, you can actually do this yourself. You can use the aforementioned Signagelive system, you can take a look at Carousel Digital Signage from Tightrope Media Systems or check out Tripleplay’s 3DSign Content Management Services — all three of those companies offer off-the-shelf content creation services that will even play on an AppleTV — in addition to any and all media players.

Happy (creative) selling!