Every business owner asks the same question about digital signage, and it is the right one: will this thing make me more money than it costs? Nobody needs another screen for the sake of it. So rather than throw industry statistics at you, here is how to work the numbers out for your own shop.
Start with what it costs
A commercial screen package for a small business – screen, mount, media player, content software and installation – generally lands somewhere between $80 and $200 a month once it is spread over a few years, depending on screen size and how many you run. Buying outright is an option too, but the monthly figure is the one that matters for this exercise because it is what you compare against.
Watch out for the two costs people forget: someone has to make the content, and someone has to change it. If neither is included, add them in. If the screen ends up showing the same three slides for eight months, it is not signage, it is expensive wallpaper.
Then work out what it replaces
This is the part most businesses skip, and it is usually where a good chunk of the payback sits.
- Printed menus and price lists. A café reprinting menus four times a year at a few hundred dollars a run is spending real money – and delaying price rises because reprinting is a hassle.
- Posters and window decals. Seasonal promotions, sale signage, new product announcements. Design, print, delivery, and someone's time putting them up.
- Corflute and A-frames. They fade, they blow over, and they get replaced.
- Delay costs. The special you did not promote because getting a sign made would take a week.
Add up a year of that spend and divide by twelve. For a lot of food and retail businesses it covers half the screen cost before you have sold a single extra thing.
Now the revenue side
Signage earns money in three fairly ordinary ways.
It sells the higher-margin item. A menu board can put the $6 coffee-and-slice combo in front of someone who was going to buy a $4 coffee. If 15 customers a day take it, that is $30 a day, or roughly $900 a month, from one slide.
It brings people in off the street. A bright screen in the window is doing its work at the exact moment someone decides whether to walk in. High brightness displays exist because a normal TV disappears in daylight – if you can't read it from the footpath, it isn't pulling anyone in.
It shifts stock you need to move. Bread at four o'clock, the last trays in the cabinet, the slow-moving line. Change the slide in two minutes, sell the stock today.
A worked example
Say a bakery runs two screens at $160 a month all up. Print savings are around $70 a month. To break even, the screens need to generate $90 a month in extra gross profit – about $3 a day. On a $6 item with 60% margin, that is one extra sale a day.
That is a deliberately conservative bar, and it is the honest way to look at it. If a supplier cannot explain the payback in numbers this simple, be careful.
What makes the difference between paying off and not
- Placement. At eye level, where people already look while they wait or decide.
- Brightness. Anything facing daylight needs a high brightness commercial panel, not a domestic TV.
- Fresh content. Regulars stop seeing a slide they have seen fifty times. Change something weekly.
- Fewer words. One idea per slide, big text, priced clearly.
- Scheduling. Breakfast in the morning, lunch at eleven, dinner from four – automatically.
Working it out for your business
Bold Media Group supplies and installs digital signage for cafés, bakeries, butchers, clubs, clinics and retailers right across Australia, including the content software and the help to keep it current. We are happy to do the sums with you before you commit to anything.
If you would like an honest read on whether signage stacks up for your site, get in touch and we will go through it with you.