“I know all about this” I hear you cry. “Everything has a touch screen now, I don’t need to read this.” But You’re wrong. If you have a shop window you do need to read this. I want to tell you how and why you may want to invest in the biggest interactive touch screen device you’ve ever seen. Just for clarification I don’t mean a seventy inch smart TV.
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Giant Interactive Touch Screens
As you read that you’re probably still thinking of huge TV screens that work like a vast tablet, but that is not what I’m talking about. In my previous blog I wrote about using video displays in shop windows to attract more customers. Mostly what I wrote about was using traditional televisions as displays. What else could I mean? Well for several years the technology has existed to add a film to the inside of windows and then rear project images onto the window. From the outside of the shop the whole projected are of the window has become a video display. Now imagine you could add a second film that transforms the window into a touchscreen.
How Is This Possible?
This isn’t new technology. I first saw this about six years ago. It’s still quite rare to see shops making use of the technology, but its use is growing. Imagine your whole shop front as a giant interactive screen, and there’s more. You can attach devices to the inside of the window which cause the window to vibrate and turn the whole sheet of glass into a speaker. Now you can have an interactive touchscreen display, with sound, that’s the size of your whole shop window.
It sounds gimmicky and it should. But eye catching gimmicks can be very useful for a small business, especially if they are located where this technology has not yet become common. As I discussed last time, the whole point of your shop window display is to attract the attention of potential customers. What a step up in the attention grabbing stakes if your whole window played cool videos. Now imagine that your customers can interact with what they are watching.
What Is The Benefit?
The element of interaction is a huge boost to the gimmick factor that will attract passing customers. Your screen could display a dedicated area of your website which has a range of content which customers are invited to browse through and select for themselves. They could choose which video plays.
What aspect of the business interests the customer? Here’s a video you can choose to display and watch without even having to come into the shop. The customer wants to examine a specific product. No problem. Here are the specifications and an introductory video. Here are QR codes you can scan into your phone to continue this viewing in private, or to place an order. Your business is based upon appointments? Easy, your interactive screen allows passing customers to stop and book a slot. More than that it would allow them to do this at any time that they passed, even when your shop is closed.
How Do We Do This?
There are several companies that deal with the interactive screen technology that will transform all, or a part, of your window space into a touch screen. That’s not what I want to write about now. I want to discuss how the content is managed and displayed.
I mentioned above that the content can be run as a portion of your company webpage, and that is possible. Better still to run it as a page that is locally hosted and that is the only content available on the screen. Alternatively if your business has invested in a dedicated app you could link your touchscreen to a dedicated tablet. The technical solutions that allow us to contemplate doing this with a shop window have all become ubiquitous and commonly understood over the last few years. How we really make this work is with good content.
Novelty and the gimmick will draw the initial users and give you some notoriety but that won’t give you ongoing success. Your display needs to be useful. That means a selection of short compelling videos. It also means useful text. Thirdly, it means booking and buying options. Again these elements are all things that we take for granted when dealing with retail websites and apps. So they can all be utilised for our giant interactive displays.
If you want to investigate the possibilities further you can click some useful links below.
Prodisplay Lifesize Touch Utouch UK
I hope this has maybe encouraged you to think about the possibilities. There are many avenues to using video to generate income and profit for your business.
