A complete guide to digital signage content creation [2025]

What is digital signage content creation?

Digital signage content creation is the process of designing and producing visual content, such as images, videos, or animations, that is shown on digital displays. These can range from TV monitors and LED walls to digital billboards, tablets, and even kiosks. The content itself is multi-format and multi-medium, often combining text, visuals, motion, and live data to inform, promote, or engage viewers in public spaces, workplaces, retail stores, campuses, and more.

One of the best examples of engaging digital signage content in action is Times Square in New York City, where massive LED screens light up the streets with nonstop ads, branded videos, and real-time visuals that capture the attention of millions every day. But it can also be as simple as a retail store displaying daily offers on a panel by the checkout or an office sharing team updates on a lobby display.

3 ways to create digital signage content

We have already mentioned the options available to you when it comes to digital signage content design. You could:

• Go DIY
  
• Use templates
  
• Outsource the work to a freelancer/agency
  

So, which one should you go with? It depends on your skills, the budget, and time. Nevertheless, let’s go deeper into the choices to help you decide which route to take!

Make it yourself from scratch

Creating professional digital signage content from scratch means designing visuals manually using content creation tools. This option gives you full creative control, but also takes the most time.

Tools-wise, you can go with graphic-based tools like Canva, Adobe Express, or Venngage for infographics. Or, if you want to work with video, After Effects, Biteable, Veed, or Placeit are great options - even if you're not a video editor.

Pros

• Free or low-cost tools
  
• Full control over your design
  
• Fast to execute once you get the hang of it
  

Cons

• Difficult to scale
  
• Time-consuming if you need a lot of content
  
• Design quality depends on your skill
  

Use a ready-made template

Ready-made templates allow you to effortlessly create digital signage content by editing pre-designed layouts. 

Canva, PosterMyWall, and Placeit are great tools for this, as they offer screen-friendly templates you can customize with just a few clicks. Yes, even without design skills.

Pros

• Fast and beginner-friendly
  
• Looks professional with minimal effort
  
• Great for maintaining brand consistency
  

Cons

• Can feel cookie-cutter if not customized
  
• Less flexibility for unique formats
  
• Requires basic editing knowledge
  

Hire a freelancer or an agency

Outsourcing digital signage content to a freelancer or agency gives you access to professional design without doing the work yourself. It’s the best choice if you want high-quality visuals but don’t have the time, skills, or resources in-house to create them.

Of course, the pros can do the proper job only if you provide them with the proper brief. The brief should contain the description of the work, the specifications of the content, its purpose, and references (if you have them).

If you don’t have an agency or a freelancer of choice, you can fall back on freelance platforms. Although they sometimes get a bad rap, platforms like Upwork or Fiverr can be a lifesaver in this job market.

A word of caution, though: pay attention to the freelancer you are hiring. Vet them properly, ask for a portfolio, and set clear deadlines. If you don’t do the above, you might end up with a result that you aren’t satisfied with.

Pros

• High-quality, custom content
  
• Saves you time and stress
  
• Great for one-off campaigns or animations
  

Cons

• More expensive
  
• Slower turnaround
  
• Requires feedback and revisions
  

How to create a digital signage content strategy?

You can't create compelling digital signage content without knowing why you're showing it, who it is for, and where it's going.

That said, here's a step-by-step framework to help you create digital signage worthy of displaying.

1. Identify your goal and audience

Before you open up any design tool (or delegate the job to a freelancer), ask yourself: 

• What’s the purpose of this content? - Are you trying to increase sales, share internal updates, promote an event, or build brand awareness? Your objective should shape everything from format to tone.
  
• Who is this content for? - Audience defines the approach. A shopper passing by a screen needs quick, eye-catching content. Meanwhile, an employee sitting in a break room might be more open to longer-form updates or internal dashboards.
  
• Where will you display digital signage? - Screen placement should influence creative direction. For example, content for digital screens in a high-foot-traffic hallway can’t follow the same rules as one shown in a quiet office lounge.
  

Also, from our experience, it’s best to define KPIs early on (foot traffic, clicks, time-on-screen, etc.). This will help you track what’s working later on.

2. Choose your content type 

With your objectives all set, it’s time to decide on the type of digital signage content that will best support them.

You could go with:

• Text-based messages for latest news, announcements, and notices
  
• Static images for posters and graphics
  
• Videos for ads, explainers, promos, and similar.
  
• Infographics for data visualization and dashboards
  
• Dynamic content for live data, RSS feeds, weather forecast, etc.
  

Yours is to choose the format. But keep in mind that, if your digital signage content will be displayed in high-foot areas, you may be better off with short videos and motion graphics. Viewers tend to retain only 10% of a message from static content. Meanwhile, with videos, numbers go as high as 95%!

3. Design your content

The next step is to bring your content to life! As you go about designing, remember these best practices: 

• Use high contrast between text and background
  
• Stick to large, readable fonts
  
• Focus on one main message per slide/screen
  
• Follow visual hierarchy (headline > sub > body)
  
• Keep animations smooth and purposeful
  
• Design for the actual screen resolution and orientation (landscape vs portrait) to avoid stretched or cut-off layouts.
  

4. Distribute your content

And that brings us to distribution! Most businesses use a CMS (content management system) to schedule and push content to screens (or Plainly… but we’ll get to that in a second!)

What you can do at this stage is schedule by time of day or day of week, target content by location or screen group, as well set expiration dates for time-sensitive promos.

Some CMS platforms even allow real-time updates through live data sources, APIs, or integrations.

5. Track and optimize

So, you’ve designed your digital signage content. You’ve pushed it to the display(s). Does that mean your job is done? Nope.

In fact, what comes is possibly the most complicated part of the process. Tracking how your content performs and adjusting it accordingly.

If you’ve already decided on your KPIs as we suggested earlier, this will be a breeze. If not, that’s ok. You can do it now. 

Depending on the type of content and your objectives, you may want to use analytics to track:

• Engagement rates - to measure how often people pay attention to or interact with your content.
  
• Dwell time - to track how long viewers spend looking at the screen or staying in the area.
  
• Interactions (for touch displays) - to see how users engage with interactive digital signage elements like buttons, menus, or forms.
  
• Playback data and uptime - to monitor whether your content is running smoothly and how often it’s being shown.
  
• Conversions or sales lift (for retail) - to evaluate whether the content actually drives purchases or other desired actions.
  

These will help you identify underperforming content, so you can swap it out quickly. And if you notice something performing exceptionally well, even better! You’ll know which approach to take the next time you go about creating digital signage content.

Digital signage content creation software

You’ve got the digital signage content strategy. Now it’s time to choose your tools.  

Some platforms help you manage your digital signs, others help you design content - and a few can even automate the entire process.

Below, you'll find what we personally believe are the best tools out there. And to make things simpler, we've grouped them into 6 categories based on what we found they are best at.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content Management Systems - or CMS for short - are tools that help you organize, schedule, and publish your digital signage content.

In this category, your best bet is going with:

Signagelive

A cloud-based CMS that supports everything from basic scheduling to dynamic, data-driven content. This software allows you to create playlists, target screens by location, and integrate with external data sources or triggers. It’s user-friendly and scalable, making it an equally good choice for small and large teams.

ScreenCloud

ScreenCloud is a user-friendly digital signage software that comes with 100s of app integrations. This means that, using it, you can pull in real-time content from platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Google reviews, and more. Its dashboard makes scheduling intuitive, and it works great for everything from internal dashboards to retail displays.

Yodeck

Yodeck offers a budget-friendly CMS with drag-and-drop scheduling, remote screen control, and Raspberry Pi support. With a Basic plan starting at just $8 per screen a month (and even a free option), it’s especially popular among schools, small businesses, and nonprofits looking for a reliable tool at a reasonable cost.

Template-based solutions

Template-based tools let you design visually appealing content fast - no design experience needed. Just pick a layout, swap in your content, and export. These tools are perfect if you need everything to look polished, but still want the output to be quick.

Here are some we recommend:

Canva

One of the most popular design tools on the planet - and for good reason. Canva offers a variety of templates customizable for digital signage, from menus and announcements to event graphics and video content. The free plan is generous, and the Pro version - at just $15 a month - unlocks brand kits, animations, magic resize, and much more!

PosterMyWall

PosterMyWall is built for fast, signage-ready visuals. You’ll find a range of templates specifically for digital signage, and it even supports auto-resizing and easy collaboration. It’s a solid choice for restaurants, schools, retail shops, and anyone who needs to create high-volume content with minimal effort.

Placeit

Placeit is a great option for creating product-focused visuals and mockups. You can quickly build modern, animated templates for promotions, digital posters, or branded videos for your digital signs. It’s especially handy for e-commerce brands and marketers who are working solo but still want sleek content.

Content repurposing software

Instead of creating everything from scratch, these tools let you reuse existing content by pulling in assets from other platforms or repackaging them into signage-friendly formats.

A couple of options we personally tried and tested include:

ScreenCloud Apps

If you already have a ScreenCloud account and are using it as your CMS, its App Store (with 100s of integrations, as mentioned) is a huge win. You can use it to automatically pull content from Google Slides, Microsoft Teams, Instagram, Trello, Yelp, and more, without having to worry about exports, formatting, and uploading. It’s an easy way to keep content for your digital signage updated with real-time info pulled straight from the platforms you already use.

Walls.io

Walls.io turns user-generated content into engaging, real-time displays. You can pull in posts from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and show them on your screens through a customizable social wall. Great for events, brand activations, or showing off customer love in retail spaces.

Everwall

Everwall aggregates content from platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Slack, and Instagram. It’s often used at conferences and live events to display hashtag feeds, attendee shoutouts, or internal comms. Setup is fast, and the output is clean and ready for displays of any size.

Design content creation tools

These tools give you full creative control. Unlike template platforms, they let you create your own digital signage from scratch, which is perfect if you’re a designer, you work with graphic designers, or you just want more flexibility over every detail.

Our go-to tools in this category are:

Adobe After Effects

The industry standard for motion design, After Effects, is what you use when you want full control over your animations. From kinetic typography to animated promos, it’s powerful enough to build complex visuals. While it has a steeper learning curve, it’s also what makes high-end signage content stand out - especially if you're combining it with automation tools like Plainly. Not to mention, there are a ton of After Effects tools that can make it even more powerful. As if it wasn’t powerful enough already!

Canva

Yes, Canva. Again. On top of providing you with a boatload of templates, Canva lets you start from a blank canvas, too, which is great if you want to design your own layouts but aren’t as tech-savvy. You can use it to create virtually anything, including static visuals, videos, and animations, and then export them in formats optimized for digital signage.

Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator

These two remain staples in the signage design toolkit - especially for static content. Photoshop is your go-to if you’re working with photos, textures, or layered layouts. Meanwhile, Illustrator is your best friend for anything vector-based - icons, logos, crisp typography, you name it. In other words, if your content needs to be super polished or follow strict brand guidelines, these two give you all the control you could possibly ask for.

Figma

Not what you expected, huh? Figma might be a well-known name in the UI/UX world, but it’s actually a solid choice for digital signage, too. As it turns out, you can use it to create slideshow layouts, branded assets, or even interactive prototypes, then share them instantly for feedback. Since it’s a web-based tool, there’s no setup required, and your entire team can collaborate on content from practically anywhere. And to top it off, Figma even comes with a free plan!

Automated content creation tools

Creating one piece of signage content is easy. Creating 100s of variations? Not so much. Unless you’re automating it. 

Digital signage content automation tools help you generate multiple content versions using templates and data, saving hours of manual work and making data-driven personalization at scale possible.

If you don’t know which tool to use for automating content creation for digital screens… use:

Plainly

This one’s ours - and honestly, we built it because creating repeatable video content by hand sucks.

Plainly is a video automation tool that helps you generate 1000s of video variations using a single After Effects template. You design the layout once, then use data to fill in the rest. That data can come from a CSV file, an API, or tools like Google Sheets and Airtable, thanks to our native integrations with them. But if you do need more flexibility, you can always connect Plainly to whatever other tool you already use through Zapier.

Instead of opening After Effects and tweaking the same layers over and over, you just define what should be dynamic: text, colors, images, logos, prices, product details - anything. Plainly handles the rest and renders everything in the cloud, so your machine stays free for creative work.

It’s used by teams that need to create digital signage content at scale:

• Retailers showing store-specific promos
  
• Franchises running localized campaigns
  
• Internal comms teams automating employee updates
  
• Platforms pushing data-driven videos to screens
  

…and much more!

If your content changes daily, needs to be personalized, or just comes in bulk, this is the most efficient way to get it done. And once set up, it can run on autopilot. Really.

You can even build a completely hands-off distribution workflow where content gets created, rendered, and delivered straight to the screens without you lifting a finger. Yes. It’s THAT easy.

Bannerbear

Bannerbear is an automation tool that lets you auto-generate images or videos by combining templates with structured data. It works through API or no-code tools like Zapier and Make - just like Plainly - and is great for digital signage visuals that change frequently (think: pricing, promotions, location-specific banners).

You create a branded template with text, colors, images, or icons. Then, connect it to a data source (like Airtable or Google Sheets), and Bannerbear will fill in the blanks and generate new content variations automatically. It’s perfect for teams who need to push out lots of visual assets, especially if you’re working with multiple screens, formats, or localizations.

It’s not as video-focused as Plainly, but it’s a great option for automating static or motion-based image content in bulk.

AI-powered content creation software

Be honest: when we mention AI and content creation, your mind goes straight to ChatGPT, right?

And while you could theoretically use it to aid the digital signage content creation process, it’s not exactly built for visual output. Sue me, but I don’t think its built-in DALL·E image generator, nor Open AI’s Sora are yet ready for that kind of uptake.

What you need are AI tools that are actually built for content people will see on a screen; tools that generate visuals, video, and/or layouts.

HeyGen

HeyGen is an AI video generator that helps you create videos using realistic avatars. You write the script, choose a presenter, and the platform handles the rest: voice, lip sync, and delivery included. It’s great for internal announcements, explainer videos, onboarding content, or scaling personalized messages. Additionally, it supports multiple languages and accents, which makes it an ideal choice for global teams.

Synthesia

Synthesia is a leader in AI avatar video generation. You can turn text into talking-head videos with realistic AI avatars and human-like voiceovers - all without a camera, mic, or studio. It’s quite popular for training videos, walkthroughs, and multilingual content, and lets you create videos that look professional in just a few clicks.

AdCreative

Not every screen needs a face on it. Sometimes you just need high-performing visual content. AdCreative.ai uses machine learning to help you generate ad-style creatives for signage, promotions, or announcements. You upload your brand assets, pick your goal (e.g., attention-grabbing vs. informational), and the tool generates dozens of AI-generated ads optimized for conversion. This creative automation tool is great for retail, quick-service restaurants, and campaign testing.

Digital signage content creation checklist

Here's the ultimate checklist to come back to when you want your digital signage content to not only look great, but also work on screen. Use it whether you’re designing from scratch, templating, or automating the whole process.

Create better content for your digital displays with less effort

We showed you what digital signage content creation is all about. From the first idea to scaling content across dozens of screens, and the tools that make it all easier.

So, take what you’ve learned, steal that checklist (we won’t tell), and start testing. 

And if you ever get to the point where manual just doesn’t cut it anymore? You know where to find us. Book a demo with Plainly to see how you can create digital signage content that basically builds itself.