What's new
Rockbot’s newly rebuilt in-store Marketing tools (Digital Signage and Audio Announcements) offer major increases in functionality and control. This quick start guide is intended to help you get off the ground and using the new functionality as quickly as possible.
The first major change is the introduction of Campaigns. Think of a Campaign as a box that you put your marketing assets into so you can schedule them to run as a group. Playback within a campaign can be ordered or randomized and you can have multiple campaigns running independently of each other at the same time.
Scheduling your campaigns can be as basic as “start playing now and run indefinitely," or you can target specific date ranges and times of day, days of the week, or even day of the month.
If you used our old Digital Signage and Audio Announcement products you’ll find your Assets waiting for you when you log in the first time, and each of them will be set up as its own campaign with all scheduling intact. Nothing should be lost in the transfer, but all the new tools are ready and waiting for you.
First Campaign walk-through
When you go to create your first Campaign in Rockbot you will begin by uploading or creating Assets in the Asset Library. Once you have your assets ready to go, you will create a Campaign and be sent to the Campaign Builder. From there, you can add Scheduling, and then Publish your campaign. At the end of your campaign, it will automatically be archived and you can view Retrospective reporting.
You can view your list of Campaigns from the Campaign Browser at any time.
Campaigns in Rockbot can be as simple or as complex as you want to make them. For large teams and Enterprise deployments, we recommend diving a little deeper into the Campaign Lifecycle.
Terminology
- Asset - a single file or piece of content. This could be a text asset, an image, video, sound file, social media widget, or an embedded web page.
- Once uploaded or created in Rockbot, Assets can be configured using a wide range of options. Learn more about Asset management in Rockbot.
- Campaign - a group of one or more Assets that are scheduled to run together. For each Campaign you can set:
- Time of day for playback to start and end
- Date or date range over which the campaign can run
- The Group or Locations to subscribe to the campaign (the places where the campaign will run)
- Zone: A set of one or more players that are linked together within a Location
- Location: A Group of Zones that share a single physical address (uses the Group version of the dashboard)
- Group: A set of Zones or Locations, for example the Western Region of a large brand might include dozens of Locations.
Zone and Group
For all Rockbot products, there is a Zone version and a Group version of each page. This lets us surface enterprise tools to our larger clients while keeping the dashboard uncluttered for small businesses and local managers that are only worried about a single Zone.
For example, the Group version of the Marketing dashboard will let you easily schedule Campaigns to run across multiple Zones and Locations within your Group. The Zone version gives you a more focused view or what’s happening in a single Zone.
Groups are useful because they allow you to manage content across multiple Zones and Locations.
You can tell whether you are in the Zone or Group version at a glance by checking the Organization browser at the top of the window.
The Group version of a page will always have a blue background and the org browser will show the name of the group.
The Zone version of a page will always have a white background and the org browser will show the name of the zone, as well as breadcrumbs to its parent group.If your Rockbot deployment only has a single Zone, you will only ever see the Zone version.
Most small businesses will only have a single zone, but some may have several; and enterprise deployments can have a dozen Zones each across hundreds or thousands of Locations.
Whatever size your business, Rockbot is designed to work for you.
Ready to get started? Your first stop is the Asset Library to get your content uploaded and configured.