Transforming Kiosk Usage Through Strategic Marketing in Palm Beach County, FL

I have a very dynamic and small and mighty team. Our responsibilities basically cover internal to external communications. One of the very first projects my team worked on was our goal to increase usage of the kiosks. And at the time we had five in the county, so they were spread out across the county and we were just beginning to be more active in our social media platforms.

So we decided to create a social media ad campaign where we would promote where all the kiosks were, how easy it was, communicate to the public that you can actually get your registration and your decal right then and there, that there was no going into a transaction in the kiosk and waiting for the decal to be mailed to you. We launched that in approximately March of 2021, and I can say over the months we increased the usage of the kiosks at 633%, which proved to us that we needed to make sure we constantly and continually promoted the kiosks because it was so convenient and so easy.

We send out the renewal notices to our clients twice a month. That totals about 70,000 registration renewals. We switched from an insert that highlighted the online renewal and we created a buck slip that specifically talked about the kiosks. And if we look at the numbers, we saw about 129% increase in people using the kiosks.

This floor where we work is our administrative offices. It’s actually the brains of the operation, I think. And it really makes decisions about how we run our office and what kind of choices we make for service to the public. I believe Palm Beach County has the highest number of kiosks in the state. And we also have the highest number of users of them because we market. We want to make it easy for the constituent to actually do this transaction. So we spent a lot of time developing marketing materials and targeting the areas.

The kiosk project kind of proved us right. Like it really proved the fact that there needed to be a focus on unreached population that we were able to reach through our efforts. So it helped validate that our expanded thinking around external communications, social media, the kiosks were like our little vehicle to validate our team’s direction and philosophy around communicating and marketing.

The people are going to go to what’s the most convenient for them. So they’re going to find whatever works for their schedules. And so as we go through and think about what are some of those savings, I think it’s a matter of the client’s time and how they’re saving their time and the transactions they flow into our regular workload on a daily basis. If you have the kiosks, they’re there when we’re not. And they’re meeting those needs, those people that need that right in that instance.

Getting the word out there and relying on the opportunity for people to then maybe have this become their go-to method and getting away from looking to come into our office to do something that they don’t need to do. Online is fine if they want to do online, but online you still have to wait for your decal to be mailed to you, right? So this is an awesome product where you can do this and get the decal right then and there. Any time we’re thinking about what we want to use our funds for, the kiosks are always the top of the list. So whether it’s creating visuals or additional videos, we’re getting ready to launch another ad campaign on social media for the kiosks. It’s just something that we hold near and dear to us. And so it’s kind of our baby.