Missing signage in retail represents a wasted opportunity. Bad signage represents a costly and easily avoidable mistake. With so much riding on how your company approaches and communicates with your customers through signs, logos, and banners, it’s important that you follow this guide and work with a qualified and professional signage company to make sure that your signs WORK.
Be Brief
Customers are bombarded with stimuli on a near constant basis. Commercials, radio spots, street signs, banner ads, mobile ads, magazine inserts… It isn’t surprising that they don’t have much attention to spare. This information overload makes it increasingly important that you condense your signage message so that your appeal can be taken in in a glance. Short, clear, and to the point is the only way to go.
Choose Your Font VERY Carefully
Font is absolutely one of the most important aspects of signage and a poor font choice can destroy an otherwise high quality design. Avoid garish color combos, curly fonts, or fonts that are otherwise difficult to read or unpleasant to look at. You’ll also want to set your font large enough so that customers can easily make your message out without reading glasses.
Sell An Experience
Say you have a car wash. You aren’t selling your customers car wash soap, wax, and tire shine. Instead you’re selling them the experience of having a clean car and a taking a trip down a fun, colorful, exciting car wash tunnel. And the images, message, and appeal you make in your signs and other advertising must support that. The same goes for a company selling a nice dinner or hair gel. You’re selling the experience and the emotions that your products or services contribute to—not just the product or service itself.
Personalize Your Message
The word ‘you’ (printed or implied) is one of the most powerful words in marketing appeals. “You’ll love how your car feels!” “Look Your Best Today!” “Your new favorite bar!” are a few examples, each of which invites the customer to visualize themselves trying out the service for themselves.
Be Memorable
The whole point of signage development is to come up with a sign that customers need only glance at to understand and which sticks in their memory afterwards. To do this well avoid clichés or sterilized, generic designs and test different options until you come up with a sign that’s memorable, unique, and striking.
Consider Your Sign’s Destination
A great sign is more than a design in a computer. It is a real world execution of that design that is effective in the location where the sign is placed. This placement will affect text size, color contrast, material, mounting hardware, and much more. Keep in mind that even a great design won’t count for much if the sign ends up somewhere where no one looks at it or it isn’t clearly visible due to distance or obstruction.
Work with an Expert Company
At Sequioa Signs we specialize in helping companies of all sizes take their ideas and transform them into award-winning, highly effective signage at an affordable price. If you need a sign, we can help. Just call us today at (925) 300-1066.
