How Signage Can Boost Local Business Success

Building signage can play a big role in the success rate of local businesses. If designed well, signage should create brand awareness, alert potential clients and customers to the location of your store or business, and demonstrate what it is that your business has to offer (whether that be products or services). Effective signage will act as a trigger—every time a person sees it, they will remember all these essential marketing and branding elements.

According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, “The digital signage market will be worth $133 million by 2020.” This huge statistic just goes to show exactly how important signage can be, especially to local businesses. It demonstrates to your customers (and potential new customers) that you are ‘Open for Business’, enticing them to visit your premises either intentionally or impulsively. They are perfect attention grabbers and advertise your brand, products and services to all passersby.

Benefits for Local Business

The business sign market has seen its share of improvements and upgrades over the past decade. And this renaissance period of signs, with a boom in digital signage, does not appear to be diminishing any time soon. Signs are highly effective communication tools to show advertising, product information and other messages. Increasingly, business signage is becoming an integral part of business marketing particularly for small, local businesses, mainly because researchers have recently revealed that 85% of the customer base of local businesses live within an 8km radius of the business’ location. Furthermore, approximately 18% of all people move each year. So, as a local business, if your building has no sign, you are potentially loosing out on 18% of your local target market each and every year.

Types of Signage

There are a lot of choices on where and what kind of signage you can put up for your business. Some of them have that huge and lighted storefront while others prefer the roadside type of signage. They all vary in shapes, sizes, location and purpose. Branding, promotions, attention, outdoor advertising and business announcements are some of the factors to consider in creating one.

According to the summary of the research conducted by the Economics Center of The University of Cincinnati on behalf for the Signage Foundation, Inc. (The Economic-Value of On-Premise Signage, August 2012):

• The national lodging chain case found that the use of a digital electronic sign to display pricing was associated with higher average occupancy rates. The impact appeared to be especially strong for properties with lower occupancy rates.
• A case study by a national bank concluded that highly visible signs are almost always associated with those erected in pylon; while those posted in monuments gave a moderate association while wall signs are just considered as identifier signs and not as an advertiser. Those signs in pylon were considered as the most significant signs especially for customers with transaction with the tellers.
• The small specialty store case study demonstrated the need for signage to reaffirm the value offered by a niche retailer. Sign design must be sensitive to community and customer expectations, and able to reinforce the limited brand of a small business. The signage should communicate a ‘promise’ of value for a product or service that is not commonly found elsewhere.
• A car dealership case study found that the addition of a video sign board was associated with large increases in both service department revenue and customer count. An added benefit was the ‘goodwill’ and reputational gains associated with using the video board for community related public service messages.

What does the study say? One thing is for sure; every business needs a good signage.