How to Write a Catchy Sign to Boost Brand Awareness: Benefits and Tips
- Written by Brian Dwyer
In the past century, technological advancements paved the way for the fast-paced world digital business. Since then, most businesses focus their efforts and resources on advertising through the Internet.
While the boom of digital marketing isn’t surprising considering the current rate of gadget use, catching people's attention is still possible with the help of well-thought-out signage materials. With enough effort and the right knowledge, you can still come up with signage that can influence people’s decisions and reel in new customers to your place of business.
In this article, you will learn about the major benefits of using in-store signs and how you can design them to maximize their efficiency in drawing in new customers to your business.
Why invest in physical signage
A survey commissioned by the FedEx Office revealed that over 50 percent of small businesses benefit from in-store graphics and signage. To be more specific, the survey found that signs have significant advantages in attracting new customers.
Interestingly, the survey that polled over 500 businesses showed that 64 percent of customers who value creative signs comprise millennials between the ages 18 and 34. Meanwhile, the generation of baby boomers age 55 years and up prefer simpler designs that are easy to read and digest.
Regardless of the target market demographics, the fact remains that in-store signs still offer true value in influencing a company’s ability to draw in new customers. Well-designed signage also boosts brand awareness and help a business grow.
The best part is, this particular marketing tool is no longer limited to just the physical store. Car and truck signages have also been proven effective in raising awareness about a brand, mostly due to their mobility.
How to Create a Catchy Sign: 4 Tips
Signages are visual representations that provide information about an office, store, building, business, and almost any kind of subject matter. Business signage offers a way to communicate with potential customers just by showing instructions or pertinent information that could help them conduct business with your company.
To make sure your signage can help you achieve your business goals, here are four tips you should bear in mind when designing one:
Ensuring that the message you want to convey to potential customers is clear starts by creating a readable sign. It should be concise and easy to read with just a glance.
Signs come in various shapes and sizes, so choosing the right one for your business may be challenging. The key is to consider how it would look from every viewing distance. It is also crucial that you pick a location where no physical obstacles may interfere with its visibility.
Aside from being visible, your sign should also be legible. This means you must avoid overstuffing the sign with unnecessary clutter that may hinder the message from being effectively communicated.
Many marketers make the mistake of filling up every blank space in a sign to get the most out of it. However, you must remember that a good sign communicates a message efficiently and concisely. This means balancing the different elements such as blank spaces, text, and graphics is necessary if you wish to maximize your investment in any type of signage material.
Another important aspect of signage design is color. Aside from capturing audience attention, the color can also help build brand identity by effectively leaving a mark in the reader’s memory.
In fact, research reveals that the psychology of color could help in brand building, particularly in terms of recognition. Other papers have also noted the link between consumer psychology and color in terms of targeted marketing.
These studies may seem technical, but they all point to one thing: the vital role that color choice plays in signwriting and design. Take McDonald’s yellow, Coke’s red, or Starbucks’s green, for instance. Each brand uses different colors, but all of them became big names in their own right.
One more thing to consider when choosing signage color is its trendiness.
Although you might feel compelled to use current and modern hues, these don’t always last. This is why you must plan for the long term and think about how long a certain color trend would last. While the color you choose maybe today’s hot trend, it can also become tomorrow’s eyesore. Moreover, you shouldn’t choose random colors either; the signage colors you use must be related to or based on your company logo.
When designing signage, you must also make sure that you use contrast to enhance readability.
Matching a continuous background color with text or graphics in the foreground often works. This is because the audience can focus on the graphics or words, with the plain background serving as a medium. This also translates to better content retention, which, in turn, leads to improved brand awareness.
To create contrast, pick two colors that are opposite or completely different. The most straightforward example is matching black text with a plain white background. Remember: the bigger the contrast between the colors, the better the readability.
While some may get away with a crayons-on-chalkboard kind of signage, getting away and drawing customers in are two very different things.
When designing signage for your store or business, you must remember to choose clear fonts. While they may look cute at first, fonts with multiple colors and curly-cues won’t do you any good when it comes to directing people’s attention to your message. Moreover, your font style choice must be appropriate for your business.
Aside from that, overly-complicated fonts are not easy to read. And when a person finds it hard to read a sign, chances are they would move on rather than seek more information about the brand being advertised in the sign.
On top of that, small fonts are not so easy to read, so make sure that the ones you pick for your sign are big enough even for those who require reading glasses.
However, it is important to note that “big fonts” and “capital letters” don’t mean the same thing. Plus, writing your sign in all caps can actually be counterproductive since nothing is ever really “normally” written this way.
Still, you shouldn’t be afraid to use italic, bold, and extended text to shift focus on a specific part of the message. This requires creativity, so be sure to look at the big picture to ensure that the text and other elements of the signage sing in harmony.
The Takeaway
Old-fashioned as it may seem, advertising a brand or company through the use of physical signage is still one of the most efficient marketing strategies that can help build a brand. Make sure you don’t miss out on the benefits they offer and design an in-store sign that sticks.
AUTHOR BIO
Brian Dwyer is the Director and owner of Colour Source Signwriters, a graphic production business specializing in various vehicle wraps, fleet signs and building signs. The company has been producing professional signage that captures the attention and matches the vision of delighted clients all over Australia since 1990.
