Signs of Success^®

Signs are everywhere! It  would be  difficult to navigate our way around the world without them. Signs  come in all shapes and sizes, can be made from practically any material and have unlimited uses. As a business owner, your commercial signage serves several functions which include spreading brand awareness, bringing customers through your doors or to your website, promoting products and services and helping your customers find their way around your property safely.

With so many options available and things to consider it can be challenging to find the right signs to use at every stage of your interactions with customers. In this guide, we’ll begin by explaining the three most common purposes for signs. That’s followed by a brief description of the two general types of signs, each of which should play a role in your sign strategy. This guide to signage concludes by narrowing down the many styles of signs available to help you determine which works best for your business. 

How Signs Are Used

Although there are a wide variety of signs, the tend to serve one of three purposes:

1. Informational Signage – This  type of sign provides  useful information that can help consumers  make  informed decisions,  navigate through unfamiliar surroundings and make decisions with more confidence.
2. Promotional Signage –  All signage is promotional when the branding and messaging is consistent.  This type of sign is designed to support advertising promotions using colors, placement and call-to-actions with the specific purpose of making sales and increasing revenue.
3. Wayfinding Signage –Wayfinding signage helps guests find hotel rooms and amenities easier and reduces stress for patients in unfamiliar healthcare facilities. They can increase student experiences on campus, improve employee productivity in the corporate workplace and guide shoppers so they can find products without difficulty.

Types of Signs

Signs fall into two categories: exterior and interior. Most enterprises require a combination of the two, and branding and design elements should remain consistent between your indoor and outdoor signs.

Exterior signage is used to attract notice and firmly implant the business’s brand and message into the consciousness of its audience. It engages viewers with vibrant and bold colors, eye-catching designs and succinct, easy-to-read text. Placement plays a vital role in the success of outdoor signage and is based on studies that show it takes repeated viewing of the sign before it becomes memorable and leads to conversions. Exterior signage can be especially effective when a business has a thorough understanding of their customers’ daily commute or the routes they travel in their community. Exterior signage is also important for wayfinding solutions that prevent frustration and confusion for guests and visitors on your property. The materials for these types of signage should be durable without sacrificing visual impact.

Interior signage creates a relationship with your audience once they’ve walked through your doors. They’re used to make the shopper, guest, or patient’s experience as enjoyable as possible, and establish a connection that can lead to greater customer satisfaction and increased revenues. Indoor signage should anticipate the needs of the customer and offer solutions that add value.. There are unlimited opportunities to engage audiences with appealing promotional displays, wayfinding solutions, dynamic visual images and fresh relevant content that matters.

Static or Digital

For years, most businesses and organizations could only afford and easily maintain traditional advertising that used printed signs and materials and lighting solutions that included front or reverse-lit channel lettering, light boxes, neon designs and directly lit signage.  As innovations in digital signage have brought costs down, the ability to coordinate digital content for added relevance and impact is providing creative opportunities for organizations of all sizes to reach audiences.

Static signage depends on brand consistency for relationship building across every audience touchpoint. In each case, the objective is to convey exactly the information your customers, workers, students, and patients find helpful and that solves their problem. Outdoor billboards and pylon signs draw attention from distances and indoor directional signage or point-of-purchase displays provide more intimate connections.

Digital signage lets organizations integrate digital marketing content like video and animation through marketing platforms with messaging that changes easily and stays relevant to the sign’s task at hand. It’s used to capture the attention of audiences on the go with digital billboards or larger than life architectural video walls. Electronic messaging boards and LED screens and free-standing digital signs provide great visibility and personalization in lobbies, waiting and conference rooms and hallways.

Sign Styles

What sign works best for your business? It depends on the personality you want to project, how and where you want to reach out to your audience, and what action you want them to take. Here are some of the most common styles of signage for you to consider and how they are put to use.

 Five Effective Outdoor Sign Styles

Billboards – These large signs, whether static or digital, attract the attention of drivers with short, concise call-to-actions. Billboards influence the decisions people make on where to eat, stop for the night, the real estate or insurance agent they can trust, or even which candidate to vote for.

Pylon signs – A familiar sign along freeway and well-traveled roadways that businesses in the hospitality industry use to grab attention. Whether mounted on one pylon or two, these signs prominently display logos and brands erected close to the roads  and can be one or two-sided to appeal to traffic traveling in all directions.

Monument signs – These free-standing signs are set up at roughly eye-level for drivers who pass them and are usually crafted from a combination of masonry and metal. They instantly create an impression of prestige, trust and professionalism and are usually placed away from a building to catch  attention.

Front and back-lit Channel Lettering – Mounted on the roofs or sides of structures, this style of signage is often common on businesses located in strip malls. They use appealing colors and illumination to stand out from the other stores and make places easy to find.

Digital LED signs – These common outdoor signs use brilliant illumination, animation and digital content with messages that can be administered and changed with easy-to-use management platforms. They increase visibility with displays that are difficult to ignore and that generate wide exposure in high traffic areas.

Five Effective Indoor Sign Styles

Free Standing Digital signs –  Popular in malls, convention centers and hotel and hospital lobbies these signs provide great visibility with eye-catching  images and are easily updated for relevancy. They can be stationed practically anywhere and may offer the added advantage of having two sides on which to promote products and engage audiences.

Menu Boards – These signs clearly present meal choices with appealing photos, graphics and colors, making the ordering process more efficient and customer focused. They help keep lines moving so that wait times are reduced and can increase order accuracy in order to eliminate customer frustration and waste.

Interactive Kiosks – Ideal for guiding and assisting guests and visitors, interactive kiosks serve as maps, handle customer service inquiries, and let people gather more detailed information about products and pricing. They can reduce stress in airports, hospitals, hotels and unfamiliar environments. Interactive kiosks also provide new revenue streams for businesses with self-checkout and contactless shopping kiosk solutions.

Video Walls – Entertaining and functional, video walls create fuller experiences for audiences with customized content and calls-to-action that drive them to new levels of engagement. LED technology provides valuable communication capabilities that make it easy for audiences to understand and remember what they see. Digital video walls are simple to manage, can be designed to conform to any space and give brands exciting ways to stay current and connected.

Directional and Emergency Signs – These signs are excellent ways to transcend language barriers and deploy instantly recognizable symbols and colors to guide, warn, mandate behavior and ensure compliance with laws and regulations. While these signs are important points of information, they can also offer fun and creative approaches to reinforce brand and make them appealing.

You need to get your signage strategy right. Your choices must make the life of your customers, patients, students and faculty, guests and visitors easier or they’ll go somewhere else. It can be accomplished through a unified approach that prioritizes consistent branding, perfect placement, and clear, concise messaging.

Keep your messaging relevant and your content fresh and unique with YESCO sign solutions. Contact YESCO today to find out how.