If you have a business, you need commercial business signs advertising who you are, what you do, and where you’re located. Read on for six surprising facts about how effective these signs are:
- Without a sign, 35% of people say they’d never have found a business. That’s a lot of people who are relying on sighting commercial business signs in order to decide where to go! In fact, of customers at Best Buy alone, a poll showed 17% on the spot walked in because of the sign. In the digital age, these numbers are surprising, but definitely important to note.
- Stats say that changing or improving a sign improves sales revenue. Just going from a small store front to a larger sign increases revenue by 7.7%, and estimates are that the value of having a sign on site is about the same as coughing up for 24 full-page newspaper ads a year. Before you spend any money on ads, check whether some electronic signs, an outdoor LED display, or other types of commercial business signs might not just give your bottom line a kick in the right direction.
- Commercial business signs have been around a long, long time. We don’t tend to keep doing things if they don’t work, so this tells you something about how powerful signage for businesses can be. We’ve found ancient commercial business signs advertising taverns, pawnbrokers, and barbers in the ruins of Rome and Greece. The ancient Chinese also used signage, and in the Middle Ages drinking water was so unsafe that King Richard II of England required all taverns to have signage so people would know where to go to get something safe to drink. The world has changed in a lot of ways, but people still pay attention to signs and rely on them to find the things they need.
- People pay more attention to these signs than you might think.When you put an ad online, you can gauge how effective it is by counting clicks. You can’t do that with physical marquee signs, so it’s easy to discount them as less valuable. But 32% of people polled say they visited a retailer because they had seen a billboard earlier in the week, and a whole 28% of respondents noted a web address, and 26% a phone number, on an outdoor billboard. (FYI, that’s a good reason to make your sure your web address is simple and memorable, too!) Both traditional and digital billboards get people’s attention: 71% of people say they often look at them, and 37% say they look at outdoor ads every time or most of the time they pass one.
- Lots of your customers are just around the corner. While the internet is a growing and important advertising tool, about 85% of a physical business’ customers live or work within five miles. You’ve not even begun counting those that might come regularly to the neighborhood for other reasons, too, like visiting family or patronizing a particular restaurant or gym. It’s worth making sure your commercial business signs are reaching out to these people in a memorable way.
- People are by nature impulse shoppers and buyers. One way to attract the impulse buy is with good signage. Of people polled, 58% said that they visited a restaurant or learned about an event they decided to attend because they saw a billboard for it in the car, and 68% say they make their shopping decisions while in the car a lot of the time.
Your sign says a lot about your business, so make sure the one you’ve got is saying the things you want to the people you want. You might be surprised what a difference good signage can make.
