9 Ways That Signage and Branding Can Help Small Business Owners Boost Revenue, Improve Customer Relationships, and Develop A Long-Lasting, Positive Brand Identity
We understand you as a small business owner have a lot on your plate. You’re juggling the many facets of your business, while trying to ensure it’s the best it can be. You want to ensure your customers are happy, that its profitable, and hopefully that you enjoy it all at the end of the day. Though you may not immediately think signage is the answer to ensure this, its certainly a tool in your arsenal that can help ensure your small business is achieving your goals.
Specifically we’ll discuss how signage can help in these manners: marketing and customer acquisition, customer relationship management, online presence, e-commerce, networking and relationship building, time management, customer perception, and should you ever decide to part with your business signage can help provide a positive brand for your exit strategy.
Fink’s Jewelers signage in Nashville, TN installed by Ortwein Sign
Marketing and Customer Acquisition
Perhaps the most obvious manner in which signage can help a business is through marketing and customer acquisition. Afterall a storefront without a sign can be anything; however, once you put a sign up that says for instance ‘Nail Spa’ your potential customers immediately know what the function of your business is. By putting ‘Ken’s Nail Spa’ now you’ve personalized it a little further. If you include a flourish or graphic, certain colors and fonts, and you’ve integrated those throughout your branding online, offline, and in your store, then now you’ve established the visual components of a recognizable brand. All of this together will help familiarize passersby with who you are, and what you are, and hopefully help turn those visitors into customers.
Sales and Foot Traffic
Of course branding and marketing pair precisely with sales, and undoubtedly you want your signage to help not only increase your brand familiarity but also increase foot traffic and sales transactions. Signage is perfectly suited to help small business owners increase their revenue, which we discuss further in our blog on calculating ROI for signage.
Customer Relationship Management
By having a strong brand you are well on your way to develop strong customer relationship management. Customers know your business, what you do, and what you stand for, and they’ll develop a connection with your brand. If you were to move your brand would still make it so an old customer would recognize your business in its new locale. Or if your small business grew into a franchise then likewise no matter the city, if a customer passed by your business, they should recognize your brand.
By having a strong brand, with a positive connection, you build a lot of familiarity and goodwill with your customer base.
Online Presence
Similarly by establishing a brand identity on your store front, and in your business, you’ll want to do likewise with your website. You don’t want to treat your online presence as a wholly separate one from your signage and branding, and instead it should be complementary to ensure a familiarity whether your customer drives by your store or scrolls through your website.
E-Commerce
Businesses that sell products online through their website, or another ecommerce platform, rely on trust and familiarity even more so to encourage customers to purchase through their store. By having a strong brand that matches your store’s branding you’re not only ensure they recognize your website as yours, but it also encourages trust, which is important when so many consumers may be reticent to spend or purchase items online.
Customer Feedback
Just because you have a strong brand doesn’t mean you can’t make tweaks to your signage everything to refresh your messages. You can keep the colors, logos, etc., but perhaps still emphasize with temporary signage, or new vinyl, new messages you’d like to convey to your customers.
In doing so, you can use this to track how your message is being received. In our article discussing how to calculate the ROI of your signage, we mention a variety of ways you can engage with your customers to determine their feelings on your branding and signage, to determine its effectiveness. Read the full blog here to learn more about your signage and determining its ROI: https://ortweinsigninterior.com/signage-roi-how-to-measure-the-impact-of-signage-on-business-revenue/
Conferences and Networking
Do you attend a lot of conferences or trade events on behalf of your company or to promote your business? If so, booth signage is an excellent way to display your brand often to potential customers, or peers, perhaps for the first time. By adapting your branding to standing displays, brochures, or hand out materials, you can provide those who network with you at the conference a first chance to familiarize themselves with your brand, so if they should be driving by your physical store in the future they’ll have that immediate connection and spark of recognition upon seeing your store signage and branding.
Time Management
Small business owners undoubtedly always feel they lack for more time, and fortunately signage can be a component in helping to save time, be it with the use of temporary signage or dynamic messaging in the form of EMCs. Technology today has allowed even the smallest of businesses the chance to use digital signage to more easily integrate dynamic messaging into your business. Whether it’s a café menu sign that automatically changes from breakfast to lunch with a timer, or an Electronic Message Center by the road that you control, there are many tools now to help small business owners showcase your business with signage without the hassle of lost time.
Exit Strategy: If You Sell Your Small Business
Perhaps you have decided that your time as a small business owner is coming to an end, but you still want to find new life for your business. By having a strong brand presence you are essentially providing the next owner of the business a leg up, which is an attractive proposition to any would-be future business owner looking to purchase an existing business.