There’s signage all around us. Some of its good. Some bad. Walk down any high street and you’ll find certain things catch your eye while others seem to fade into the background. If you want people flocking into your store, bar, cafe or restaurant, signage is one area where you can’t afford to make too many mistakes.
Here are our top tips for avoiding signage mistakes that could impact on your business:
- Too Much Information
It can be tempting to cram information onto a sign, especially if you have a big space. Take the sign above your restaurant. Yes, you need to put the name of the shop. But what about the telephone number? Web address? Then you could add a list of all the things you cook. The trouble is, the more you put on the sign the more cluttered it looks and the more likely it is to stop attracting people.
There’s an old adage: Less is more. This is certainly the case when it comes to signage.
- Low Quality Signage
Another mistake businesses make is not investing enough money in quality signage. This can have two effects, neither of which you want for your business. First, cheap signage tends to look cheap. Nowadays, customers have pretty high expectations. If you’re not spending enough money on your signs, then what is the quality of your service likely to be? Cheaper signs also tend to have a fairly short shelf-life which means you’re going to need to replace them a lot sooner.
- Lack of Consistent Branding
Branding is important for telling your customers what to expect and it needs to be consistent across all your areas of communication and marketing, including your signage. Going that step further and including your brand identity means you set yourself apart and stand out from the competition.
- Forgetting the Dark
You’ve spent a large amount of time and money developing that sign above the door to your bar, restaurant or store or the arranging the display in your window. It’s dark in the morning and early evenings in the UK during winter so you need to have carefully thought about what kind of lighting you’re going to include for those signs.
- Poor Location
Another mistake is putting signs in the wrong location where customers aren’t likely to see them. This is generally a problem with interior signage where business owners don’t look at signage from the point of view of diners or visitors.
- Bad Wording
If you employ a professional sign maker, they’ll often work to your exact specifications – that means you own what’s written, however badly your wording is composed. The good companies, of course, will work with you and point out any issues. You really need to make sure, however, that you are being clear and concise with your language.
- Forgetting to Proof Read
How many businesses write out their signs, send them off to the signage company and put them up before they realise there’s a grammatical or spelling error? The truth is, quite a few. You need to proof read all signage properly and not assume that everything is fine.
- Ignoring the Competition
If you haven’t updated your signage in a while, it pays to step out onto the street and check out how it looks. More importantly, how does it compare to all the other offices, restaurants, bars and stores around? Has a new shop opened that seems to be taking the limelight? Is it time you thought about new signage?
- Not Employing the Professionals
Finally, the other mistake business owners make when choosing signage is not picking the right company. Ideally, you want someone who is going to work with you closely and make appropriate suggestions about what’s going to work best and a team that gives you plenty of options.
Contact Technical Signs today for expert advice on branding, placement and manufacture that you need to make your business premises stand out!
