Is your signage as effective as it could be? Retail signage can drive a steady steam of customers into your store, fueling sales and giving your business an audience that’s continually growing and growing over time. 

That is, if your retail signage is designed and positioned effectively. Many businesses make the mistake of designing and creating retail signage that seems to be effective, but really does little to improve their bottom line. 

From visibility to persuasiveness, a variety of factors go into creating retail signage that’s both visually appealing and effective. If you’d like to improve your signage to drive more sales, try the three simple but effective techniques listed below.

Study what your competitors are doing right

Are your competitors attracting more customers than you? It’s easy to write off a competitor’s success as a result of aggressive marketing techniques or a product that’s just too different for you to compete with. 

However, it’s far more effective to study what your competitors are doing better than your business, then apply the techniques they’re using effectively to increase the response rate of your signage. 

Do you have a competitor that’s constantly busy? Visit their retail store and look at how their signage draws in passers by and turns them into shoppers, and then into loyal customers and sources of revenue. 

The difference between an effective sign and a completely ineffective one can often be as simple as a small change to your message. Study what your competitors have done that you aren’t doing, then apply their winning principles to your signage.

Try changing your sign’s statement of value

Does your sign clearly state the value that your business offers? Many retail stores make the mistake of focusing entirely on discounts or specific products and not on stating the specific value that they can offer their customers. 

Effective advertising, whether it’s retail signage or a print advertisement, is always built on value. Does your signage clearly communicate your value proposition and unique selling points, or is it narrowly focused on a specific point or characteristic? 

If your signage doesn’t have a clear statement of value, it’s time to review it. Think about the biggest type of value that your business offers its customers, then make this the primary focus of your retail signage. 

From the best return policy to the widest selection of products, it’s important to use your unique selling point in your signage. Focus on your unique value, and then turn it into an inspiring item that you can use in your retail store’s advertising.

Signage too complicated? Simplify and streamline

Many businesses have signage that’s designed to be noticed, better than any signage their competitors offer and backed up by a great value proposition, all while being a little too complicated for their target audience. 

It’s easy to forget that most customers only have a couple of seconds to look at your signage. Long, complicated messages may seem great, but they can easily get lost as a customer glances at your signage and loses focus on its challenging message. 

If your retail signage is too complicated to understand in one or two seconds, you’ll benefit from streamlining and simplifying. Shorten your message so that it’s easy to understand in two seconds or less, all without losing any of your value message. 

Sound difficult? It’s actually surprisingly simple. By shortening your message to one sentence of ten words or less, you make it far easier for prospects to understand the benefits of entering your retail store and becoming a customer.

Has your business ever used coupons to improve its response rate and encourage existing customers to return? Coupons are powerful marketing assets that can be used in retail, business-to-business commerce and even for restaurants and cafés. 

There are several factors that separate good coupons from great ones. For a coupon to be highly effective, it needs to have an excellent offer that’s worth returning for as well as being easy to share and a design that’s focused on inspiring action. 

Would you like to use coupons that improve your business’s revenue? In this guide, we’ll share three simple tips and techniques that you can use to design coupons that your customers can’t wait to redeem.

Have a great offer that your audience is interested in

The key to an effective coupon is an enticing offer. If your coupons offer little of real value – for example, a very small discount on an unwanted product or service – few, if any, of your customers will redeem them. 

On the other hand, if your coupons offer a great deal on a product or service that is appealing to your target audience, they can generate a steady stream of customers that can’t wait to return to your business. 

Before you start designing your coupons, choose a great offer. Think about which of your products or services is most likely to generate a motivated response, even if it only occurs in a small part of your target audience. 

Good offers include discounts on top-selling products and service, buy-one-get-one-free deals, loyalty programs for existing customers and other offers that emphasize the value offered to your target audience.

Use a design that encourages recipients to take action

Even with a great offer, not everyone will take advantage of your coupon as soon as they receive it. Your coupon’s design plays a huge role in inspiring people to redeem it, and it’s important that you design your coupons with action in mind. 

Do your coupons communicate value alone, or do they communicate how that value can be used? Good coupons have all the elements of an effective brochure – a strong unique selling point, call to action and important data for prospective customers. 

Begin your coupons with your value proposition – the value that you can offer to the coupon holder. Explain your product or service’s unique selling points. Then, add all of the information required for coupon holders to take action and redeem the offer. 

Remember that coupons aren’t just freebies for customers – they’re advertisements, and like any advertisement, they need to be optimized for action. Design all of your coupons like direct response advertisements and they’ll be far more effective.

Make your coupons remarkable and worth talking about

Most coupons are designed to attract the business of one person. You can make your coupons far more effective by designing them to be remarkable and encourage your target audience to talk about your business. 

Online companies like Uber and Dropbox have done this to great success, offering a bonus – free credit in the case of Uber, and free online storage for Dropbox – for any users that invite their friends and colleagues to become customers. 

Do your coupons encourage conversation? Try offering an even bigger discount to any recipients that invite their friends, or create two-in-one coupons that users can cut into two and share with their friends and family. 

Doing this massively increases the value of each of your coupons for your business by expanding your audience of prospective customers. Even if only a small number of customers “share” their coupons, your business can find a whole new audience.

Which colors do you use in your business’s marketing? Color can have a huge effect on the way people respond to your marketing efforts, from helping you attract the right amount of attention to presenting your brand in the right way. 

Choosing the right colors can emphasize your business’s strong points and position your brand optimally. Choosing the wrong colors, on the other hand, can weaken or damage your brand, costing you recognition and revenue. 

Do you know which colors to use in your marketing materials and which to avoid at all costs? Read on to discover three color schemes that you should never use in your marketing materials.

For direct marketing, black and white

Black and white has been used in advertising for decades. The famous Volkswagen print advertisements of the 1960s used black and white extremely well, inspiring a huge number of marketers to do likewise. 

Using black and white as the foundation of your campaign is a risky decision. This is because black and white don’t stand out in print or on a computer screen in the way that bolder, more powerful colors do. 

If you’re advertising in a medium in which black and white are typical – for example, a local newspaper or simple brochure – then using black and white isn’t such a large issue. However, black and white are best avoided for other marketing mediums. 

Instead of using black and white, try using a power blue with white to create great contrast without reducing the visibility of your advertising. Other dark colors, such as dark green or purple, can also replace black without affecting readability.

For luxury products, red, yellow and orange

Strong, powerful and intense colors like red, yellow and orange are frequently used in advertising. Numerous retail and food brands, such as McDonald’s and KFC, have used these colors to build powerful, memorable and valuable brands. 

While powerful, intense colors like this may work well in the fast food industry, they are far from ideal for luxury brands. This is because these sharp, powerful colors are all about urgency and convenience – two qualities that aren’t associated with luxury. 

If your product or service derives its value from its quality and exclusivity, it’s better to use colors that emphasize these qualities – such as blue, green, brown or purple – than it is to use colors that make you stand out from the crowd. 

All colors have their place in advertising, but it’s essential that your color scheme is a good match for your brand. A mismatch between brand and color can weaken and compromise your brand, reducing customer loyalty and hurting your response rate.

For health businesses, white-on-black text

White on black text – that is, white text on a dark, black background – is popular on the Internet, as it’s believed to increase readability and text visibility on many LCD monitors and make long pages of text easier to scroll through. 

Offline, however, white on black generally isn’t a good idea. This is particularly true for health businesses, as the intense contrast of white on black text isn’t associated with the light, relaxing feel of a health clinic or spa. 

If you’re marketing a health product or service, use light and refreshing colors that are easy to associate with relaxation. Light blue, pink and yellow are all ideal colors for marketing health-related services and products. 

Color says a lot about your business, as well as the experience of interacting with it as a customer. Choose the color scheme you use in your advertising wisely, as it can have a surprisingly large impact on the way people respond to your message.

Is your advertising as effective as it could be? One of the most important aspects of effective retail signage is design – the visual elements that make your signage stand out and attract attention. 

While design is important for successful signage, it’s not the only factor that makes your signage effective. The words you choose to use in your signage have a massive impact on its response rate and profitability. 

From action verbs to simple changes in wording, small changes to the words used in your signs, brochures and other marketing materials can have a significant effect on how many leads, sales and responses your campaign produces. 

Would you like to improve your signage’s effectiveness? Try using these five action words in your signage to increase your response rate, generate more leads and get more sales.

Free

Everyone loves to get something for free. If you’re giving away something – either as a completely free giveaway or with an additional purchase – make sure you mention it in your signage. 

Have you ever stopped and walked into a store in exchange for a free sample or free bonus? Receiving something for free can be a powerful motivating force that could result in you – or your target audience – taking action. 

If you’d like to generate massive attention with your signage, “free” is a great word to use.

You

“You” is one of the most powerful words for marketers. The reason is simple: when you use “you” in your signage, the people reading it immediately associate your offer with themselves. 

Compare “Losing weight is possible” with “you can lose weight.” The second example is barely different from the first, but the image it creates in the reader’s mind is very different – it’s all about them, rather than all about the product. 

People naturally respond to offers that allow them to visualize themselves in better situations. Use “you” to make your advertising more personal and more effective.

Try

Have you ever wanted to try something before you bought it? Being able to try out a product or service before committing to a purchase is a powerful motivator that can have a huge positive effect on your response rate. 

Do you offer a free trial of your product or service? If so, using “try” in your signage can inspire customers to try your product that would otherwise walk right on by to somewhere else. 

By trying your product or service, you gain a powerful opportunity to sell directly to prospects within your retail store or sales office.

Now

Given the choice, would you rather wait to receive something or have it now? Most people, with select few exceptions, would choose to receive something right now than have to wait for it. 

This makes instant delivery a selling point – a potentially powerful one that you can use to enhance your signage. Make “now” a major word in your signage and you will attract customers that are interested in trying your product or service right then. 

“Now” is especially powerful in markets where instant delivery isn’t usually offered, making it a great way to differentiate your business from competitors.

Get

Everyone likes to get something. The word “get” might seem simple, but it can have a powerful effect on the way people respond to your marketing and view the task of purchasing your product. 

For example, compare the word “get” with the word “buy.” The first implies that you will receive something, while the second implies that there is a transaction that has a cost – not a picture that many customers want to think about. 

Instead of using “buy” in your advertising, use “get” to create an image of receiving something in your target audience’s mind.

Have you ever seen a sign that once looked cutting edge but has since aged? Brand new design trends can look fantastic for a time, but they quickly age and date your brand in the process. 

From neon, rigid 1980s designs to dated 1990s websites, design that’s right on the cutting edge tends to age worse than classic design, leaving your brand with a look that’s not as trendy five years into the future as it is today. 

If you’d like your brand to stand the test of time and not require constant updates, using an old-fashioned approach to design can give your brand additional staying power that separates it from its here-and-how, trendy competitors. 

Would you like to give your signs, brochures and other marketing materials more of a timeless feel? Read on to learn three tips that you can use to avoid making signage that ages rapidly and dates your brand.

Keep it simple

The best logos and identities are usually the simplest. Nike’s famous swoosh, as an example, is one of the simplest logos in the world. The McDonald’s arches are also straightforward and simple, making them immediately recognizable. 

Simple logos are usually the best for several reasons. They’re easy to identify as a part of a specific brand or company. They’re also easy to incorporate into a wide range of different marketing materials, signs and other items. 

Finally, they’re timeless. The simpler your logo is, the less it will age over time, as simple designs have few elements that fall victim to trends and tastes. Keep it nice and simple and your brand will have real staying power.

Avoid being trendy

Is your corporate identity too trend? Trends come and go very quickly in the world of design, making an image that looks good one decade look extremely dated in the next. 

We’ve all seen designs that were clearly a product of their time, from glitzy 1980s neon signage to Internet Bubble-era 1990s branding. These look good for a certain time, but age rapidly once the specific trend they’re part of is over. 

From the plastic-looking digital logos of the early 2000s to grunge website designs and endless bevel and emboss, relatively recent design trends often look the worst of all, since they’ve only just gone out of style while still being widely used. 

Do you want your corporate identity to stand the test of time? Avoid falling victim to fans and design trends that come and go. Design an identity that’s grounded in basic design principles, not the specific values of the day.

Use a versatile design

The best designs aren’t just timeless and simple – they’re also versatile. Apple’s logo, for example, is a simple design that’s so versatile it can be used on a huge variety of devices, in numerous different settings and decorated in a wide range of colors. 

Is your corporate identity versatile? The key to a versatile design is a lack of specific qualities, such as certain fonts and elements. Can you change the color of your brand to suit a specific promotion, or would doing so affect its look too much? 

Versatility is an important aspect of design that’s often ignored by businesses that are aiming for a specific look, as opposed to something that can adapt to their needs at any certain point. 

Be versatile and you expand your options, often to the benefit of your business. You also prevent your brand from appearing as a product of its time, because a versatile design is rarely one that’s built around a fad or passing trend.

Is your business active on Facebook? Do you have a Twitter account with plenty of interesting content? Social media can be a great marketing channel for businesses, but without an audience it’s unlikely that anyone will engage with your message. 

From local businesses to large companies, a wide range of businesses can benefit from the exposure that social media offers. Over time, your business can build its brand and strengthen its connection with its target audience. 

That is, as long as there are people to engage with your content. While the majority of businesses grow their social media presence online, it’s also possible to make use of offline marketing methods to develop your social media presence. 

From direct mail to print advertising, a wide variety of channels can be used to grow your social media audience and build a loyal following of people that are interested in your business. 

Would you like to grow your brand’s social media page? Read on to learn how you can use in-store posters to grow your social media audience and give your business an additional marketing channel.

List your URL in your in-store posters

Do you use posters to promote sales and specific items in your retail store? If you use retail posters to promote items and events, you can also use them to promote your business’s social media page. 

The easiest way to promote your social media page using posters is to include your URL – for example,Facebook.com/YourBrandName – in your posters. You can also add a call to action to encourage prospective followers to take action. 

This method is simple and low-cost, but it’s also very effective. People that have had positive interactions with your business offline will often want to follow you online, giving you a loyal audience with no significant costs.

Offer a benefit for people that follow you

Would you like to grow your social media audience much faster? While listing your social media URLs or usernames is a great way to attract a small number of highly loyal followers, it’s not always the best way to build a large audience quickly. 

If you’d like to grow your social media following quickly, try giving something away in exchange for people following you. This creates an incentive for people to follow your business on Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms. 

The best giveaways are typically of products or services related to your business. A closely related item – preferably one of your own products – is more likely to attract real followers than something chosen purely for its mass appeal.

Use QR codes to make adding you easy

Does your business cater to a tech-friendly audience? If your customers are highly tech-savvy and love all things digital, you can market your social media profiles by using QR codes. 

QR codes are scannable two-dimensional barcodes that redirect users to a specific URL. Once a user scans a QR code with their smartphone, they’re automatically sent to your social media profile – or any other target URL. 

The biggest benefit of using QR codes is the convenience. Since QR codes only take a second or two to scan, they’re far more convenient than entering a URL manually on a smartphone, giving them a higher than average response rate.

Deliver exclusive online content

Does your business specialize in creating content for its customers? From guides to technical videos, content – whether it’s written, recorded or purely digital – can be an extremely powerful marketing tool for a variety of businesses. 

If your business produces content to market to its customers, one of the best ways to promote this content is through your social media channels as an exclusive offer for followers and fans. 

Instead of offering the chance to win a free product or offer for following your brand on social media, try promoting your online content as a type of value for people that follow your business online to increase the size of your social media audience.

Is your business active on social media?

From helping you retain customers to expanding your business’s reach online, social media has a wide range of marketing benefits for businesses. Is your business active on social media? If so, how can you use posters to promote your social media pages?

Whether you’re aiming to connect with large-scale corporate clients or just market your retail store’s latest products, brochures are fantastic marketing tools for a wide range of businesses. 

With a brochure, your business can promote its latest offerings while strengthening its connection with its target audience, all in a cost-effective way. 

There are two key components of every effective brochure: the design, which plays a major role in attracting the attention of prospective customers, and the content that the brochure contains, which plays an important role in driving sales. 

Are you struggling to prepare the right content for your retail brochure? Read on to learn more about which information you should include in your retail brochure for the biggest possible response.

Key selling points

What are the key benefits of each product your business has for sale? An extremely common marketing mistake is to market a product using its features – for example, specific technology or design elements – instead of discussing its benefits. 

A health supplement, for example, may have a patented formula that achieves great results, but that’s not a selling point. Its selling point is that it’s more effective than any other product within its category at promoting good health. 

Before you list any item in your brochure, take note of its two or three biggest and most important selling points. Then, use them as building blocks for your copy to create engaging, effective content that drives sales.

Pricing information

How much does your product cost? One of the most common brochure mistakes is to exclude pricing information in an effort to drive leads by forcing prospects to call your business for more information. 

While some prospects will call your business to learn more, it’s far more common for people to simply search online for pricing information. As a result, they could end up learning more about a specific product from one of your competitors. 

It pays to be transparent, particularly when it comes to pricing. Listing the prices of specific products in your brochure provides your prospective customers with useful information that can play an important part in the purchasing process.

Payment options

How can prospective customers pay for your product? By listing the ways that your target audience can purchase your product, you increase the likelihood of a positive response and successful sale. 

If your business offers online shopping, mention this in your brochure. You can even use scannable QR codes to take customers right to a specific product’s page in your online store. 

Is there a retail store nearby? If you’re distributing brochures as part of a direct mail campaign, try listing your nearest retail location to show customers how convenient it is to take action.

Your business’s bio

What makes your business special? People rarely receive just one brochure – it’s far more common to receive several direct mail pieces per day. Because of this, it’s vital that you let people know what makes your business different from its competitors. 

Do you have an excellent reputation? Do you offer a great return policy? Think about the key points that make your business worth purchasing something from, then use them to build trust in your brochure. 

People rarely buy based on price alone; if your can’t clearly communicate how your business is trustworthy and remarkable, there’s a significant chance they will go to one of your competitors instead of purchasing a product directly from you.

Is your retail store, café or restaurant attracting customers? Good retail signage can bring a constant flow of customers into your store, fuelling your revenue and giving your small business a loyal following. 

Many small business owners make the mistake of thinking that customers will come to them, provided they set up shop. The reality is that gaining customers is a process that requires your active involvement and marketing efforts. 

One of the most effective ways to draw customers into your store or local business is by using retail signage. In this guide, we’ll share five retail signage tips that you can use to encourage customers to visit your café, restaurant or other local business.

Before you design, know your goals

What is the goal of your signage? Many small businesses design signs not to achieve any key sales or marketing goal, but simply to let their community know that they’re open and ready for business. 

Without a clear goal, it’s unlikely that your signage will be effective. Before you start designing your sign, you should write down a clear goal for each of your retail signs, so that you can design with purpose in mind. 

Whether your goal is to attract new customers to step into your store or promote a product or service you offer, have a goal in mind before you start so that your sign will be designed with purpose, not just to fill in empty space.

Keep your design and copy simple

Is your signage overly complicated? It’s easy to use too many elements in the design of your retail signage, resulting in signage that is too visually busy for passersby to notice and understand. 

A far better strategy is to keep your signage only as busy as it needs to be. Reduce your marketing message down to one or two key points that are likely to attract a large audience to your business, then focus on those. 

Simplicity works, particularly in retail signage. Since passersby will only notice your signage for a second or two before deciding whether to step inside or keep walking, it’s essential that your message is simple enough to understand immediately.

Choose a distinctive color scheme

How obvious is your retail signage from a distance? One of the easiest ways to make your signage more visible is to use a distinctive color scheme that people can easily notice from far away. 

Some color combinations – black and white or red and white, for example – are ideal for standing out from the crowd. They’re easy to see, full of visual contrast and great for drawing attention to your business. 

As well as choosing a color scheme that’s easy to notice, it’s worth choosing a color that defines your business. This way, people will associate certain colors with your business over time as they view your retail signage.

Make sure that you don’t blend in

Who says your business needs to blend into its surroundings? Unless zoning laws forbid you from hanging unusual signs, there’s no reason not to use retail signage that stands out from its surroundings. 

From brightly colored signage to signs that have unusual dimensions, it’s easy to make your business stand out from its surroundings by deliberately using signage that doesn’t blend in. 

Before you design any retail signage, consider its surroundings. From contrasting materials to bright and powerful colors, it’s often worth designing signage that has little in common with its background to make a powerful statement.

There’s no need to be complicated

Another common small business marketing mistake is making retail signs with a message that’s just too complicated. The longer your message is, the longer it will take for people to read it and understand it as they walk by. 

Just like with design, it’s best to keep your message simple to prevent people from ignoring it out of lack of interest. A short, simple message will almost always result in your business generating more attention than a long and overly complex one. 

Try and shorten your marketing message to one sentence – or, if possible, just a few words. Remember that you only have a second or two to attract attention, and that a short message is far more likely to hook in potential customers than a complex one.

When most marketers think of retail signage, they think of instant sales, foot traffic and return on investments. While most people might associate signage with direct marketing, retail signage can also be extremely valuable for branding. 

Through effective design and copy, your retail signs can do more than just attract customers into your retail stores – they can also, over time, build a powerful and effective brand for your business. 

Would you like to learn more about the effect retail signs can have on branding? In this guide, we’ll share five simple but highly effective branding tips that you can use to get more from your store’s retail signage.

Use the same color scheme

When you see the colors red and blue together, what do you think of? Most people associate these two colors with Pepsi, and for good reason – the two colors are used heavily in Pepsi’s branding and advertising. 

Likewise, people associate yellow and black with Best Buy and red and white with Target as a result of these colors’ frequent use in their respective companies direct marketing and branding campaigns. 

Using the same color scheme in your business’s signage on a consistent basis is an excellent way to establish a brand. Whenever people see the colors used together, they will naturally associate it with your brand and business.

Always mention your name

There’s more to marketing than just producing an immediate response. The second goal of most marketing assets – a category that includes retail signage – is to make the product or company’s name familiar and recognizable. 

One of the best ways to familiarize people with your business is through effective use of repetition. By mentioning your business’s name – or the name of your latest product – you can increase its level of familiarity with your target audience. 

Do you use your brand and product names frequently in your retail signage? If not, you could be missing out on a lucrative and highly effective opportunity to set your business and brand apart from its competitors.

Keep using a consistent style

Throughout the 1960s, Volkswagen carried out one of the most effective print ad campaigns in history. The Think Small campaign made the Volkswagen Beetle into one of the world’s top-selling cars in little more than a single decade. 

The campaign worked for various reasons, one of which is that every advertisement was designed using a consistent, familiar style. As soon as readers noticed each ad, they immediately knew that it would talk about Volkswagen. 

Consistency is the key to effective branding, and there’s no better place to be highly consistent than in your retail signage. From in-store signs to street signage, use the same style in all of your signage and you’ll establish a recognizable brand.

Feature your logo prominently

How well does your target audience know your business? One of the first indicators that your brand is growing stronger is that more of your target customers recognize its logo – an event that occurs as a result of familiarity. 

The world’s most well-known logos – images like Nike’s swoosh and Apple’s bitten apple – aren’t recognizable just because of great design, but also because they are featured time and time again in their respective companies’ marketing materials. 

Does your retail signage prominently feature your company’s logo? Using your logo frequently in your retail signage and marketing materials is another fantastic way to improve brand recognition and strengthen your connection with customers.

Share your value proposition

What is your company’s value proposition? Every successful business, from a local bakery to a multinational company, has a clear statement of the value it provides to its customers – in short, a value proposition. 

If your business has a clear value proposition, it’s essential that you make it part of your promotional signage. Simplify your value proposition to a sentence – or, for a more complex value proposition, two sentences – so that it can be used in signage. 

Emphasizing the value your business can offer sets it apart from its competitors and engages your target audience. Over time, this results in a stronger brand and a much greater sense that your company can provide real value via its products or services.

From leading customers towards your top-selling items to promoting your loyalty program, custom retail displays can have a significant, measurable effect on your retail store’s sales.

Would you like to improve navigation within your store, increase the amount of time customers spend with you and improve your sales figures? Read on to learn more about how custom displays can help your retail store’s sales.

Guide customers through your store

In-store marketing is one of the most important yet frequently ignored aspects of retail success. Getting customers into your store is the first part of the challenge – encouraging them to take action and purchase something is the second.

One of the most important aspects of in-store marketing is ensuring customers can easily find the items they’re searching for within your store. Through effective use of custom displays, you can make navigating your retail store simple.

Use custom displays to list the contents of each aisle in your store and direct people once they’ve entered. You can also use custom displays to list specific sections and guide people towards the products they’re most interested in and likely to buy.

Improve loyalty program sign-ups

Does your retail store have a loyalty program? If so, you can use custom displays to improve your sign-up rate. If not, you should consider starting a loyalty program to encourage your existing customers to keep returning.

There are many ways to use custom displays to increase you loyalty program sign-up rate. You can market the program and collect registrations at the counter or add your website’s URL to the displays and register customers online.

Does your store target a technical audience? If your customers are tech-savvy, you can even use scannable QR codes to opt people into your loyalty program and email list in seconds, creating a valuable asset for your business to remarket itself to.

Lead customers to top-selling items

Over time, most retail businesses begin to generate the bulk of their earnings from a select few top-selling items – products that achieve sales figures that beat almost all of the other items in the store, often combined.

By directing customers towards these top-selling items, you can improve the chance of foot traffic turning into sales and significantly increase the amount of revenue you produce.

One way to do this is to establish a “top-selling items” section of your store and use custom displays to direct customers there. Another way is to highlight and promote your top-selling items within your custom displays to increase customer interest.

Promote your sale or special event

Does your retail store hold sales or special events? If you hold frequent sales, you can significantly increase customer awareness and improve foot traffic by using a custom display to market your upcoming sale.

Instead of just promoting upcoming sales through window posters and displays – most of which are seen by new customers – you can market to existing customers through in-store posters and custom displays.

List your upcoming sales, special events and interesting dates to draw interest and keep your existing customers coming back for more. Over time, your customer base will become immensely loyal, giving your business a valuable marketing asset.

Strengthen your business’s brand

Many small businesses – retail businesses in particular – for on direct marketing as a primary marketing strategy. This can fuel short-term sales, but it’s unlikely that a constant stream of direct marketing campaigns will give your business a real brand.

A brand, particularly a well-known brand, is an immensely valuable asset. With an excellent brand, your business will attract a loyal audience of returning customers without having to actively spend money on marketing campaigns.

Luckily, it’s easy to strengthen your brand using custom displays. Showcase your company’s identity and beliefs in its custom in-store displays – over time, they’ll become aspects of your brand that people naturally associate with your business.

Are you having trouble deciding on a color scheme for your retail signage? The right choice of colors can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your signage, with an excellent color scheme often resulting in a measurable increase in sales. 

A dull or uninteresting color scheme, on the other hand, can make even the finest of headlines or selling points go ignored or completely unnoticed by the vast majority of your target audience. 

Color is one of the most important elements of design. When you’re designing a sign to attract attention and encourage people to come into your retail store, it’s vital to choose colors that create the right type of response. 

From high-contrast classics like white and black to more elegant color schemes, in this guide, we’ll discuss three of the most effective color combinations that you can use in your retail signage.

Blue and white

Blue and white are two of the most versatile colors – or, in the case of white, shades – available to designers. Both light and dark blue look fantastic alongside white in a range of settings, from brochures and business cards to retail signage. 

Using blue and white in your signage is a great way to attract attention and create a powerful visual contrast without using a high-contrast combination that’s as intense and powerful as white and black. 

Blue text on a white background is highly readable, all the while without being too boring or plain. White text on a blue background stands out from its surroundings, setting your business’s signage apart from its competitors. 

As well as being a high-contrast color combination, blue and white look fantastic in an incredible range of settings, making the two colors a versatile choice for business branding as well as direct marketing.

White and black

When it comes to getting noticed, the key to success is often contrast. Whether they are used in a retail sign or a brochure, white and black are a powerful combination of shades that can have a powerful impact on prospective customers. 

Thanks to the incredible amount of contrast between white and black, signs that use these two shades stand out. Even from a distance, black text on a white background, or white text on a black background, is easy to read and extremely distinctive. 

Many web designers also argue that black-on-white text is easier to read on an LCD monitor, although opinions differ. Despite this, it’s undeniable that light-on-dark is an extremely powerful color scheme that commands attention. 

While the white and black color scheme is far from subtle and largely unsuitable for many businesses, it’s a powerful combination that can be highly effective for a direct marketing campaign or retail sign that just needs to be noticed.

Yellow and red

An international favorite of fast food chains, yellow and red are a powerful choice of colors that have several advantages. Yellow and red are both warm colors, as well as highly visible colors that can easily be spotted from a distance. 

Have you ever noticed that red and yellow are both used extensively by fast food chains? The reason for this is simple: red and yellow are so powerful that they’re easy to spot from roadways and side streets. 

They’re also welcoming colors that inspire action. Red is viewed by psychologists as a color that can stimulate the appetite. Likewise, yellow is associated with warmth, happiness and energy, making it an excellent choice for encouraging rapid action. 

Although yellow and red may not have the incredible contrast or black and white or blue and white, this color combination’s psychological effect makes it an excellent choice for brands that want to stand out and create a positive impression.

Does your business have a great value proposition? Being able to communicate the value your business can provide for its customers or clients is a major asset for any marketing campaign, whether it’s direct mail, digital, or in-store retail signage. 

A great value proposition separates your offer from the competition and sets your business apart, establishing why you’re the best choice within your category and encouraging prospective customers to take action. 

It’s also something that determines whether or not people will pay any attention to your marketing at all. Without a great value proposition, it’s unlikely that people will continue to read your in-store poster, retail signage or company brochure. 

Is your business using its value proposition effectively in its signage? In this guide, we’ll talk more about how your business can use its value proposition to make its retail signage more effective at achieving its marketing goals.

Keep it short and simple

If your business has a value proposition that’s long and complicated, you’ll need to shorten it in order to use it effectively in your retail signage. 

Long value propositions may be effective in technical brochures and items aimed at a detail-focused audience, but they’re often too demanding for the fast-paced, quick environment of retail signage. 

The shorter you can make your value proposition without weakening its message, the more effective it can be. Try to reduce your value proposition to one sentence and you’ll vastly increase its effectiveness in your retail signage. 

Here’s a great way to do this: start with your value proposition as it is now, then shorten it as much as possible without affecting its meaning. Once you’ve made it more compact, try removing more text until it’s short enough for one sentence.

Make it highly relatable

Many businesses make the mistake of marketing to the wrong audience using their retail signage. If you’re used to marketing to enterprise customers and just opened your own retail store, you’ll need to adjust your message for the new audience. 

Is your value proposition as relatable as it could be? An effective value proposition should be short enough to fit perfectly into your retail signage and relevant enough to draw immediate attention. 

What problems does your target audience face? How does your value proposition solve them? The greater the importance of the solution your product or service is capable of offering, the more effective its value proposition will be. 

Don’t know what your target audience values? Try polling your retail audience to learn more about the key selling points, unique benefits and value factors that you can use to increase the effectiveness of your retail signage.

Approach it from multiple angles

Even if your value proposition speaks about something your target audience has an interest in, it may not be effective. This is because your value proposition might use the wrong angle to approach your target audience. 

An audience of 100 people may find 100 different reasons to like a product. A sports car, for example, may appeal to some customers because of its performance, others because of its comfort and others still because of its looks. 

These are all different angles from which the same value can be marketed. To make your retail signage and marketing materials as effective as possible, it’s important to consider all possible angles. 

Does your retail signage cover your product or service’s value from a wide variety of angles that your target audience can relate to? If not, it’s time to look at new angles to make your offer stand out from the crowd and attract attention.

Are your posters, brochures, postcards and other marketing documents as simple as they could be? While simplicity may seem like an odd goal for marketing documents to aspire to, it’s often far more effective than a design that’s too complicated. 

From endless headlines to color schemes that are just too powerful for the eyes, an overwhelming number of brochures and other marketing documents feel too busy, from a visual perspective, to be effective. 

Is your brochure too busy? Do your prospective customers find it hard to discover its key message and call to action? Read on to learn five ways to do more with less by simplifying your brochures and making them more effective at the same time.

Shorten your headline

Many marketers prefer long headlines to short ones. One reason for this is a belief that longer headlines can include more detail than shorter ones, making them more appealing to prospective customers. 

This isn’t always true. A short and simple headline that immediately captures your product or service’s value is often far more effective than a longer one, even if it’s not quite as detailed. 

Could your headline be shorter? Use the KISS rule – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Often, a short and simple headline is more effective at capturing a prospective customer’s attention than a long one.

Stick to two or three colors

Does your brochure use more colors than it needs to? While two or three colors can be used to breathe life into the design of your brochure and create visual contrast, a brochure that uses too many colors can often look garish and confusing. 

As a general rule, your brochure design should never use more than three different colors. Different shades of similar colors, of course, and complementary colors, are fine. However, keep the wildly different or contrasting colors to a minimum. 

When you limit your color scheme to the bare essentials, you’ll actually find it much easier to create visual contrast in your brochure that attracts people’s attention and encourages them to continue reading.

Limit your use of images

Does your brochure design overuse images? Using an image or two to add some life to your brochure is a great idea and often a fantastic way to increase its engagement level and conversion rate. 

However, using too many images can make the design of your brochure feel a little bit too cluttered and confusing. With multiple images, it can become hard for your readers and prospective customers to work out where they should look first. 

Try to limit your use of images to only include visual elements that are essential for delivering your message. Ask yourself if any images can be removed without having a negative effect on your sales message – if some could be, it’s best to remove them.

Stick to black and white

Have you ever tried producing a brochure using a black and white color scheme? It may seem difficult to create a visually interesting brochure using black and white on their own, but it’s actually very possible. 

Black and white, along with select use of color images and photographs, can make your brochure stand out from the crowd and attract attention that may otherwise not come its way. 

Try using white-on-black – for example, white text on a black background – to really stand out and set your brochure apart as an authoritative document that truly can’t be ignored by your target audience.

Keep your copy short and sweet

It’s easy to use too many words to describe your product or service, especially if you are marketing something that’s difficult to explain in a single paragraph. Big walls of text may be great for being descriptive, but they can often lower reader engagement. 

The reason is simple: most people, when given the choice between reading a short and interesting paragraph and a long and dull page, will pick the shorter and better of the two options. 

Try shortening your copy and improving its focus by removing unnecessary details and “fluff” writing. The more focused and simple your message is, the more likely it is that your target audience will read it in full.

Is your retail store marketing itself as effectively as it could? Many retail stores use direct mail, digital advertising and other marketing methods very effectively, all the while ignoring the immense power or retail signage and posters. 

When used effectively, in-store posters can increase your retail store’s revenue, lead to higher sales of certain items and help you increase the average amount spent per customer in your store. 

Would you like to learn how to use wall posters to your advantage? Read on to learn four ways that you can use wall posters to improve your retail store’s sales, generate more interest from customers and create a powerful brand.

Showcase your top-selling items

What are your retail store’s top-selling items? Every store has items that sell better than others, and directing customers to them is a fantastic way to improve sales and produce more revenue. 

By showcasing your top-selling items using wall posters, you can encourage people that are already in your store to increase the size of their purchase by adding new items to their shopping carts. 

The effect of a poster or two promoting your top items – particularly items that are affordable – can be huge. Try promoting your most popular upsell items using wall posters to improve your retail store’s revenue per customer.

Direct customers to sale areas

Is your store having a sale? Sales are great marketing tools for attracting new people to your retail store, but customers will often only spend a few moments viewing the most heavily discounted items before leaving. 

A great way to use a sale to your advantage is to hang wall posters that direct people throughout your store from a sale area. Attract people using a sale, then direct them to view your most popular products or top-selling, high-margin items. 

Many customers who’ve visited your store to purchase sale items will add additional items to their shopping carts this way, increasing your store’s total sales and leading to a higher per-customer average spend.

Mention your great post-sale support

You don’t need to mention specific products to improve your retail store’s sales with wall posters. One great way to increase your retail store’s revenue is to mention the great post-sale support your business offers. 

If you offer a fantastic warranty for many items, mention it in your wall posters. If your staff have excellent technical skills and product knowledge, talk about their ability to troubleshoot common problems and provide hands-on support. 

Great customer service and post-sale support is often all it takes to convert someone from interested in a product into ready to purchase. Mention your post-sale support using wall posters to highlight the huge value your company offers its customers.

Promote your loyalty club offer

Does your retail business have a loyalty club? Loyalty clubs are great ways to keep customers coming back for repeat purchases, whether through a recurring discount or through a points-based shopping system. 

If your retail store has a loyalty club, promote it using wall posters so that shoppers enquire when they purchase something from your store. Mentioning the offers and rewards your program provides is an excellent way to increase total sales. 

Not only do loyalty clubs increase customer loyalty – they also give you a direct line of contact with your target audience, allowing your retail store to deliver targeted marketing communications to its customers and increase recurring sales.

Business cards are fantastic marketing tools, but many business owners ignore them in favor of marketing methods. For B2B businesses, few tools will help close deals as much as a highly effective business card. 

Despite the incredible effectiveness of business cards, many business owners treat their business cards as simple contact tools – cards that list their phone number or email address with very little more. 

With the right combination of design and content, your business card can be more than just a tool for sharing your communication information – it can be a marketing asset that brings in new customers and clients for your business. 

Read on to discover the five elements of a successful business card that separate it from the rest, cause it to bring in a massive amount of sales leads and turn it into a powerful marketing asset for its owner.

A clear purpose

What is the purpose of your business card? Is it designed to help you kick-start new relationships with prospective customers and clients, or to establish yourself as an expert in your industry? 

Business cards can serve a wide range of purposes, and it’s important to design each and every business card with one clear purpose – whether it’s sales or credibility for your brand – in mind. 

Just like marketing campaigns with multiple different objectives rarely success, it’s hard for a business card that tries to do too much to work. Keep it simple and focus on one clear purpose or objective at a time.

A great description

Does your business card clearly describe what you do? You’ll give out most of your business cards at trade shows, networking events and other settings where people may also receive business cards from other people. 

This makes it essential that your business card clearly describes who you are and what you can do. If your business card lacks any description, people will forget its purpose alongside the other business cards they collected from other people. 

Keep your description short and simple. If you’re a web designer, talk about your web design services. If you’re an accountant, mention the type of accountancy that you specialize in. A short, simple description is often all it takes to be remembered.

A value proposition

Does your business card clearly state the value you can offer? Along with a fantastic description, your business card needs to include a clear statement of the value that you can offer your customers or clients. 

State your value proposition, whether it’s the highest quality, the fastest delivery or the best pricing. This differentiates you from other people or companies that might offer similar products or services. 

The best value propositions, like the best headlines or descriptions, are short and simple. Since your business card is small, you’ll need to condense your business’s core value proposition into a five to six word statement.

Several contact options

As fashionable as it might be to exclude your email address and phone number in favor of a scannable QR code, doing so will cost you a huge number of leads, since most people would rather call or email than scan your contact information. 

Offer multiple contact options on your business card, from your phone and email to your instant messenger contact. If there are any contact methods that are specific to your industry, make sure you include them. 

It’s also worth including the URL of your Facebook Page and Twitter account if you work in a high-tech field. Today, many people prefer to connect using social media than through traditional contact methods.

In the hands of your target audience, a business card or brochure can be a powerful marketing tool. Business cards and brochures alike can reignite a prospect’s interest in your business, strengthen your brand and even close lucrative deals. 

Unfortunately, however, getting your business’s marketing materials into the right person’s hand can be significantly more challenging than you’d think, especially if it’s something you’d like to do en masse. 

Luckily, there are solutions available to make your business’s marketing materials more appealing to prospective customers. Read on to learn five ways to encourage prospects to take your brochures, business cards and other marketing items.

Offer a special discount with the brochure

Have you ever received a brochure from a business with a voucher inside? There’s a reason this technique is so popular with marketers, particularly small businesses: it works, often really well. 

Giving away a discount or special offer with a brochure, business card or sales letter is a great way to give your target customers a reason to read your business’s content and keep your marketing materials. 

It also gives prospective customers a reason to contact your business or visit your retail store – the discount you’ve offered. Think of a great offer that you can give as part of your brochure or business card and put it into action.

Include detailed, engaging information

How detailed and informative are your marketing materials? Many businesses hand out brochures, sales guides and other marketing items that are sleekly designed but full of generic, unengaging information. 

If your brochure has something interesting to say, people are far more likely to take it, as well as far more likely to keep it. Stand out from the crowd of dull, boring and largely worthless marketing brochures by talking about something interesting. 

You could talk about your company’s unique history and story, the most exciting new elements of your product or service, or simply share a story about how your business has helped its customers in the past.

Use an attention-catching headline

Just like great headlines are essential for effective retail signage, good headlines are a key component of any successful brochure. The headline will sell prospects on the value of your brochure and encourage them to read past the front cover. 

Ask an engaging, interesting question or lead with a provocative statement and you will catch people’s attention and draw their interest. Use a generic headline and it’s far more likely that your brochure will be passed over in favor of another. 

Attention-grabbing headlines are great ways to stand out, especially if your business operates in a crowded market with lots of competition. The more different you are, the greater the positive effects for your business’s marketing efforts.

Pre-sell to customers for better results

Have you ever attended a trade show? By the end of the event, you were probably carrying around more brochures, business cards and product manuals than you’re capable of reading in a year, let alone an afternoon. 

Trade shows and other industry events are great marketing platforms, but it’s easy for attendees to feel overloaded with brochures, business cards and other swag by the end of the event. 

Make it clear to your prospective customers that your marketing materials offer real value by pre-selling to them – either through a sales pitch or a simple conversation – before handing them your brochure or business card.

Make your business card a hot item

Most business cards are extremely generic – they list a person’s name, position and contact information with very little else. Some business cards, however, are unique and remarkable, either due to their design or their content. 

From minimalistic business cards that tell people to Google you for information to ultra-complex business cards that tell a story, sometimes the best way to make sure people remember you is to stand out from the crowd. 

Turn your business card into a hot item – something people will want to show their colleagues when the event is over – and you’ll massively increase its retention rate while giving your business the marketing exposure it needs to thrive.

Is your retail signage not achieving the positive effect on sales you’d hoped for? It’s far from uncommon for signage that seems perfect to fall flat, whether it’s due to an ineffective message or a color scheme that causes it to blend into the background. 

One of the most common reasons for the failure of a corporate signage campaign is an ineffective, unengaging headline. The headline is the first part of your brochure, sign or menu that people will read, so it’s important to make sure it’s bulletproof. 

From understanding your audience’s needs to clearly communicating the value of your product, service or offer, a great headline needs to achieve several things at once – something that many marketers struggle to do. 

If you’re interested in improving the results of your retail signage or brochures, enhancing sales and revenue in your retail store and vastly increasing customer engagement, read on to learn how to write great direct marketing headlines.

Understand your target audience’s needs

One of the most common marketing mistakes is to focus on the features of an offer, product or service instead of its benefits. For signage, this means writing a headline that includes what you think is a selling point, not what actually is a selling point. 

The best headlines directly relate to the needs of your customers. A headline for a tax preparation service relates to the customer’s need to file a tax return on time; retail signage for a discount sale related to people’s need for a specific product. 

Does your headline directly address your target audience’s needs? Many headlines communicate value but don’t tap into needs and desires. Think about the key needs of your audience and make sure they’re incorporated into your headline.

Write for attention, not for an instant sale

Another common marketing mistake is to assume that your headline will “close the deal” and encourage customers to purchase something. Headlines don’t sell on their own – instead, they attract attention and encourage people to continue reading. 

It’s your copy and call to action and produce sales, not your headline. In the A-I-D-A sales formula (Attention, Interest, Decision and Action), the headline’s goal is only to achieve the first step in the process: attention. 

Your headline should immediately attract attention, then encourage people to keep reading. Use a short, simple message that attracts attention and let your copy focus on creating interest and desire, then closing the sale.

Clearly communicate your offer’s value

What value do you have to offer? Another common headline mistake is forgetting to mention the value that your product or service offers to its audience, particularly its value relative to other offerings from competitors. 

How is your product or service better than offerings from competitors? If your offer is the best in its category, how can you communicate this fact in your headline? The key to attracting attention is often differentiating your offer from its competitors. 

If your product or service is the best in its category, don’t be shy about saying it in your headline. Talk about how you’re the best, then use your copy to explain why you’re the best in your category to your target audience and build real interest.

Keep it short, sweet and as simple as possible

For decades, direct marketers have stated – often without any substantial evidence – that long headlines are more effective than short ones. In many cases, the opposite is true – short headlines are often far more effective at attracting attention. 

Remember that the goal of your headline isn’t to close the deal, but simply to keep people reading. The shorter and simpler your headline is, the easier it is for people to digest its message and move on to your marketing copy. 

Keep your headline short, sweet and simple. Although it might take some editing to create the perfect headline for your retail sign or brochure, you should easily be able to communicate your message and attract attention in 10 words or less.

Does your business market its products and services using brochures? An effective brochure can produce a large quantity of sales or leads for your business, making it an important goal to ensure that your brochures get into prospects’ hands. 

One of the most effective ways to give out brochures is by placing your brochures in a brochure holder. This puts your brochures right in front of prospects as they shop in your retail store, visit your trade show booth or dine in your restaurant. 

But where should your business mount its brochure holders? Is it better to place a brochure holder on the counter, where it’s visible to most customers, or mount it on the wall, where it’s out of the way and easier to reach? 

Read on to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of mounting a brochure holder on the counter or on the wall, as well as the most effective option for your business.

Why should you mount your brochure holder on the wall?

There are several advantages to mounting your brochure holder on the wall instead of keeping it on a counter or tabletop. The biggest advantage of keeping a brochure holder on the wall is that it’s less likely to get in the way of customer transactions. 

If your café or restaurant only has a small counter, adding a brochure holder could take up valuable counter space. This can make dealing with customers a challenge for your business and result in longer queues and slower traffic at your counter. 

Another advantage of mounting your brochure holder on the wall is that it’s at eye level for most people. Many people miss countertop brochure holders as they sit at below the level of most people’s eyesight, requiring people to look down to notice. 

One disadvantage of mounting your brochure holder on the wall is that it could be less accessible. This is particularly true if your counter is far from the walls of your retail store or restaurant, requiring customers to reach in order to take a brochure.

Why should you keep your brochure holder on the counter?

Your retail store or restaurant’s checkout counter is the classic location to keep a brochure holder, and for good reason – it’s the one part of your store that every customer will pass by as they exit. 

There are several advantages to keeping your brochure holder on the counter. The first is that every paying customer – an audience that’s likely to be most receptive to further marketing efforts – is going to pass it. 

A second advantage is that keeping brochures on your counter, where staff are close at hand, allows your staff to give away brochures to customers as a type of upsell – a simple addition to your sales process that can result in greater customer loyalty.

The disadvantage, of course, is that keeping your brochure holder on the counter is going to take up some space. This can be a problem if your retail store, restaurant or café is small and lacks the space to process customer transactions easily.

Which solution is best for your store or restaurant?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both options – mounting your brochure holder on a wall versus storing it on the counter. Each option offers several benefits for some businesses and marketing weaknesses for others. 

The best option for your retail store, café or restaurant depends on the amount of space that’s available on your checkout countertop, the type of audience that you are targeting with your brochures and the design and layout of your store.

From café counters to public spaces, donation boxes can generate revenue for your charity or nonprofit organization in a huge range of spaces – provided they have an effective, eye-catching and engaging design. 

Most people encounter a wide range of donation and tip boxes throughout their day, ignoring most and donating money to the few that catch their attention and present a persuasive, engaging and effective message. 

Below are four simple but effective tips that you can use to make your donation box one of the engaging, effective few. Try one, two, three or all four to help increase the amount of donations your box receives and improve your nonprofit’s funding.

Use colors that create plenty of contrast

Since donation boxes are ubiquitous on café counters, most people glance past them without paying much attention. This means that your donation box, no matter how great its message might be, is rarely noticed by most people. 

In many ways, this is similar to advertising fatigue – a phenomenon where people pay less attention to each individual advertisement they notice due to the massive number of advertisements they come into contact with over the course of a day. 

The best way to make your donation box stand out and get noticed is to use colors that attract attention. Choose a high-contrast color combination that makes your donation box stand out and you’ll increase the number of people that notice it.

Place it in a central, noticeable location

Where is your donation box placed? The key to increasing the amount of attention your donation box generates – and, as a result, the amount of cash it receives – is to place it in an obvious, high-traffic location. 

The classic donation box location – on a café or restaurant counter – is a good one, but it’s not always the best. Other great locations include on information desks in a hotel or shopping center, or on each table in your restaurant. 

Study foot traffic patterns throughout your restaurant, café or space to learn which areas receive the most traffic. You can then place your donation box in an area that receives a lot of passersby, increasing the amount of attention it receives.

Use an eye-catching, engaging headline

Donation boxes aren’t all that different from direct mail letters or brochures – they need an engaging headline, persuasive copy and enough images to attract people’s attention and convince them to take action. 

Does your donation box have an engaging, eye-catching headline. A great headline should communicate, in just a few words, exactly why people should pay attention and leave their change in your donation box. 

Ask a thought-provoking question or explain how important their donation is for your cause to attract people’s attention. The more engaging your headline is, the greater its positive impact on donations will likely be.

Explain what people are donating to

Today, there are thousands of nonprofit organizations and charities competing for people’s attention and cash. How does your cause stand out from the crowd as one that people should pay attention to? 

Copywriting for a donation box goes beyond crafting a great headline. You also need to clearly explain what people are donating to so. This helps increase their feeling of contributing to a worthy cause when they donate. 

If your message isn’t clearly defined, few people will take action and support your nonprofit organization. Use your copy to explain what people are donating to and you’ll increase the number of people that take action and give.

Do you have an engaging headline?

Is your call to action easy to act on?

Are your images relevant to your offer?

Is your copy easy for prospects to read?

With the right combination of a great booth, a talented sales team and a fantastic brochure, your business can generate a huge amount of sales from each and every trade show it attends. 

Trade shows are a relatively expensive marketing channel, with large initial costs for your business. There’s the cost of renting floor space, designing and building a booth, training your sales team and giving away free marketing materials.

Despite these costs, trade shows can produce an incredible return on investment for your business with the right approach. The key to success at a trade show is often an excellent brochure that keeps selling to your prospects after the show ends. 

Are you struggling to design a great trade show brochure? From calls to action to an excellent offer, read on to discover the five most important elements of a successful, effective trade show brochure.

A relevant, high-value offer

Is your offer relevant to your target audience? One of the most common mistakes that businesses make at trade shows is offering something that their prospective customers already have or have no need for. 

Your offer is the key of your brochure – without a good offer, no amount of copy is going to make prospects interested in your business. Make sure your offer is highly relevant to your target audience in order to truly attract their interest. 

Can’t think of a good offer? One of the most effective ways to come up with a good offer is to survey your target audience to learn more about their needs, then tailor your offer based on your findings.

An eye-catching headline

Most trade show attendees leave each event with a thick stack of business cards and brochures. Typically, only the most engaging and persuasive of these brochures are subject to any attention. 

It’s important to remember that your brochure doesn’t exist in isolation – when you give a brochure to a prospective customer, you’re competing for their attention and need to be better at attracting it than your competitors. 

Use an eye-catching headline that clearly lists the benefits of your offer to prospects in order to catch their attention. Remember that the objective of your headline isn’t to sell your product, but simply to make prospects pay attention to your message.

Benefits-focused copy

Does your copy clearly express the benefits of your product or service, or is it most focused on your unique features and technology? One of the most common mistakes made by direct marketers is assuming that prospects care about features. 

While some do, most don’t. Instead, the majority of prospects will be motivated to take action after reading your brochure if it communicates the benefits your offer provides, rather than just its features. 

Before you print any promotional brochure, make sure it communicates the two or three biggest benefits of your product or service, as opposed to simply listing all of its key features and technology.

A persuasive call to action

Once prospects reach the end of your brochure, are they aware of the next steps to take in order to claim your offer? Many brochures list the benefits of their product or service, only to leave prospects with no idea of how to take action. 

This is where a call to action comes into play: it converts prospects from desiring your product or service to taking action in order to claim it. It changes the focus of your marketing from educating prospects to encouraging them to take action. 

Does your brochure contain a persuasive call to action? Your call to action should make it easy for any prospect to take action and claim your offer, whether it’s over the phone, online or at your nearest retail location.

Highly relevant images

Brochures are visual marketing tools – sales channels that depend just as much on great images as they do on great copy. If your brochure is devoid of images, it won’t achieve such a positive impact on sales as it otherwise would. 

Effective images are both eye-catching and highly relevant – outstanding enough to attract attention, but relevant enough to your business to communicate the value of using your product or service. 

Does your brochure contain highly relevant, eye-catching images? If your brochure isn’t visually appealing and interesting, it may not even be read by the majority of your prospects.

For many marketers, the trope “bigger is better” is more than a useful idea – it’s the guiding principle behind every campaign. While big signage is usually more effective for catching attention than small signage, it’s not always the best choice. 

A strategically designed small sign with the right message, when used properly, can often outperform its significantly larger counterparts and generate a huge volume of foot traffic, leads and sales for your retail business. 

If your business has limited space to advertise and needs to get the best bang for its buck, there’s no need to worry. Apply these five tactics to get the best sales results, even from a small retail sign.

Keep your message extremely simple

The simpler your message, the more easily you can tell your target audience what to do in a limited amount of space. Keep your message extremely simple so that there’s no ambiguity about what people should do after seeing your retail sign. 

Aim for three to five words in your signage – just enough to tell people what you’ve got to offer. Good message ideas include a statement of value of a description of the products or services your business offers.

Don’t ask for something – tell people what to do

When you ask for something in your marketing – for example, by asking people if they might like what you’re offering – you force them to think instead of making them act quickly. 

This can cost your retail business interest and foot traffic, particularly if you only have a limited amount of space to deliver your message. Instead of asking people what they think or how they feel, tell them how to act in your signage.

Clearly communicate your offer’s value

What value does your business offer? The key point of your marketing message – whether it’s a discount sale or a unique selling point of your business – should be clear in explaining the value that your business offers. 

Value could mean being cheaper than your competitors and offering better value for money. It could mean selling a higher quality product. Focus on communicating your offer’s value in your signage, as people are motivated to act by good value.

Use icons and symbols to communicate in a small space

Since you only have a limited amount of space to communicate your message, it can be more effective to communicate your advertising message through symbols than by using text alone. 

From arrows pointing towards your store to cut-price symbols to showcase value, it can be surprisingly easy to communicate a long and complicated message simply by using the right combination of descriptive symbols.

Choose an eye-catching, high-contrast color scheme

The more colorful your retail signs are, the more they’ll stand out. Since you have a limited amount of space in which you can deliver your message, it’s important that people can notice it and easily respond to it. 

Use high-contrast color combinations like black and white, blue and white or yellow and black to make sure your signage stands out. A great way to make a sign pop out from its surroundings is to use a bright, colorful border around its edges.

How can your business generate interest with a small sign?

Marketing your retail business using small signs might seem impossible, but it’s an interesting exercise in breaking your marketing message down to its basics that any business can benefit from. 

Simplify your message, use symbols to communicate value and encourage people to act, and make your signage visible with a high-contrast color scheme. This way, even a small retail sign can have a potentially massive impact.

One of the biggest challenges for many businesses is attracting Generation Y. While traditional marketers may struggle to attract Millennials, it’s surprisingly easy for a young, exciting brand to stand out and attract a teenage or 20-something audience. 

If your retail store targets a young audience and wants to brand itself as a place for younger people, adapting your signage is a great way to attract a new audience and stand out from the crowd. 

The four tips below range from easy to implement to slightly more complicated but amazingly effective. If your business targets a Millennial audience, try implementing one, two or all four of them for better marketing results.

Emphasize your store’s online presence

One of the easiest ways to build a relationship with your Millennial target audience is to encourage prospective customers to connect and interact with your retail store online. 

Instead of just listing your business’s name in its signage, provide the URL of your company’s Facebook Page or Twitter account. In short, make it as easy as possible for prospective customers to find you online. 

This way, your store can keep in touch with its target audience through Facebook updates and tweets. Over time, this can help you build a loyal audience that’s likely to return to your store or purchase products online.

Don’t overuse memes and online culture

One of the easiest ways to connect with a young audience is to use the same memes and language. However, this marketing method can easily backfire, especially when it’s used in a format as permanent as a retail sign. 

Instead of trying to appropriate Millennial culture, focus on communicating all of your brand’s values to a young audience. Showcase your product as part of a full lifestyle rather than as a single item or items in isolation. 

Show prospective customers how your products can benefit them through your retail signage. This is a far more effective strategy than attaching memes, youth culture and other movements to your signage in an attempt to stand out.

Keep your branding sleek and simple

There’s no need to make your branding complicated. The most effective signage is often the simplest – often, it’s as little as a sign listing what your business can offer and how people can benefit from it. 

No matter which audience you’re targeting with your signage, make sure you focus on the fundamentals of great signage. Have a message, have a call to action and have an explanation of how people will benefit from your product or service. 

Although Millennials love to shop online and take part in communities, the old rules of marketing haven’t gone out of style. Focus on the fundamentals of great signage and you’ll achieve a great result, even on a young, digital audience.

Avoid traditional, old-fashioned design

It might sound overly simple, but it’s true: one of the best ways to make sure your brand feels youthful and exciting is to avoid using traditional design elements, such as old-fashioned fonts or color schemes, in your retail signage. 

From serif fonts to old-fashioned marketing taglines, make sure your business has none of the 20th century marketing staples in its signage. Instead, go with a modern design that brands your business as something new and exciting. 

It’s important that your business has the products or culture to back up its image, as modern signage is unlikely to make a very traditional business seem more relevant to a young audience.

Does your business appeal to Gen Y?

Marketing to Generation Y can seem difficult, but it’s actually much easier than most businesses imagine. Use the four tips above to create signage that’s highly relevant to a young audience and your business may stand out as an exciting youth brand.

How integrated are your retail business’s marketing campaigns? When you deliver a consistent, easily recognizable marketing message and look on a range of platforms, people will rapidly become more aware of your business. 

Integrated marketing is the practice of using an integrated look and message – for example, a single color scheme and value proposition – on a wide range of different marketing channels, from print media to online display ads and retail signage. 

The more consistent your message is, the greater the synergy between channels and the bigger the results for your business. Read on to learn how to create consistently effective advertising and signage for any marketing channel.

Keep it consistent in every possible way

The key to creating synergy between different marketing channels – for example, a print campaign to promote your retail store – is to keep your style and message as consistent as possible between different platforms. 

The more closely your messages and designs match, the more familiar people will become with your brands. As they become more familiar with your brand, they’re also likely to trust your business more and view it as a dependable choice. 

Staying consistent in your marketing is simple. Decide on one color scheme and use it for all of your branding. Keep typefaces, styles and messaging consistent across all platforms so that your look, feel and message is the same everywhere.

Use simple, highly readable typefaces

It’s easy to create readable text when you’ve got an entire billboard to fill, but it’s far more of a challenge to communicate your business’s message within the confines of a small print media ad. 

Since integrated marketing depends on communicating the same message across a wide range of platforms, it’s important that your message is easy to read, no matter what the setting might be. 

Choose a simple message that people can understand in any setting, then use a font pack that’s easy to read. Remember that your message will be viewed at size and in a small newspaper ad, making flexibility and readability essential.

Avoid using situation-specific colors

Situation-specific colors are colors that only make sense in certain settings. As an example, a bright red sign might stand out against a gray building, but it if doesn’t match your business’s brand, its value is debatable. 

Creating synergy between different marketing channels is all about crafting a good message and a consistent look. One of the most important elements of consistency for any design is color – particularly the color profile used in your advertising. 

Choose colors that look good in any situation, not just in specific situations where a certain element includes the look of one color alone. This way, you’ll be able to use the same color profile in all of your business’s marketing, increasing familiarity.

Create a message that works anywhere

Just like it’s important to choose a color profile that works in any setting, it’s equally as important to create a message that works anywhere. Does your message make as much sense in a newspaper as it does on a large sign beside your retail store? 

When you’re consistent with your messaging, the value of the message increases at an incredible pace. This is because people are exposed to the same message over the course of your campaign, making them more likely to remember it. 

For the best results, it’s essential that your business chooses a message that works in any marketing environment. Does your marketing message work anywhere, or is it only compelling, engaging and interesting in a certain setting?

Great signage can make or break a retail business. When your retail store’s signage is eye-catching and effective, it’s surprisingly easy to generate attention and attract a large volume of customers.  

One of the most common signage-related questions is “What information should be included on our retail signage?” It’s often quite difficult to strike a balance between listing too much, and creating a cluttered sign, and listing too little.  

From your business’s phone number to its website URL, working out what to add to your retail sign and what to remove can be tough. Read on to discover four elements that you definitely should include in your company’s retail signage.

Your company’s logo

Does your business have a logo? A surprisingly high number of small businesses are lacking a logo, often due to the belief that a logo just isn’t necessary until a business reaches a certain size. 

Your logo is the first thing most people will remember about your business, making it essential that it’s clearly displayed in its signage. If your business doesn’t have its own logo, make designing one your first marketing priority. 

Make your logo as visible as possible in your signage, as brand familiar should be an important priority for your business. Over time, people will easily remember your business’s logo due to repetition, even if they never visit your store.

Your website URL

It’s 2015, and commerce is no longer something that’s exclusively offline. Even as a small business, it’s important to make people aware of your online presence to build a strong relationship with your target audience and community. 

List your company’s website URL in your signage so that it’s easy for people to visit you online. A large number of people that pass your store in their vehicles or on foot may follow up by researching your business online. 

This is particularly important if you offer products and services online. A “lost sale” due to a customer driving past your store can be regained by offering great deals on products and services through your business’s website.

A great call to action

What is the goal of your retail signage? Most businesses hope to inspire action with their retail signage by encouraging people to place orders, enquire inside or enter into their shop and purchase a product. 

The key to achieving action is a call to action – a strong statement telling passersby what to do after reading your signage. A call to action can be simple – such as “Come on in” or specific, such as a call to action related to a certain deal or offer. 

It’s important that your retail signage features a call to action, as signage without a call to action rarely encourages people to visit your store. Use a straightforward and simple message to encourage people to act and enter into your retail store.

A value proposition

What value does your business offer? How does it help people? People are naturally drawn to businesses and people that can help them get ahead in life, whether it’s by selling a unique and helpful product or by offering a useful service. 

Your business’s value proposition is a statement of how it helps people. This can be a direct explanation of the value that your company offers or a specific benefit that your product or service has for customers. 

When you state your value proposition in your retail signage, you encourage people to take action. Backed by a clear benefit of visiting your store, they’re far more likely to enter and browse the products you have available.

Have you ever spotted a recognizable sign from several hundred yards away? There is a simple reason you recognize signs from big companies and forget others: many of the world’s biggest companies have mastered designing for memorability. 

From McDonald’s to Citibank, many of the world’s largest companies design their signage and branding items not to stand out from the crowd, but to make it easier for potential customers to remember them. 

They do this using a number of techniques, ranging from basic marketing ideas to certain color choices. Read on to learn how your business can use the same tactics as the world’s leading companies to produce more memorable signage.

They keep everything simple

From fast food chains to retail stores, the world’s biggest brands all obey one rule in their retail signage design: simplicity first. Almost all large businesses use extremely simple sign designs in order to make their retail signs more memorable. 

Keep your signage – and the rest of your company’s branding – as simple as possible so that it’s easy to remember. People are far more likely to remember a simple logo than a complicated sign with several different messages.

They design for memorability

Because the world’s most well-known corporate logos are designed for simplicity, they tend to be easy to remember. Large companies know the immense value that return customers offer, and as such focus on being remembered. 

How can your business make its signage more memorable? From bold colors to a simple logo that sticks in people’s memories, use design elements to ensure your signage is as easy as possible for people to notice and memorize.

They don’t waste any space

Have you ever seen any wasted space in a big company’s signage? While it’s vital that your signage isn’t cluttered, it’s also important that you avoid wasting space that could be used to effectively communicate your company’s message. 

White space is essential for breaking up the different elements of your signage, but it shouldn’t be overused. Use as much space as possible to get the biggest possible impact from each of your retail signs.

They use highly visible colors

The reason you notice signs for shops such as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s from miles away is because they’re designed for visibility. High-contrast color combinations are often all it takes to make signage visible from an incredible distance. 

How visible is your signage from a distance? Choosing a color combination that can stand out from far away makes your signage easier for people to see, and therefore significantly easier to remember.

They design with action in mind

How action-focused is your signage? Great signs not only communicate a message and stand out from the background – they’re also designed and written to deliver a very specific message to their target audience. 

From encouraging people to visit you retail store to pointing them towards your company’s website, make sure all of your signs are designed with action in mind, since people will remember the action each sign prompts before anything else.

Drawing people’s attention to menu items and encouraging orders can be difficult in the dark, crowded and often loud environment of a bar or nightclub. Thankfully, it’s surprisingly simple using table tents and well designed menus. 

Table tents are special menu holders that sit atop each table or countertop in your bar or nightclub, making it easy for customers to view dishes and learn about what is available. 

Does your restaurant, bar or nightclub use table tents? Read on to learn four ways that your business can use table tents to increase orders, encourage customers to take action and increase its sales revenue.

Design from the top-left down, just like you would for a book

Did you know that people read menus from the top-left down? Although one of the most common menu design beliefs of the 20th century was that the top-right corner was the most viewed, the reality is most people read menus just like books. 

This means that the content in the upper-left corner of your table tent will usually receive the most attention. From here, people scan downwards, then right into the second column once they’ve finished the first. 

Use this to your advantage by placing your top-selling items in the top-left corner of your table tent’s content. This ensures they’ll be viewed by everyone, resulting in a greater amount of orders and revenue for your business.

Make sure your menu is available on every table and counter area

Table tents are fantastic sales tools for bars and nightclubs, but only if they’re used on all tables and countertops. When people can’t access a menu to learn about the dishes that are available, it’s unlikely that they’ll place an order. 

Make sure every table and countertop in your bar, restaurant or nightclub has all of the relevant promotional material on top. For readability, you may need to use both table tents and menu holders so that customers can easily access all of your content. 

If your bar or nightclub has a large menu, consider using both table tents and menu holders. For maximum visibility, you can spread your menu over both by listing the specials and top-selling dishes on a table tent, and other items in the menu.

Place your top-selling items in boxes for faster, easier customer orders

The key to running an effective, profitable bar or nightclub is to focus on the 20% of menu items that generate 80% of revenue. For most bars, this means a certain list of cocktails, draft beers and house wines. 

One of the easiest ways to draw attention to top-selling dishes is to list them inside a box on your menu. For a table tent, you can highlight the top half of the menu to list your top-selling items and maximize their visibility. 

Other ways to draw attention to top-selling items include using a bold or underlined typeface, increasing the font size for better visibility and only listing a few items in a table tent to increase order frequency.

Use color, contrast and great design to make your table tents stand out

How well does your bar or restaurant’s marketing stand out from the crowd? In the dark, noisy environment of a bar or nightclub, it’s important that your menu is easy to read and highly visible. 

Use bright, strong colors in your menu’s design to make it visible from anywhere on the table. You can also use heavy contrast – such as a black background with white text on top of it – to further increase visibility. 

These design techniques not only make your menu more visible – they also improve readability, making it far easier for customers to scan and read your menu, even in a low light environment.

The design of your restaurant’s menu can have a surprisingly large impact on how much attention diners pay to your dishes and drinks, as well as the amount they’re willing to spend in your restaurant. 

Just like a good salesperson can be the difference between selling large amounts of products and selling nothing at all, a good menu can be the difference between your restaurant generating a profit or achieving little financial success. 

Your restaurant’s menu is, in effect, a salesperson for your entire restaurant. Get its design right and you’ll generate a greater amount of income and encourage diners to return to your restaurant more frequently. 

Are you not sure where to start with your restaurant’s menu design? Follow the five simple but effective tips listed below to improve your restaurant’s menu design and get diners to pay more attention to your best dishes.

Establish your restaurant’s personality right away

Every restaurant, café or bar has its own unique personality. Is your restaurant a sleek, upmarket dining destination or a friendly place where people can meet and enjoy food together? 

Establishing your restaurant’s personality early makes it easier for people to get a feel for its menu. You can use design elements like color, typefaces and graphics to quickly establish your restaurant’s personality entirely visually. 

When you establish your restaurant’s personality right away, people will instantly understand its atmosphere and feel. This often results in diners ordering dishes at faster speeds and increases overall spending.

Use a reasonably large, easily readable typeface

Although you may be able to read a small typeface, not all of your diners can read small text. Use a large typeface so that your text is easy to read and avoid using any fonts that are overly complicated and difficult to decipher. 

Remember that the more people can read on your menu, the more likely they are to order several dishes. Make your menu as easy to read as possible to give people the chance to understand every item that’s listed. 

If you use long item descriptions and list each dish’s ingredients in detail, you can make use of smaller fonts to free up space. However, avoid using text that requires readers to squint and strain in order to understand your menu.

Use boxes and highlighting to draw attention to top-selling items

What are your restaurant’s top-performing items? Every restaurant or café has a few select dishes that produce the bulk of its revenue and are ordered most often over time. 

If your restaurant has several top-performing items that you’d like to promote, it’s easy to draw attention to them using boxes, highlighting, different fonts, stars and other graphical items on your menu. 

Drawing attention to your top-performing items makes people more likely to order them, allowing you to systematize your restaurant’s kitchen and deal with a greater number of orders every night.

Don’t just list each dish – be descriptive and sell it to customers

Remember, your menu isn’t just a list of the dishes your restaurant offers – it’s also a salesperson that can, if successful, market your dishes to customers and increase the total amount they spend. 

The key to sales is being descriptive and detailed. By listing a dish’s ingredients and key selling points – for example, a unique flavor or large portion size – you can make it more likely to appeal to customers. 

It’s important not to be too descriptive – listing every last ingredient in a dish isn’t relevant for customers – but make sure you offer enough detail that customers are likely to become interested in a wide variety of different dishes.

Avoid using currency signs, as they can reduce total spending

This is a menu design trick that’s been around for decades, and for good reason. If you add currency signs to your menu – for example, a dollar sign before each item that’s available – people will interpret the cost more literally. 

Interestingly, this results in fewer sales and a reduced average spend for all of the customers that come into your restaurant. The effect is subtle but can have a large effect on total sales over time. 

Avoid using currency signs on your menu, especially if your restaurant sells dishes at a higher price point than the average. Instead, list numerical prices without any currency signs to provide detail without the negative effect on sales.

There are several advantages to making your small business seem bigger than it really is. The appearance of being big can make customers far more likely to take your business seriously and increase the level of customer to business trust. 

Looking bigger than you really are can also make your business seem like a better value provider than its smaller competitors. After all, big businesses needed to be good in order to grow into large companies in the first place. 

Luckily, you don’t need to run a huge business in order to give your company the appearance of being large and well known. These four tips will help your business design a signage that makes it look bigger, more established and more dependable.

List your website on your signage

An online presence is one of the most obvious signs that a business is larger than its physical presence alone. Designing and building (and promoting) your website is an excellent way to increase the perceived size of your business for consumers. 

As well as listing your company’s name and slogan on its signage, list its website to show that it has an online presence. You can even list your Facebook Page or other social media accounts to show that your business has international reach. 

Listing your website on your signage also makes it easier for people that pass your store or retail location to search for your business online and potentially return in the future. 

Keep it simple, just like the big brands

Big brands all have one thing in common: they keep their signage simple. From Wal-Mart to McDonald’s, many of the world’s most well known brands keep their retail signage extremely simple to make it more recognizable. 

Many small businesses, on the other hand, do the opposite and invest in signage that offers every detail about the business. It’s a trade-off – one is designed to make your brand familiar, while the other is designed for instant action. 

One of the easiest ways to make your business seem larger than it really is to use the same branding techniques as large companies. Keep your signage nice and simple to make your brand more memorable for consumers.

Avoid using localized terms and phrases

The more local your business is, the smaller it will seem. Using words like your city’s name or approximate location in your business’s name – and particularly in its retail signage – makes it seem like a local business rather than a bigger brand. 

In contrast, using a name that’s not restricted to any one location makes a business feel bigger than it really is. Because of this, it’s best to avoid geographical names if you’d like to make your business appear larger and more established. 

As with all marketing choices, there’s a trade-off present. While a local name will make your business seem smaller, it can often be more effective for developing a local audience of loyal customers.

Create a brand for your company

Many small businesses pay little attention to branding, preferring to focus on the more easily measurable direct response style of marketing. While branding might not seem important for a small business, it’s actually extremely valuable. 

When your business builds and establishes a brand, it becomes far more than the sum of its parts. It stands out from its competitors as a trusted name instead of a single choice among many others. 

It also seems bigger than it really is, largely because of the trust that’s associated with the brand. By creating a brand for your company, you can make it stand out among the alternatives as a larger, more established and trustworthy option.

From photography to film, black and white can often be a great option for standing out from the crowd and making an impression. Since most signs use color heavily, it makes sense that black and white could be a useful, effective alternative.

The reality is that while black and white has some place in the world of marketing and signage, it’s more often than not less effective than using a full range of colors for the design of your retail signs.

Whether you’re considering black and white for an advertisement or for your retail signs, read on to learn why using a wide range of colors in your advertisement tends to be a more effective strategy than designing with black and white.

Black and white is less memorable than color

How well do you remember the advertisements you see on a daily basis? Most of us see thousands of advertisements every day but only remember a select few, usually after we’ve seen them several times.

Color plays a major role in helping us remember content. We’re far more likely to remember signs and advertisements that use strong, powerful colors than a black and white advertisement or retail sign.

This is confirmed by A/B tests between black and white and color advertisements and signs. An advertising test by Airgas reveals that 33% more people remember a colorful advertisement than one printed using black and white.

The key to effective branding is ensuring people remember your message. While a black and white advertisement might seem like a strong stylistic choice, it usually puts your business at a disadvantage when it comes to brand recognition.

Color signs almost always attract more attention

Beyond being easier to remember, color signs almost always attract more attention than black and white signs. This occurs for several reasons, from the eyes naturally gravitating towards colorful content to color simply standing out better.

While black and white appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, there are far fewer options between them for designers. There are different shades of gray, but these rarely stand out as well in a design as colors such as blue, red or yellow.

When you design your advertisements using black and white, it becomes necessary to use gray for any additional elements. This reduces contrast and makes it harder for people to spot your signs from a distance.

When you design in full color, you can use complementary colors that don’t reduce contrast, but increase it. This gives your signage and advertising a more noticeable look that makes it far more effective at attracting people’s attention.

It’s harder to show detail using black and white

Black and white might look more artistic than full color, but it puts you at a serious disadvantage when it comes to showing detail. Since black and white only allows the use of gray as an intermediary color, it captures far less detail than color can.

From shadows to mid-tones, all colors between pure black and white become gray in black and white designs. This makes it difficult to showcase your product in any level of detail or truly capture a scene in your signage and advertising.

In contrast, designing using a full color scheme allows you to capture detail beyond what’s possible with black and white. From photographs to stylized cartoons, all of your advertising can showcase a wide range of details.

From standing out from a distance to increasing your signage’s memorability, color has a range of benefits for marketers. While black and white might offer an artistic and stylish look, it’s rarely the right choice for your signage and advertising.

How much of an impact do your retail store’s signs have on sales? The right signage can have a significant impact on your store’s bottom line, generating foot traffic for your store and sales for customers already inside it.

Many retailers make the assumption that bigger signs are more effective than small signs – an assumption that, like many, doesn’t completely match reality. Small signs can, in many cases, have just as big of an impact as signs with larger dimensions.

From the message of your marketing copy to the design of your signs, a large range of factors can determine whether or not your signage is effective in increasing your store’s foot traffic and generating sales.

Would you like to ensure your small signs have a big impact on sales? From location to copy, read on to learn five simple but effective ways to increase the effects of your small retail signs on foot traffic, visibility and sales.

Use signs as directional markers within your store

Once customers are inside your store, how easy is it for them to find the products they’re interested in? Signage doesn’t just draw people into your store – it can also help them find their way around once they’re inside.

Use small signs as directional markers within your store to help people find popular products. By directing people to your most popular products, you can guide them in a path towards the products and offers they’re most likely to respond to.

Keep your message simple and focused on action

How long does it take to read one of your retail signs? Most people will only want to spend a couple of seconds reading each sign they notice, making a short and simple message more powerful than a long and complicated one.

Make sure your signs clearly communicate your marketing message in five seconds or less – ideally two or three seconds. This means customers can easily identify and understand the message you’re delivering, giving them time to respond to it.

Make sure each sign has a clear and actionable goal

What is the goal of each of your retail signs? Many retail business owners make the mistake of investing in signage that doesn’t deliver a firm, concrete message to their store’s customers.

Each and every sign you hang inside or outside your store – whether it’s focused on bringing customers in or directing them to certain products – needs to have a clear, actionable goal in order to be effective.

Test different signs to see which one is most effective

Your signage might be effective, but could it be better? A/B testing – the process of testing one version of an item against another – is a mainstay of online marketing, but it’s rarely practiced in retail.

Apply testing methods to your retail signs and pit one sign against another to see if one performs better than the other. You can measure sign performance by checking the number of sales of items in the area surrounding each indoor retail sign.

Over time, you might discover that one sign’s design or copy greatly outperforms its alternatives. This data can allow you to make optimizations that improve the results of signage throughout your entire store, significantly increasing revenue.

Use signs to “close the deal” and create confidence

Signs can guide people into your store, direct them to certain products and – when worded correctly – even encourage them to make a purchase. By increasing overall confidence in a product, you can “close the deal” and increase sales.

Use signs to increase a customer’s confidence in a product by mentioning the great guarantee you offer, your financing deals and other useful information. Using signs to build confidence can encourage customers to take action, improving your results.

The right daily or weekly specials can transform your restaurant from a place that people like to visit into part of people’s routine. From increasing retention to giving your restaurant a larger potential audience, specials have a wide range of benefits.

Specials also allow you to benefit from the economies of purchasing ingredients in bulk. With just one or two dishes to focus on instead of several, the right special is ideal for improving your restaurant’s focus and generating a great income.

Many restaurants offer specials, but few market them as effectively as they could with the right combination of marketing materials and sales. In this guide, we will share four effective ways to market your restaurant or café’s daily specials.

Use table tents to list your specials

There’s no better way to market your specials than by listing them in front of your customers. Table tents let you list your specials menu right there on the table, in a location that’s extremely easy for customers to access.

Prepare a list of your daily or weekly special offers and add it to your tables, making it easy for customers to read. Table tents allow you to easily swap out new lists on a daily or weekly basis.

The biggest benefit of using table tents is visibility. Since your specials list is right in front of your customers, the chance of them ordering something from the menu goes up, as do your restaurant or café’s orders.

Make a specials board with daily offers

The specials board is a staple of many restaurants, and there’s no need to remove it simply because you also use other marketing methods. Add a specials board to your checkout area or inside your restaurant to make your specials visible to customers.

The advantage of a specials board is that it allows you to avoid replacing menus on each table. With a centralized list of specials, all that’s required from you is a quick revision every morning or Monday to list the day or week’s new items.

Ask service staff to read your specials

Your restaurant’s service staff can often also be great sales staff. By asking service staff to read out your daily or weekly specials, you can significantly increase orders and encourage customers to take action.

Asking service staff to read your daily or weekly specials has two benefits. First, it increases the rate at which people order due to increased awareness of the special dishes you’re offering.

Second, it allows your service staff to provide useful answers to any questions your customers might have about your special dishes and offers. Many customers have a range of questions that can’t be answered by a menu or specials board alone.

Post your specials on social media

Does your restaurant use Facebook or Twitter to promote itself and keep in touch with its customers? If you have a following on social media, try using it to promote your daily or weekly specials.

Social media is a particularly useful tool for promoting seasonal specials, such as a dish that’s only available for part of the year. By raising awareness, you increase the number of people that will visit your restaurant and order from your specials menu.

Just how visible is your retail signage? No matter how perfectly designed or cleverly written your signage is, it will ultimately have very little effect on your store’s traffic or sales if it isn’t visible.

Visibility is the key to success in retail signage. Signs that are located in areas which are highly visible almost always outperform their counterparts in quieter, less easily noticeable locations.

The difference between a highly visible sign and one that’s barely noticed isn’t just a two or three-fold increase in foot traffic. In many cases, a highly visible sign can lead to an exponential increase in the number of people that visit your retail store.

There are many ways to make your signage more visible, from changing its location to using high-visibility color combinations. Read on to discover five ways to increase your signage’s visibility and generate more traffic for your retail business.

Understand the importance of location

The location of your signage can have a huge impact on its effectiveness. Signs that are hidden away from view are unlikely to attract much attention and less likely to have any real impact on your retail store’s foot traffic.

The greater the number of people that pass by your sign, the more people will see it and take action. Even a poorly designed sign will usually generate a good response if it’s placed in an area that receives a lot of foot or vehicle traffic.

Scan the area around your retail store to determine which location is best for your retail signage. The difference between one location and another can often be a four, five or 10 times increase in the amount of foot traffic your signage generates.

Keep your signage copy short and simple

The more complicated your copy is, the longer it takes to read. The longer your copy takes to read, the fewer people will stop to read it. People don’t want to read a long, complicated message when they stop on the street, so don’t give them one.

Short, simple copy that immediately communicates your message is almost always a more effective option than a long, complicated message. Remember that you have an extremely limited amount of time to reach each customer, often only a few seconds. 

Aim for the two-second rule: passersby should be able to read and understand your sign’s copy within two seconds or less. If your signage takes longer than this to read and understand, it’s likely going to be ignored by a significant number of people.

Use bold, crisp, clear and powerful fonts

The easier your signage is to read, the greater its response rate will be. Choosing a font that’s complex and difficult to decipher might fit your store’s brand, but it will usually hurt the effects of your retail signage.

The best fonts to use in retail signage are bold, crisp, clear and powerful. They have power and presence that makes them stand out from the crowd, but they aren’t too complex or decorated to be read easily by passersby.

Avoid using complicated or overly decorative fonts in your signage, as they’re rarely easy to read. Instead, opt for fonts that are highly visible and readable from a decent distance and free of large serifs or other stylistic elements that reduce readability.

Choose high-contrast color combinations

The greater the level of contrast in your sign, the more visible it will be. Powerful and high-contrast color combinations – such as white on black or yellow on blue – stand out from a distance and make your content leap out of its surroundings.

On the other hand, low-contrast color combinations such as white on light blue or gold on white are unlikely to stand out at all. If your sign’s content blends into the background, it’s unlikely to make much of an impression with passersby.

Choose a high-contrast color combination that matches your branding and makes noticing and reading your signage easy. At the same time, avoid overdoing it with colors that clash and make your signage readable but aesthetically unpleasing.

Make your signage personal and actionable

How personal is your signage? The best marketing messages are highly personal and written to connect with their target audience. By using words like “you” and “your,” you can make your sign’s copy far more effective in achieving its goals.

People naturally respond to marketing offers that focus on them. Focus on using words that create familiarity and personality in your signage and you’ll create a deeper connection with the people you’re targeting.

At the same time, make sure action is a priority. Develop all of your signage with a clear call to action so that people know exactly what to do once they’ve understood your store’s value proposition.

How well written is your company’s brochure? Many companies are confident that their direct marketing materials are the best in their industry, but a quick read can often reveal simple mistakes in wording and design.

One of the most common brochure mistakes is the inclusion of words that just don’t fit. From words that deter prospects from taking action to words that cheapen your product or service, some words just don’t belong in a direct marketing setting.

Does your company’s promotional brochure contain some of the words best avoided in direct mail? Read on to discover 10 words not to use in your company’s brochure, and discover whether your company’s marketing materials are as good as you think.

Cheapest

If you’re marketing your product as the cheapest in its category, people will almost always question its quality. Instead of marketing based on cheapness alone, market your product based on the value it offers relative to its competitors.

Bargain

Even if your product is a bargain, it’s best to avoid using this word. Bargain has a lot of baggage to its – customers are far more likely to view your product as a discount item of questionable quality than as a high quality, bargain-priced good.

Best

If your product is the best, you shouldn’t need to say it. Instead of labeling an item as the best in its category or class, provide a description of why and how it’s the best so that your target audience can discover some of its value.

Honestly

When you use the word “honestly” in a brochure, it gives the impression that all of your other marketing communications aren’t honest. Show you’re honest using the copy you write, not with a single word at the beginning of a marketing promise.

Maybe

The key to effective copy – whether it’s in a brochure or a sales letter – is concrete, undeniable certainty. “Maybe” is a word that isn’t certain, and as such it shouldn’t ever be used in a brochure, retail sign or direct marketing letter.

Get (or “buy”)

People are far less interested in “getting” something – or “buying” something, for that matter – than they are in owning it. Instead of talking about what people get from your company, talk about what they can potentially own.

Obvious

While a certain fact might be obvious to you – for example, the fact that the product or service you’re selling can improve someone’s life – it might not be obvious to the people you’re targeting. Avoid using “obvious,” as it could sound patronizing.

Contract

Have you ever seen a gym membership marketed based on how easy it is to get out of the contract? People don’t want to think about contracts when they sign up for an offer – they rarely leave a positive impression – so avoid focusing on them.

Trial

Like contracts, “free trials” are often viewed suspiciously by customers. If you offer a free sample of your product, use a phrase like “try it free” instead of mentioning the trial period, as people often associate free trials with expensive cancellation fees.

Fast

We’ve all been told that we can “lose weight fast” or “make money fast,” usually with results that don’t match the reality. Like free trials and contracts, many people don’t trust the word “fast” in marketing, making it worth leaving out of your brochure.

How much of an asset is your restaurant menu? While almost everyone associates the service staff in a restaurant with sales and customer service, few people view a menu as a marketing tool.

The simple truth is that your restaurant’s menu can be its greatest marketing asset, if, that is, it’s designed well. With the right combination of design and copy, a menu can act as a powerful sales asset, driving a huge part of your restaurant’s revenue.

From encouraging people to order desserts, drinks and other extras to putting your most profitable and popular dishes in front of your target audience, a great menu is a valuable asset that can help your restaurant or café achieve its financial goals.

The difference between a good menu and a great menu can be subtle, but it’s easy to notice when you pay attention. Try these four tips to write your menu for maximum sales, maximum revenue and maximum customer satisfaction.

Keep it simple. Complicated menus are often confusing

How long does it take to navigate through your menu? The longer your restaurant’s menu is, the more challenging and time consuming it becomes for diners to find the dishes they’re interested in.

Long, complicated menus can leave customers feeling confused and uncertain about what to order. With so many choices, customers can fall into the paradox of choice – a situation in which it’s harder to make any decision at all.

Keep your menu short and simple. The ideal solution is usually to give customers a choice of 5-10 dishes within each category – for example, mains or appetizers. This amount provides a good level of choice without creating any potential confusion.

Avoid using currency symbols. They make items ‘feel’ more expensive

It’s one of the oldest tricks of psychological menu design, and for a reason. Including currency symbols on your menu – for example, the $ or £ signs – often has the effect of making menu items seem more expensive than they really are.

The reason for this isn’t certain – some people suspect it’s because financial symbols make people associate each item with spending money more – but the effects are all too real. 

Instead of including currency symbols in your restaurant or café menu, list all menu prices as numerals alone. This clearly communicates the price of each item without associating it with the act of spending money, which can potentially deter diners.

High-end restaurant? Avoid using psychological pricing in your menu

Every business owner has heard of psychological pricing – lowering prices by a cent or another arbitrarily small amount to make them seem lower than they are. While this trick dominates retail pricing, it’s often a bad idea for high-end restaurants.

Although psychological pricing works, it’s closely associated with the priced-based value big-box retailers and discount stores are known for. In a high-end restaurant, it can often send the wrong message – that you value cost over quality.

If you operate a high-end restaurant or café, use round numbers for all of your menu items. Although a number like $100 might look more costly than $99.95, it lacks any of the baggage of psychological pricing and communicates quality above value.

Design and write your menu for a 100-second attention span

Did you know that most customers will spend around 100 seconds looking at your restaurant’s menu before making a decision? Customers will spend slightly more than one and half minutes looking at your menu – it’s vital to make the time count. 

Make the most of the average customer’s 100-second attention span by ensuring that your menu can be completely read, from cover to cover, in under 60 seconds.

This gives customers time to read your menu once, then make a decision about the dish they would like to order. It also gives customers time to compare dishes and a selection of drinks, appetizers, desserts and other optional extras.

You only have a few seconds to make an impression with your retail signage. This makes readability one of the most important aspects of effective design – one that any designer should prioritize.

If people can’t read the content of your signage, it’s unlikely to have any positive effect on your sales and revenue. Choosing the right combination of typeface and color can increase your sign’s readability and make it far more effective.

From the right font to the right combination of text color and background color, a wide range of factors go into making text easy to read. Read on to learn four simple tips for more effective, more readable text in your retail signage.

Choose simple, sans-serif fonts

The key to readable text is a simple font. Complicated fonts, such as script fonts or stylized fonts, can look great when used for short headlines, but they’re often too challenging to read to be any good on a sign that’s designed for action.

The longer it takes people to understand the text on your sign, the lower the chance of them completing your desired action. For effective signage, stick with a font that’s easy to read and free of complications.

A simple, sans-serif font is almost always the best choice for headlines, subheadings and other quick and simple content. Likewise, sans-serif fonts can work well for sign copy, provided the copy isn’t overly dense or lengthy.

Avoid overly bright colors

Brightly colored text can occasionally look good, but it more often than not is hard to read and out of place. Avoid using overly bright text unless you’re placing text on a dark background that doesn’t clash with the text color.

Color combinations like yellow text on a white background are difficult to read and far more likely to annoy passersby than attract their attention. Stick with colors that can easily be read without people having to focus in order to understand them.

Black-on-white, blue-on-white and other simple color combinations are usually the most effective. A good litmus test for whether or not a color is suitable is how well it fits into its setting – if it looks natural, it’s probably a good choice.

Use a light stroke on large text

A stroke – a light outline around text – can make large text easier to read, especially if the background color of your sign is similar to the color of your text. Adding stroke to your text is a good idea, albeit only in certain circumstances.

Try to avoid adding a stroke to small text, as it rarely increases readability and often makes it difficult to work out the shape of characters. This is particularly difficult if a stroke is placed on the inside of the text, rather than on the outside of characters.

Use a light stroke – no more than two to three points on large text – to outline each character’s shape and make it more visible without affecting the shape of the letter and its readability.

Make sure your text is a good fit

The key to readability is both the text and the space around it. When text ‘fits’ into a space, it naturally becomes more readable. Think about the difference between one line of text, which is easy to read quickly, and a long and dense paragraph of text.

One of the easiest ways to improve your sign’s readability is to break up sections of text into individual lines. Instead of using a paragraph of copy, break your copy into a series of bullet points or short, quick and simple sentences.

Text that ‘fits’ into its space will almost always be easier to read than text that’s part of a long paragraph. Make your text more readable by using white space and spacing to isolate it from other passages of text and helping it stand out for passersby. 
 

Designing visual content for the web might seem similar to designing visual content for retail signage, but it’s actually very different. From visibility to effective use of a canvas, design for signage doesn’t have much in common with design for the web.

Despite the differences in format, a talented designer can easily adapt to the format of retail signage from the web. Understanding the differences and limitations makes it far easier to adapt and adjust your design priorities.

From space limitations to working with a fixed – rather than fluid – design, read on to discover five key differences to keep in mind when you’re designing for signage instead of digital.

Visibility and readability is far more important

On the web, visibility isn’t all that important. Since users are sitting in front of their computers and unlikely to leave just because your content takes a second or two to understand, there’s no need to design for immediate visibility.

In retail signage, however, things are very different. Visibility and readability are far more important because your audience can – and will, if required – give up and go to the next visible sign in the event that yours doesn’t interest them.

Don’t hide your message in retail signage. Make it immediately obvious what you’re trying to say so that people don’t give up on your sign. As well as making your main message obvious, make it as easy to read and understand as possible.

You no longer have unlimited space to scroll

On the web, users can keep scrolling and scrolling until they reach the bottom of the page, making the length of your design a non-issue. In retail signage, you have strict dimensions that your message must fit inside in order to be successful.

Keep your signage short, simple and interesting. Since you don’t have an unlimited amount of vertical space to work with, it’s important to limit what you use in a sign to make it quick and easy for people to understand.

Sometimes, the limitations of retail signage can be advantages. Since you’re forced to keep the key message behind your signage short and simple, there’s no possibility of going overboard with your design, as is much more possible online.

There’s no compatibility for you to worry about

In the world of web design, compatibility is a major issue. There are browsers for you to think about, as well as operating systems. There are even devices, from the classic desktop computer to mobiles, tablets and more.

In retail signage, there’s none of that to worry about. Although signs come in many different sizes and dimensions, it’s far easier to adapt a sign to fit a different canvas than it is to adapt a digital design to work across multiple browsers.

Enjoy the lack of compatibility – in many ways, it’s a huge advantage. Use the focus that you would otherwise spend on compatibility testing to ensure your sign design makes the best possible use of its canvas.

Your design is fixed, not built to scale up and down

As more and more people browse the Internet using their smartphones, tablets and other devices, the importance of designing for multiple resolutions and screen sizes is becoming greater.

In retail signage, there’s a need to design for multiple sign sizes, but no need to scale your design up and down as there is with digital design. Design a sign that works at one size and it’s extremely likely it will work well at another.

The best retail signs are simple, stylish and easy to understand at full size, as well as at a smaller scale. Just like online, you need to design your signage to scale in terms of size. However, there’s less of a need to design for multiple different canvases.

There’s no need to keep your audience focused

How long do you expect people to look at your retail signage? One major difference between retail signage design and web design is that retail signage success is made clear by people paying attention to your sign, then taking action.

Online, however, a key metric for success is how long people spend on a website in one session. The longer people pay attention and remain on-site, the more valuable a design or page is viewed as being.

Since retail signage is all about inspiring action, there’s no need to make sure people stay focused on your content as there is in web design. Design to encourage people to take action, not to linger on your signage for longer than they need to.

How effective is your retail signage in achieving your marketing goals? While almost all retail businesses use signage to bring customers into their stores, few businesses optimize their signage to be as effective as possible.

By using the right fonts, choosing the right color combinations and designing with a clear goal in mind, your business can achieve far more from its signage in attracting customers to your store and increasing retail sales.

Many of the most effective ways to improve your retail signage aren’t complicated or difficult, but extremely straightforward. In this blog post, we’ll share five simple but effective tricks to make your signage more eye-catching and effective.

Choose bold, powerful typefaces

How powerful is your retail sign’s text? Using a powerful, easy-to-read font makes your marketing message easier to notice and understand. This can often be all the difference between attracting a potential customer and being ignored.

Choose bold, powerful typefaces that get your message across and stand out from the crowd. Your choice of font can often be the difference between a sign that has real presence and a sign that blends into its surroundings.

Use short, punchy headlines

One of the most important rules of marketing is to keep things simple. The more complicated your marketing message becomes, the less effective it’s likely to be in attracting your target audience.

Use short, punchy headlines on your signs so that your marketing message gets to your audience as quickly and easily as possible. Try to limit your headlines to five words to keep them short, simple, direct and highly effective.

Create contrast using colors

The colors that you use in your marketing materials, and particularly in signage, can have a huge effect on your response rate. Choose a pair of colors that contrast and it can drastically increase your sign’s visibility.

Choose a pair of colors that are almost the same as each other, however, and you’ll see your signage blend into its surroundings. Pick high-contrast color combinations like black and white, red and black or yellow and blue to improve readability.

Keep your message simple

It’s not just your headline that should be simple. From your headline to your sign’s copy, every aspect of your marketing should communicate your message in as little text as possible.

How long does it take your business to communicate its value proposition? Instead of being wordy in your marketing, keep your copy short and to-the-point so that it’s possible for prospective customers to immediately understand what your offer is.

Write and design for action

What is the end goal of your sign? Some signs encourage customers to come inside your store and browse your range of products, while others might encourage people to remember your brand and drop in at some point in the future.

Always design your signage with a goal in mind. If your goal is immediate action, it’s important to make sure your sign includes a clear call to action. If your goal is brand recognition, it’s important that your retail signage clearly emphasizes your brand.

Does your retail store need effective signage? Signage can be the difference between a successful store that’s rarely without customers and a store that, despite its great location, is rarely full.

The type of signage you choose for your retail store can have a huge impact on how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it generates. Because of this, it’s important to carefully consider any signage you plan to install.

Retail signage comes in many forms, from bright and highly visible signs to smaller, more subtle signs. From design elements and color schemes to size, there are a wide variety of factors to consider when choosing a sign for your retail store.

If you’re just getting started in retail and need help choosing the right size of sign to install in and around your store, read on for four simple and effective techniques to help you determine which size of sign is best.

Use distance to determine optimal signage dimensions

One of the most important factors to consider when choosing retail signage is scale and distance. The further away your target audience will be when they pass by your retail store, the larger your signage should be to fully attract their attention.

For example, a big-box retail store located close to a major highway will need larger signage than a retail store on a city’s high street, largely because its customers need to look further into the distance to notice its advertising.

If your store is located close to passing customers, keep your signage in proportion to the environment around your shop. If it’s far from the road or walkway, scale up your signage to increase visibility.

Make up for small dimensions with an eye-catching design

Small signs aren’t necessarily invisible. By using an eye-catching design that’s heavy on contrast and color, you can make even the smallest sign highly visible for people passing by your store.

This is particularly important if restrictions such as signage laws limit your ability to market using large-scale signage. Scaling down your signs can make it important for your business to scale up the elements that make them visible and effective.

Pair a large sign with a design that isn’t too aggressive, as this can put off customers more than it helps. For a smaller sign, use a design that puts attention first so that it is as easy as possible for people to locate and identify your business.

Use large and small signs to draw attention to your store

The key to effective visual marketing is contrast. Contrast between text and a sign’s background increases readability. Contrast between a sign and its imagery increases engagement and makes people more likely to pay attention.

Contrast between large signs and small signs can be an equally effective marketing tool for your retail business. By using large and small signs around your store, you can send a variety of different marketing messages.

Make use of a wide range of different sign dimensions to maximize the visual real estate you have around your retail store. Many people will pay more attention to a mix of different dimensions than several uniform and similar retail signs.

Keep in-store signage small, subtle and not overly intrusive

Exterior signage and in-store signs are two very different things. One has a goal of getting people to walk into your store, while the other has a goal of directing those people that have already entered.

Because of the different purpose in-store signage serves, it’s important to choose in-store storage that’s small, subtle and not too intrusive. Try to inform and direct the people in your store, not to display a powerful marketing message to them.

While in-store signage is an important aspect of retail marketing, giving it the same treatment as your outdoor signage is a mistake. Prioritize taste and subtlety above action to make the interior of your retail store welcoming for your customers.

How effective is your retail store’s signage?

Using a variety of different signs inside and outside your store is an excellent way to increase visibility and inspire more customers to step inside. How effective is your retail store’s signage in achieving your marketing objectives?

What’s the key to increasing your restaurant’s revenue? For some restaurateurs, the best way to increase revenue is to increase the number of customers that visit their restaurant. For others, it’s to increase pricing while serving the same people.

For others, the best way to increase restaurant revenue is to focus on getting more – both in terms of revenue and total orders – from the customers that already dine in their restaurant or café.

Increasing your per-customer revenue is one of the best ways to increase the total amount your restaurant earns. It’s also possible without raising your prices, which can often reduce the amount of people that visit your restaurant.

There are several ways to increase your average per-customer spend, but one of the best ways it through table tents. Effective use of on-table marketing materials can be all that’s required to significantly increase your restaurant’s total earnings.

In this blog post, we’ll share three simple but effective ways that you can increase the amount of revenue your restaurant or café generates using on-table marketing materials and table tents.

List your top-performing dishes and drinks

What are your restaurant’s top-performing dishes? Most restaurants generate most of their orders from just a few dishes – the Pareto Principle of 20% of actions, which are in this case dishes or products, producing 80% of results, or in this case revenue.

Understanding your restaurant’s top-performing dishes can be the key to getting the most from your existing menu. By focusing on these dishes in your menus and other marketing materials, you can increase your per-customer spend.

This is because most customers will choose a “safe” option – food that they already know they like. Listing your most popular dishes, particularly at the beginning of a menu, makes them more visible for diners in your café or restaurant.

When you’re designing your menu, place your top-performing dishes near the top of the design so that customers always see them. This increases the chance of someone ordering several dishes from your most popular section.

The same logic can be applied to drinks, desserts and other items. List your popular items towards the beginning of the menu so that customers can quickly locate their “safest” choices and feel comfortable making an order.

Offer set menus for lunch and dinner diners

Set menus are renowned for offering good value, which is why they’re a great way to increase your restaurant’s sales. Customers that see a set menu will almost always look through it, with a large number ordering the set course as their meal.

Offering a set menu has several advantages for your restaurant. It makes preparing food easier, since multiple orders of the same set menu are far easier to prepare for your kitchen staff than several wildly different dishes.

It also has the potential to increase your average per-customer spend. This is due to the higher relative cost of set menus – which include drinks, and often desserts – in comparison to an order for a single dish.

Customers often rationalize the cost of a set menu as being great value, even though it’s more expensive than ordering a single dish alone. This allows your restaurant to passively sell optional extras such as drinks, desserts and salads.

Include upsells like desserts, drinks and more

Upsells can make or break a restaurant’s earnings. Since drinks, desserts and other popular upsells are inexpensive to prepare and easy to market, they’re an excellent way to increase your restaurant’s sales and generate more revenue.

How well does your menu emphasize upsells and optional extras? Many menus put desserts, drinks and other optional dishes towards the end of the menu, making it unlikely that most customers will spot them.

Instead of hiding your drinks and desserts towards the end of the menu, make them as visible as possible. A great idea is to create a separate menu for drinks or desserts so that customers can view them independently from other dishes.

This has two benefits. Firstly, it increases the amount of attention that people pay to desserts and drinks. Secondly, splitting dishes onto two menus can make the price of each individual dish seem relatively lower since they’re viewed separately.

How optimized is your restaurant’s menu?

Improving your menu and other on-table marketing materials is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase your restaurant or café’s sales? How optimized is your restaurant’s menu?

One of the most important aspects of effective marketing is balance. Highly effective marketing campaigns strike a balance between being too focused and frequent, and being so infrequent that prospective customers fail to notice.

When it comes to retail signage, balance is more important than ever. Use too many signs in your retail store and you’ll irritate and annoy customers. Use too few and it could significantly affect your revenue and sales results.

Balancing too much signage versus too little signage is something that many retail marketers struggle with. It’s hard to assess how much is the right amount when it’s your store you’re working on, especially as a business owners instead of a customer.

Luckily, it’s not impossible to work out the right amount of signage to use in a retail environment. Below, we’ve listed three simple strategies that you can use to find the perfect balance of signage that creates results but not annoyances for customers.

Avoid using more signage than you need to

Here’s a great way to determine whether the amount of signage in your store is ideal of over-the-top: how much do you need to get your marketing message across?

When you use more signage than you need to, you run the risk of annoying shoppers by bombarding them with marketing messages. You also do this at no real benefit, as customers will already be aware of the message you’re trying to deliver.

When you’re assessing the optimal amount of signs to use in your retail store, think in terms of what’s necessary. Will adding an additional sign increase your message’s impact, or will it merely get in the way of customers?

Strike a balance between what’s necessary and what’s optimal without going too far and irritating customers. This way, you’ll achieve optimal results without spending more on signage than you need to or alienating potentially happy customers.

Use different signage to increase relevance

If you’d like to increase the amount of signage in your restaurant or retail store but don’t want to use the same signs over and over again, try using different signage to create a mix of styles and marketing messages.

Can you image walking down a street that’s lined with the exact same billboard over and over again? Repetition is important in marketing, but overusing the exact same message will leave your customers cold and uninterested in your offer.

Instead of reusing the same signage, use a mix of different messages – or different angles on the same message – so that customers get a greater amount of contrast and visual variety when they navigate through your retail store.

Use a combination of large and small retail signs

Another great way to introduce variety and contrast into your store is to use a mix of different sizes, shapes and sign configurations. Signs don’t always need to be the same size – in many cases, it’s far more effective to use a mix of shapes and sizes.

Use large retail signs in windows and above aisles to direct customers through your store, then small signs to direct their attention onto shelves and racks. Use tiny signs on your counter to deliver short, simple messages and big signs near the entrance.

When you use a mix of different shapes and sizes in your signage, you create visual contrast that’s necessary to keep people interested. If your signs were all the same size and look, customers would quickly tune them out and ignore them entirely.

The more unique each sign appears, the greater its effects. Use a wide range of sizes, shapes and styles to maximize the impact each of your retail signs has on customers.

What is your company’s identity? Creating a strong and effective corporate identity is one of the most important aspects of effective marketing, especially for companies that depend on the power of their brand to reach and acquire new customers.

Your corporate identity not only plays a role in helping customers remember your brand – it also works as an image of your company’s values and ideals that affects your employees, managers and owners.

A powerful corporate identity can set your company apart from its competitors and make its marketing efforts stand out. This can mean significantly better results from your marketing efforts, whether they’re in the form of signage or direct mail.

Many marketers struggle to effectively implement their corporate identity as part of their retail signage. In this guide, we’ll share three simple techniques to develop and strengthen your corporate identity through retail signage.

Make your branding a prominent aspect of your signage

How prominent is your company’s brand in its advertising? Well-known brands like Nike and Apple rarely miss an opportunity to include their name and logo in signage or other marketing materials.

One of the most important aspects of effective branding is frequency. If customers – or prospective customers – see your brand frequently, they’re more likely to view it positively and remember it in the future.

Make branding a prominent aspect of your signage by incorporating your logo into all of your retail signs. Even in-store signage should include your logo and corporate identify to strengthen it and increase brand recognition.

Keep your message focused, consistent and memorable

How consistent is your company’s marketing message? Many companies focus on the action side of marketing and use a different message for every campaign to get the highest possible response rate within the campaign itself. 

This produces great short-term results, but at a cost. Since you’ve used a different message in every marketing communication, your marketing efforts have produced results without creating any long-term brand for your company.

Keep your marketing message focused, consistent and memorable in your signage and in your other visual marketing channels. This way, customers will remember your company’s values, identity and marketing message over the long term.

Use your company’s color scheme for all communications

One of the biggest mistakes many companies make is using a different color scheme for different advertising campaigns. Color is an incredibly important part of creating a visual identity for your company, making it a vital component of every campaign.

Use a different color for every sign and people are unlikely to associate your brand with any one look. There’s a reason we associate Coca-Cola with red or Shell with yellow – because these colors are core elements of their marketing and identity.

What color best represents your brand? Make one color a major focus of your retail signage and visual advertising and you’ll create a consistent look that customers will automatically associate with your brand whenever and wherever they see it.

How consistent is your marketing message? While many businesses, both big and small, use a variety of different marketing channels to target customers, few use a message that’s consistent from direct mail and brochures to retail signage.

Integrating all of the marketing channels your business uses into a single, consistent message is one of the most effective ways to increase your response rate and get far more from your marketing budget.

If your business is currently using different graphics, headlines and copy for every different marketing platform it uses, it’s missing out on a powerful synergy that is only possible through integrated marketing.

In this guide, we’ll share four simple, effective and actionable ways that you can give each and every marketing platform your business uses a message that’s consistent, effective and designed to generate results.

Use your brand’s colors, typefaces and style

When you think of Coca-Cola, what image pops into your mind? Most people think of red backgrounds, white text and a traditional script typeface – all essential elements of the Coca-Cola brand.

The reason for this close association between the product and its branding is very simple: Coca-Cola always uses the same image, style, colors and typefaces in any of its advertisements, regardless of their particular platform of marketing channel.

When your company consistently uses its brand’s colors, typefaces and other key stylistic elements across different marketing channels, it becomes an image that’s immediately associated with the company. 

Get more bang for your marketing buck by creating synergy between the marketing platforms you use with a consistent look that people associate with your business.

Keep your message short, sweet and simple

The best marketing messages are short and simple. This isn’t just because shorter messages are easier to remember, but because shorter messages generally work in far more settings than longer, more complicated messages.

If your marketing message can only be communicated in five paragraphs of dense, descriptive copy, it’s unlikely to work well on multiple platforms. It might be great for direct mail, but it’s far from ideal for retail signage or display advertising.

On the other hand, if your marketing message can be condensed down to five or six words, it’s suitable for any platform. You can keep it as it is for signage or expand it into a long sales letter for direct mail or email marketing.

The key to effective integrated marketing is having a message that’s built to work on any platform. Keep your marketing message short, sweet and simple and it can work just as well on a retail sign as it could in a brochure.

Take different angles on a single message

What’s the key message of your marketing campaign? Since each marketing channel has different strengths – some are great for long text, while others are most valuable for short messages – it’s important to have multiple angles on a single message.

For example, if you’re marketing a product that makes people healthier – a vitamin supplement, for example – one of the best ways to increase people’s interest in it is to target a different angle using each marketing channel available to you.

In print, which allows a reasonable level of detail, you talk about how your product has helped other people. In signage, you keep it simple with a statement of its major benefits. In direct mail, you talk at length about its key benefits and advantages.

By taking multiple angles on the same message – in this case, that your product can make people healthier – you can make the most of each marketing channel and get the greatest results for your marketing budget.

Start small, then expand onto new platforms slowly

If your business markets its products or services on ten or more platforms – retail signage, direct mail, TV, radio, display ads, search and more, for example – it can be extremely difficult to manage and maintain its campaign.

The wider your campaign becomes, the more challenging it becomes to ensure all of its messages are consistent and effective. Because of this, it’s best to start with a few marketing channels and expand onto new platforms very slowly and gradually.

Start by choosing two to three marketing channels that are best suited to your offer or product. As your business becomes more adept at using them effectively, expand slowly onto other, similar platforms.

Many marketers make the mistake of spreading their campaign too wide and using too many different channels. Focus on what works initially and expand to use new channels as and when they become appropriate, not before they’re necessary.

The marketing materials you include on your café or restaurant’s tables can have a huge impact on the amount that each customer or group of customers spends each time they visit.

A bare table might look stylish, but it can often reduce the average customer’s total spend and leave your restaurant at a financial disadvantage compared to a more full table with numerous different marketing materials.

One of the best ways to increase the amount of revenue your restaurant generates per customer is to include a variety of different marketing materials on each table, giving each customer a great range of dishes and dining options to choose from.

From drinks lists and menus to less straightforward ideas such as a list of the daily specials, read on to find out which five marketing materials you should include on your restaurant or café’s tables.

Dining menu

It’s the obvious choice, and it’s one of the most important. Make sure your dining menu is always available at each table so that customers fully understand which dishes are available for them while they’re in your restaurant.

If you’re aiming to maximize your revenue-per-customer, keep the menu close to the table – or better yet, in a menu holder on the table – so that customers are free to look at other dishes and upsells while they dine.

The more opportunities customers have to view your menu, the greater the chance of them ordering a second dish or choosing an extra from the menu while enjoying their existing meal.

Drinks menu

If your restaurant serves a lot of drinks or acts as a restaurant/bar after dinner, an excellent way to increase your revenue-per-customer is to offer a drinks menu with a full list of the drinks your restaurant offers.

Many restaurants, bars and cafés make the mistake of using a short drinks menu in which only a few staple drinks are available. Customers are then required to order other drinks off the menu by asking the staff.

The longer and more comprehensive your drinks menu is, the more choices people fell as if they have. Offer a comprehensive, detailed drinks menu and you’ll increase the likelihood of customers ordering drinks along with their meals.

Daily/weekly specials

Does your café or restaurant offer daily or weekly specials? Listing your specials on a board might be the classic way to advertise your daily offerings, but it’s nowhere near as effective as listing them on a menu that customers can easily reference.

Prepare a daily or weekly specials menu – it needn’t be as detailed as your full menu – that you can keep in each table’s menu holder. This lets customers check the daily or weekly specials while they dine without looking across your restaurant.

Many people order special dishes on an impulse because they stand out from other dishes on the menu. Make your specials menu easy to find and even easier to read and you’ll maximize the number of people that order special dishes.

Desserts and extras

If your restaurant or café serves extras such as desserts or digestifs, it’s a good idea to list these on a separate menu from other dishes. This gives your service staff an additional opportunity to present the menu to diners and ask if they’re interested.

By maximizing your service staff’s interaction with customers through using several different menus, you increase the level of awareness customers have of your dishes and subsequently increase the average number of customers that order extras.

From desserts to post-dinner cocktails, adding your most popular extras to a menu that’s independent from others is a great way to increase the amount that customers order and create an additional upselling opportunity for your staff.

Dinner or lunch sets

If your restaurant serves a high volume of customers during dinner or lunch, one of the best ways to simplify your kitchen’s workload and increase average revenue per customer is to offer a range of dinner or lunch sets.

Set menus are easier to prepare than a large range of a-la-carte dishes and allow you to offer an additional option for customers. There’s no need to only offer a set menu; a set menu can be a complement to your usual range of lunch or dinner dishes.

By offering lunch and dinner sets, your restaurant gains an additional way to market its food to customers. Adding a set menu to each table streamlines ordering and gets more of your dining options in front of each customer.

One of the most important aspects of graphic design for marketers is legibility. Fonts that are clear, simple and easy to read make communicating your message far easier and more effective.

Many marketers make the mistake of choosing fonts that are stylish, eccentric and – in far too many cases – difficult to read. The more complex your choice of fonts are, the less likely it is that everyone will understand your marketing message.

Instead of expanding your reach or investing in more signage, one of the best ways to get more bang for your buck from your retail signage is to make it easier for the people that already see it to read.

Choose the right font and your message will go from taking five seconds to read and understand to being instantly understandable to anyone that sees it. Read on to find out which five easy-to-read fonts are perfect for effective retail signage and more.

Garamond

Garamond is a traditional serif typeface that’s one of the most popular in the world of print marketing. It’s widely available on PCs and Mac, built for optimal legibility and perfect for use in advertisements and brochures with lots of text.

If your marketing materials use long, dense copy, readability is extremely important for making sure people understand your message. In legibility tests, Garamond often ranks among the most readable fonts, especially for large passages of text.

When legibility is important and ensuring your target audience takes in your whole marketing message is essential, a traditional serif font like Garamond is one of your best choices.

Futura

Unlike Garamond, which is a traditional serif typeface, Futura has no serifs and uses a geometric design. Each letter is designed to use straight lines and shapes to make it easy to view and understand.

Futura is an excellent font to use in modern advertisements, especially in headlines and other pieces of text that need to be clear and easy to understand. Its geometric design makes it useful in a variety of modern settings.

With a simple, easy-to-read look and style that looks equally appropriate advertising a revolutionary new product as it does outside a traditional retail business, Futura is one of the most versatile sans-serif fonts for marketers.

Franchise

Franchise is a free font that resembles the powerful display fonts of the 20th century marketing style. It’s simple, easy-to-read and extremely powerful, using all caps as a way to stand out from the crowd and get your message across.

Since Franchise is a caps-only font, it’s best used lightly in headlines, subheadings or important pieces of copy. All-caps fonts generally don’t work as well in large bodies of text, since the uniform height makes them hard to read quickly.

As a break between sections in your brochure or an eye-catching headline font that stands out from the crowd, Franchise is an excellent choice that’s suitable for a huge range of different businesses.

Nevis

Nevis is another free font – a stylish, angular headline font that looks just as good on a billboard for an adventurous outdoor brand as it does inside the office of a modern technology company.

With angular letters and beautiful spacing, Nevis is clean and incredibly easy to read in large blocks of text. It’s also powerful enough to be used in headlines, especially in all caps, which immediate stands out from its background.

As a sans-serif font, Nevis is best suited for headlines and subheadings and isn’t such a good choice for paragraph copy. Despite this, its spacing and clear letter design are perfect for small snippets of text in retail signs and brochures.

Miller

Miller is a stylish and impressive “Scotch Roman” typeface, according to its creator Matthew Carter. With a powerful look that’s still easy to read, Miller is a good option for use in newspapers, magazine advertisements and long brochures.

As a serif typeface, Miller is easy to read and perfect for long blocks of text, making it a good choice for sales letters and long brochures. The longer your copy is, the more important it becomes to choose a font that’s easy for readers to understand.

Although it’s not powerful enough for headlines outside of a print setting, Miller is a good choice for subheadings and text snippets. This stylish font is a great alternative to classics like Garamond.

When someone walks past your retail store and catches a glimpse of its sign, what type of impression do you want them to receive? Many businesses design signage with prestige or style in mind, all the while forgetting the value of action.

The primary goal of any retail signage is to encourage customers and prospective customers to take action, whether doing so means entering your store to browse, immediately buy a new product or simply to remember your store for later.

While many businesses prioritize other goals in their sign design, designing your retail signage for action will produce a measurable, sustainable increase in sales, revenue and popularity for your business.

Designing signs for action is remarkably simple once you’re familiar with the few elements of design that inspire action. Read on to discover four design elements to use in your signage if instant action is your goal.

Effective use of color and contrast

Color has a huge effect on the way people perceive your business. Bright colors like red, yellow and orange can inspire people to feel alert and active, encouraging them to take immediate action.

Other colors can make people feel more secure and confident. Blue, for example, is a widely used color in bank and financial services advertising because it makes people feel more reliable, trustworthy and dependable.

Using the right colors in your marketing materials, as well as the right contrasting color combinations, is a great way to make your signage stand out, send a suitable message and inspire passersby to take action and enter your retail store.

Large, highly readable typefaces

The key to inspiring people to take action is having an effective message. If you don’t have a message that engages with people and encourages them to take action, you’ll struggle to encourage them to pay attention to your business.

In order to make sure your message reaches its target audience, use a large typeface that’s easy for people to read. Typefaces that are clean, well spaced and designed for readability from a distance are the most effective choices for retail signage.

It’s generally a good idea to avoid using typefaces that are overly charismatic. These typefaces might look visually interesting, but their design can make reading them an extremely difficult task for people that are just passing by your retail store.

An engaging, relevant call to action

Color and contrast catch people’s attention. A clear and highly readable typeface lets you communicate with them and broadcast your message. An engaging and relevant call to action lets you encourage people to take action after receiving your message.

A good call to action is the key to any form of effective advertising, from signage and in-store displays to direct mail. Write a fantastic marketing message without a good call to action and you’ll get people interested but ultimately lose them.

Your call to action should be simple, engaging and relevant. Think about your goal – from encouraging people to enter your store to getting them to interact with your sales team – and make sure your call to action is written to lead to this goal.

A clear explanation of your value

Rarely will people enter your store without understanding the value that you have to offer. This value can be concrete – a certain product at a certain price – or more abstract, such as a promise to improve someone’s quality of life.

Clearly communicating your product, service or store’s value to your target market is the key to effective marketing. Within five seconds of looking at your signage, the people you’re targeting should be able to clearly identify your store’s value.

The key to clearly communicating your store’s value is designing with value in mind, right from the beginning. Understand your value proposition before you design any of your signage and you’ll naturally make it a key aspect of your retail signs.

Marketing a luxury brand is very different from marketing a brand that excels due to its pricing. From exclusivity to design, people that purchase luxury products have an extremely different list of priorities to people that shop primarily based on price.

Design is one of the most important aspects of selling an expensive luxury good. The world’s most well known luxury brands and fashion houses dedicate a large amount of their advertising and marketing budgets to crafting stylish, effective designs.

If you’re creating a brochure, sign or any other marketing material for a high-end or luxury product, it’s important that you have a firm understanding of the aspects that make luxury marketing effective.

In this guide, we’ll share four tips, techniques and tactics that you can use to design and create signs, brochures, and other marketing materials that emphasize quality, exclusivity and luxury instead of the traditional marketing focuses.

Leave prices out so prospective customers contact you

Since people in the market for luxury products aren’t likely to price shop, it’s worth leaving prices out of your marketing materials. This has two positive effects for your business, both of which are significant.

The first benefit is that leaving prices out of your marketing creates exclusivity for your product, making prospective customers more interested. The second benefit is that leaving prices out of your advertising makes people more likely to contact you. 

Not all products are best marketed based on value. When you’re selling luxury, it’s often much better to create an image of exclusivity than to market a product based on its value for money.

Market a lifestyle, not just a list of features or benefits

Signs and brochures for luxury brands can vary hugely in style and content, but they all share one feature in common: few, if any, market a product’s features, while most advertisements market the lifestyle a product makes possible.

From the pursuit of excellent that’s the focus of Rolex advertising to the worldwide travel that’s often featured in Louis Vuitton brochures, the most exclusive brands in the world always focus on marketing a lifestyle, not a product.

Instead of listing your product’s features or benefits, design your signage and other marketing materials to emphasize the lifestyle that’s possible for people that have the product you’re marketing.

Avoid using popular direct marketing tactics in your ads

For most businesses, focusing on direct marketing – generating immediate leads or sales from your marketing materials – is the best way to drive sales and increase the amount of revenue that your company generates.

For luxury products, however, things are a little different. People rarely buy luxury goods because they’re marketed using direct marketing tactics. They’re much more likely to buy a luxury product because of the strength of its brand.

In many ways, branding is the opposite of direct marketing. Focus on establishing and building your brand through your marketing materials and you’ll attract your target audience naturally instead of having to pull them in with direct sales tactics.

Design your signs and brochures around images, not text

Along with marketing a lifestyle instead of features or product benefits, one of the most common elements of graphic design for luxury products is an emphasis on a product’s appearance through images rather than text.

Advertisements for luxury goods are image-heavy, with pictures taking up far more real estate in brochures and signage than text. This is because the image of a luxury product sticks in someone’s mind far more effectively than a paragraph of copy.

When it comes to luxury product marketing, an image really is worth a thousand words. Design your signs and brochures around images, making text a powerful complement instead of the focus of your marketing materials.

You’ve walked into a restaurant and sat at your table. A waiter brings you a menu and you scan through it searching for a dish you like. What do you choose and why did you choose it?

This might sound like a sample exam question, but it’s a question everyone that sits down in a restaurant asks themselves every time they look over the menu. As such, it’s important that any restaurant owner makes the decision as easy as possible.

Through price psychology and effective design, it’s possible to make certain items on your menu look more appealing, expensive items seem less expensive and extra items like drinks and desserts go from optional to essential.

It’s also possible to determine the optimal price for certain items on your menu by understanding the basic price of ingredients and time, the price of restaurants that compete with you and the amount customers are willing to pay.

In this guide, we’ll share three simple but highly effective tips and techniques that you can use to optimize your menu for a higher per-table average spent, increased return customers and a more powerful brand for your restaurant.

Calculate pricing based on your competition

One of the most frequently used restaurant pricing models is referred to as food cost pricing. This method of pricing takes into account the cost of the food (and the labor involved in preparing the food) to work out a reasonable menu price.

For example, a dish that costs $5 to prepare with a desired food cost percentage of 25% should be priced at $20, giving your restaurant a 75% profit margin whenever it’s ordered.

Food cost pricing gives your restaurant a predictable profit margin, but it ignores an important aspect of running a successful restaurant – offering better value, whether in terms of pricing or quality, than competitors.

Instead of simply determining prices using food cost pricing, dine at restaurants that compete with yours to ensure you’re offering the best value – not just in terms of the quantity of food or lowest price, but also the quality – to your customers.

Avoid using currency icons on your menu

Here’s an interesting psychological truth: people are more likely to spend more if the menu they’re ordering from doesn’t include currency symbols – dollars, euros and others, for example – than if it does include these symbols.

This is because people mentally associate currency symbols with cost, making the act of ordering an item from a menu that includes currency symbols a purchase in their mind. When price symbols are removed, this mental effect isn’t as great. 

Removing currency symbols from your menu won’t suddenly turn people into big spenders, but it has a subtle but noticeable effect on the willingness of customers to order meals that they would normally perceive as being out of their price range.

If your restaurant sells high-end food that’s priced accordingly, removing currency symbols from your menu could decrease the psychological cost of ordering many of your menu items and encourage customers to spend a higher amount, on average.

Offer a range of items at different prices

The most successful restaurants tend to offer items at a range of different prices to appeal to a wide, diverse audience. For example, a restaurant could offer some of its mains for $50 and a range of cheaper dishes from $25 to $40 each.

Offering a spectrum of different prices gives your customers more a far wider range of items to choose from. It also makes your restaurant seem more affordable due to the selection of inexpensive items, which balance the menu.

The vast majority of people won’t purchase the cheapest items listed on your menu, but simply offering them creates a psychological effect that makes your restaurant’s dishes seem more affordable and competitively priced.

This technique is often used in drinks menus and wine lists, where an inexpensive bottle of wine is used to define the lower end of the menu, increasing the chance of customers ordering mid-priced menu items.

Your restaurant’s menu can drive sales, clearly communicate your brand and give customers an idea of which dish will give them the best experience. Despite these important characteristics, menu design is an oft overlooked aspect of restaurants.

Many restaurants owners stick to a basic menu design, listing appetizers, mains and optional extras such as drinks and desserts on a plain sheet of paper using a simple typeface and little or no extra design elements.

While a simple menu has its own range of benefits, it’s often far more effective for a restaurant or café to use a menu that’s designed from the ground up to lead people towards top-selling dishes, entrees, drinks, desserts and other items.

From the fonts you use in your menu design to elements such as lines, text boxes or photos, a wide range of design elements can have a significant effect on the way that customers perceive and react to your menu.

This can drive extra orders and additional revenue for your restaurant, making it an important priority. In this guide, we’ll share five tips that you can use to design and create a more effective, profitable menu for your restaurant or café.

Own a high-end restaurant? Avoid adding photos to your menu

If your restaurant offers inexpensive dining, adding photographs to your menu is an excellent way to familiarize customers with the dishes you offer. This is particularly true if your restaurant serves exotic food that customers may not be familiar with.

For a high-end restaurant, however, it’s often a better strategy to leave the look and feel of your food to the customer’s imagination. Adding pictures to your menu could cheapen the dining experience and change people’s perception of your brand.

Leave out currency symbols to make prices seem less direct

Research shows that people are less likely to associate a price with their spending if it isn’t preceded by a currency symbol. This means that leaving dollar, pound, euro or other currency signs out of a menu could increase your average per-table spend. 

People naturally associate currency symbols with cost. Leave them out while clearly listing prices for all of your dishes and you don’t lose any transparency, but you will make ordering more expensive dishes less of a difficulty for customers.

Use boxes to group similar menu items and “build” meals

Does your restaurant offer entrees, mains and desserts? One of the best ways to help customers build a meal and increase your restaurant’s per-table spend is by sorting menu items into logical groups to help people create full meals.

Group your most popular menu items together so people have an idea of the dishes that are most worth ordering. Then, group similar items in boxes so that customers can easily build a meal, from the entrée to their favorite after-dinner drink.

Use simple typefaces that customers can read without difficulty

One of the biggest mistakes many restaurants make – particularly international or unusual restaurants – is using typefaces that, while visually appealing, aren’t easy for customers to read.

Here’s a good way to balance style and function: use an interesting font for menu headings and subheadings, with a simple, easier-to-read font for menu items and descriptions.

Take people’s reading patterns into account when designing a menu

Eye-scanning studies reveal that people don’t read menus using a unique reading pattern, as experts once thought. The majority of people actually read menus just like they’d read a book – from the top left corner to the bottom right corner.

Organize your menu logically, with entrees or favorite dishes in the top left corner and desserts in the bottom right, so that customers can easily make their way from the beginning of your menu to the end while ordering their meals.

From professional service businesses that use Comic Sans or Papyrus to children’s businesses that choose an old-fashioned slab-serif font, there are numerous cases in which businesses choose fonts that simply don’t match their brand values.

Choosing an appropriate typeface is one of the most important aspects of effective design, but it’s one that many businesses – from retail chains to service businesses and technology companies – overlook or get completely wrong.

Some typefaces are utilitarian and simple, while others are traditional, with a long history of use in newspapers and magazines. Other typefaces are stylish and highly expressive, while even more typefaces are safe and reliable.

The typeface that you choose to use in your corporate branding has a huge effect on more than just the readability of your signs and brochures – it also affects the view that people have of your brand.

In this guide, we’ll share four tips that you can use to select a typeface – or typeface combination – that matches your brand’s values, presents the best possible image of your business to your target audience and attracts the right kind of attention.

When in doubt, choose a simple typeface

One of the biggest mistakes small business owners make is assuming that their logo needs to use a memorable typeface. Try to think of the last 10 corporate logos you remember. Did any of them use an interesting or remarkable typeface?

Large companies like Nike, Apple and Microsoft all use relatively simple typefaces in their branding. The reason for this is that simple, “safe” typefaces appeal to a wider range of audiences than interesting and unique typefaces.

If your business sells a product or service that appeals to a wide audience, choose a typeface that’s safe and simple. Typefaces that appeal to one part of your audience could alienate another, reducing the total value of your brand.

Use multiple similar typefaces for consistency

For most companies, one typeface just isn’t enough. Since the average brochure or advertisement includes a heading, subheading, paragraph copy and a call to action, it’s important to use at least two different fonts for readability.

When you use more than one typeface in an advertisement, it’s important that the two or more typefaces you choose use a similar (but slightly different) style so that they’re easy to group and read together.

A geometric sans-serif font might look great for headings, but it will clash with a slab serif font that’s used for copy. Choose two fonts from the same category so that your content and headings are both as readable and consistent as possible.

Use contrast to differentiate between heading and copy

If you’re designing an ad that’s light on text and heavy on aesthetics, using two fonts that deliberately contrast with each other – for example, a modern sans serif font as a title font and a traditional serif font for copy – can be a great idea.

This deliberate use of contrast makes both your heading and your copy stand out by emphasizing the difference between the two elements. This can make your signage, brochure or advertisement more visually appealing and eye catching.

It’s important to use two fonts that contrast but don’t completely clash. Fonts with a single shared element, such as weight or spacing, generally work better for contrast than fonts with no shared design elements at all.

Avoid using fonts that compromise readability

Some fonts are amazingly stylish and unique but difficult to read, making them only suitable for short headings and snippets of text. Many businesses, especially theme businesses, overuse these fonts in their marketing materials.

Fonts with huge serifs or quirky letter design can look great when used for a short heading, but are terrible for readers to decipher when they’re used in a large block of paragraph copy, especially in a small font size.

Don’t be afraid to use charismatic fonts in headings, but avoid using them for body text or dense copy. The content of your copy is more important than its style, which is why readability should always be your top priority when choosing a typeface.

Many brands, particularly luxury or vintage brands, heavily use black and white in their marketing materials. Black and white are powerful colors – polar opposites of one another – and when used together can be a powerful combination.

When used poorly, however, black and white signs, brochures and other marketing materials can easily fail to catch people’s attention. After all, color is often the major draw for people in a visual advertisement, and black and white isn’t rich in color.

Nevertheless, black and white can be a great color scheme for use in advertising if it’s used correctly. In this guide, we’ll share four tips to help you design effective, eye-catching and powerful signs and brochures using black and white.

Use gray to balance high-contrast black and white

Black and white are as far apart as any two colors can be. One is light and easy on the eyes, while another is immensely dark and powerful. When used together, it’s easy for black and white alone to seem like too powerful a color combination.

Just like using complementary colors can lighten a bold choice of two colors, using gray in your black and white signs, brochures and other marketing materials builds a visual bridge between the two colors that reduces the level of contrast.

This is a great way to make your designs feel more welcoming and less extreme than they would be using only pure black and white. Use gray to bridge these two colors in the same way you’d use green to create a visual bridge between blue and yellow.

Focus on simplicity – don’t make your design too cluttered

Black and white is the most simple color scheme in design, and as such it works best when paired with an equally simple design. The most iconic and memorable designs that use black and white tend to be straightforward and visually uncluttered.

From solid black backgrounds with small, centered white text to gray scale images on a plain white background, think of ways to use black and white to create a high contrast design that’s amazingly simple.

Since black and white are such a high-contrast combination of colors, using them in a cluttered or busy design can often reduce visibility and make it hard for people to work out which part of your design is its focus.

Use white on black for better readability and visibility

Although white on black generally isn’t the most readable choice for paragraph text on the web, it’s one of the most eye-catching and readable color schemes for text in print and in visual advertising.

Light text on a dark background – for example, plain white or light gray text on black – is ideal for headings, subheadings and other text that people are likely to skim past quickly while navigating through store aisles or walking past your retail store.

Use dark text on a light background for small text, such as paragraph text in a sales brochure. However, light text on a dark background almost always offers the highest level of visibility for use in signage, brochure headings or other skim read text.

Use black and white to draw attention to a product

Do you remember the Volkswagen ads from the 1960s? Volkswagen, then a small car manufacturer with little popularity in the United States, used simple black and white advertisements to market its at-the-time new and innovative Beetle.

The advertisements had an incredibly simple design: the black and white Beetle sat in the center of the advertisement, with a large heading and a couple of paragraphs of copy at the bottom.

The reasons Volkswagen’s advertisements were so effective was because they put the product at the center of the ad. Use the contrast of black and white signage to draw attention to a product, your brand’s logo or a powerful visual metaphor.

Signage is one of the most important aspects of effective marketing in hospitality and retail. Effective, eye-catching signage can increase the number of people that enter your store and, once they’ve entered, convince them to take action.

Unfortunately, signage is also one of the aspects of retail marketing that’s all too frequently neglected. Many retailers, particularly small businesses, view signage partially as an “optional extra” that isn’t integral to their marketing success.

Failing to create effective signage can leave your retail business without the large-scale awareness and steady flow of traffic that it needs in order to become as highly successful as it can be.

One of the most important parts of creating effective signage is using a sign holder that matches your marketing priorities. From size to visibility, a variety of factors have an effect on the value and usefulness of your retail signage.

In this guide, we’ll share five factors that you should consider when choosing a sign holder for your retail business. Read on to learn what you should look for in order to purchase the highest quality, most suitable sign holders for retail marketing success.

Size

What size is your retail signage? Retain signs can range from large – window signs and hanging in-store signage – to small signs used on desks, beside products and in in-store exhibits.

Choosing the right size of sign holder is essential for showcasing your signage in an effective, visible manner. Before you purchase any sign holders, work out the exact size that you need to best display your in-store and window signage.

Construction

Do shoppers often bump into your in-store signs? While signs that are behind your counter or in the windows of your store won’t nee thick and sturdy sign holders, a sign that’s frequently bumped into or brushed by needs a high quality sign holder.

For signs that are frequently bumped into by shopping carts and other items, choose a thick plastic that can tolerate bumps and scratches. It’s also important to choose a sign holder that’s stable, such as one with a bottom or top-loading plastic frame.

Versatility

What type of signage will you be displaying? Do you need a sign holder to hold one type of sign, such as an opening hours or store policy sign, forever? Do you need a more versatile sign holder to hold a variety of signs that change every week.

Versatility is one of the most important aspects of a sign holder. Sign holders with a simple top, side or bottom-loading design make switching your signage easy, giving your retail store extra versatility to change its marketing message when it needs to.

Purpose

What is the purpose of your signage? Are you showcasing a discount offer sign that needs to be seen by everyone that passes it, or are you displaying an opening hours sign that only needs to be seen by people that are deliberately looking for it?

The purpose of your signage will determine the type of sign holder that’s the most appropriate. Countertop signage is best suited to an angled sign holder, while table signage is more suitable for a table tent or side loading advertising frame.

Visibility

How visible is your signage? The key element of effective marketing is visibility. No matter how effective your marketing message might be, it’s unlikely to have any real effect on customers (and prospective customers) if it isn’t visible.

Some sign holders offer better visibility, particularly from certain angles, than other types. For example, an angled side frame offers ideal visibility for countertop signs, since it angles upwards towards people’s fields of vision.

In a busy restaurant environment, getting the right information in front of your diners is often the key to increasing the amount of revenue your restaurant gets from each individual order.

From upselling desserts, drinks and other special dishes to promoting the most popular dishes on your menu, table tents – display holders that sit atop a table – offer a wide range of marketing benefits for your restaurant.

Likewise, table tents can be useful in a retail sales environment, especially when placed on store counters and tables where customers interact with your store’s sales team.

In this guide, we’ll share five great ways to use table tents to promote your retail store or restaurant’s marketing materials and increase the level of attention your customers pay to optional extras, menu items, special offers and more.

Promote your most popular menu items

Every restaurant has a few staple items – dishes that are by far the most popular with diners. Since table tents are right in front of your customers as they think of their order, they’re great tools for promoting your most popular menu items.

List three to four “favorite dishes” and place them in front of customers using table tents. Drawing customers’ attention to your most popular menu items is often all it takes to help them work out what they would like to order.

List your daily or weekly specials

One of the biggest advantages of table tents is that it’s extremely easy to switch in and out different printed marketing materials. This makes table tents ideal as a way to list your restaurant’s daily or weekly specials.

Update your table tents every Monday with a different offer or slide in a new special deal every morning. Offering a daily special is a great way to draw in business, and a table tent on each table makes it easy to increase customer awareness.

Share desserts and drinks as upsells

Does your restaurant offer a range of desserts and drinks? Upsells often generate a significant percentage of many restaurants’ revenue, making it important to make your customers aware of your drinks, desserts and appetizers.

Create a short menu showcasing your best desserts, appetizers, drinks and other extras for each table. This makes customers more aware of your extra dishes and increases the average amount spent in your restaurant on a per-table basis.

Offer financing on your sales counter

Table tents aren’t just used in restaurants and bars – they’re also useful marketing tools for retailers. If you sell high-ticket items such as Hi-Fi equipment, furniture or anything else that’s commonly purchased using financing, table tents can help you.

Use table tents to close more deals by creating a financing brochure that you can put on sales counters and desks. This way, whenever a prospective customer talks with your sales team, they’ll instantly be aware of the financing options that are available.

List special offers and great discounts

Sometimes the best way to draw people into your restaurant and increase their per-table spend is by offering a special deal. From discounts on certain menu items to a buy-one-get-one-free offer, exclusive deals rarely fail to attract attention.

The key to a successful special offer is awareness. Use table tents to place your latest special offers right in front of customers as they order, increasing the chance they’ll respond positively to the offer you’re advertising.

Could your restaurant or retail store benefit from table tents?

Paired with the right marketing materials, table tents can be fantastic marketing and promotional tools for your restaurant or retail store. How could your business make table tents part of its in-store marketing and sales strategy?

Whether you operate a restaurant or a retail store, working out the perfect type of signage for your business can be difficult. With so many different sign holders out there, which is the best choice for your business?

We offer a wide range of sign holders, each of which has its own range of advantages and disadvantages. Some sign holders offer great visibility at eye level, while others are designed for easy reading from a standing position.

Some are designed to hold signs with unusual dimensions, while others are built to hold more traditional portrait and landscape signs. In this post, we’ll look at several different types of sign holder and assess their major advantages and disadvantages.

Angled frames are ideal for reading on a countertop

Our sign holders are available in two configurations: flat sign holders, which hold a sign vertically, and angled sign holders. Angled frames point backward slightly and hold their contents at an upward angle.

This makes them an ideal choice for countertops and other areas where the reader is likely to be above the sign. Since the sign’s surface is angled slightly backward, it can easily be read by people that are standing above it.

While angles frames are perfect for countertop signs – think of a sign close to a cash register at a store’s checkout counter – they’re not as suitable for restaurant tables and other environments where people’s eyes are at the same level as signage.

Top or bottom-loading frames suit restaurant tables

Promotional signs can be incredibly effective on restaurant tables. From promoting your daily specials to listing inexpensive upsells for diners, a well-placed sign has a serious impact on any restaurant or café’s order volume.

If you’re using signs to promote specials and additional items on a table’s surface, it pays to use a top or bottom-loading frame. This is because these frames hold a sign at a perfect vertical angle, meaning it can be read from both directions easily.

Top and bottom-loading sign frames also let you display two messages at once – one message in each direction. This makes it easy to show a menu and list of specials, for example, or a list of drinks and desserts in your café or restaurant.

Side-loading frames keep your signage nice and secure

There’s a third type of sign holder – the side-loading frame – that’s suitable for many restaurants, cafés and retail businesses. Side-loading frames offer many of the major benefits of top-loading frames in addition to improved stability.

Since your paper sign loads in through the side of the frame, it’s impossible for it to fall out the bottom of the frame or be pulled out from the top. This means that side-loading frames generally offer the more secure housing for your paper signage.

If you’re installing signage in a bar, nightclub or any other crowded space where it’s important to keep your message steady and secure, a side-loading frame might offer the best combination of visibility and stability for your business.

Each type of sign holder offers a unique advantage

From angled frames to side-loading vertical sign holders, each type of sign holder we sell has unique advantages and disadvantages. Since all business has have their own different needs, there’s no perfect sign holder for every business out there.

If you’re interested in installing highly visible and readable signs on your store’s countertop, an angled frame might be your best choice. If you operate a busy café, restaurant or bar, a side or top-loading printed signage frame might be ideal.

Which sign holder best matches your business’s need and marketing goals? With the right combination of in-store promotional signage and sign holders, you’ll effectively promote your business’s marketing message to your target audience with ease.

The key to an effective marketing campaign is a great offer. Whether you’re using brochures, direct mail sales letters or in-store signage to promote your offer, your campaign’s success depends much more on its offer than it does its presentation.

Many business owners and marketers spend more time focusing on making their posters or brochures look the part than on making sure their offer is effective and truly appealing to their target audience.

Creating a good offer can be challenging, especially if your business is new and has little data on what its target customers respond to. Despite the challenge, it’s worth investing a significant amount of time and effort in creating your marketing offer. 

Below, we’ve provided four tactics that you can use to create a great offer for your next brochure. From free samples to loyalty discounts, read on to learn what goes into an effective brochure-based marketing offer.

Offer a free sample of your product

Does your business sell a specific product? If your business offers a product that can be broken down into a smaller sample, try offering a free sample to work out if your target market is interested in what you’re selling.

Free samples are ideal for cafés and restaurants – after all, who can say no to a free taste of your latest snack? They’re also great for businesses that sell high-end items that people like to test before purchasing.

Remember, samples don’t need to be physical. If you own a car dealership that sells luxury automobiles, your free sample could be a test drive in your latest vehicle for people that belong to your target audience.

Give loyal customers a great discount

Does your business depend on customer loyalty? If you sell a product that people need to buy frequently – for example, a home cleaning product or something that has seasonal demand – building customer loyalty is a great way to increase sales.

The best way to increase the amount of revenue each customer generates for your business is to focus on retention. If your target audience has a monthly need for the product you sell, retaining them for a year results in a 12 times revenue increase. 

One of the best ways to retain customers is through a customer loyalty program. Use your next brochure to promote a discount or free giveaway for customers that come back to your store in order to build a loyal audience of responsive customers.

Selling a service? Offer a free quote

Does your business sell a service? Giving away free samples can quickly get out of hand for a service business, since every free giveaway is a significant sunk cost for your business. A much better solution is to offer a free quote or estimate.

This is particularly valuable for prospective customers if your service business is built around an expensive service such as home renovation, business services or automotive repair. 

Promote your free quote or estimate service in your brochure and you’ll offer your target audience a valuable service that also contributes to your business’s marketing efforts by generating a steady stream of engaged, motivated sales leads.

Give away a complementary product

Sometimes the best way to promote your product is by giving away a different item for free. A complementary item – an item that matches the product or service your business offers – can engage and catch the interest of your target customer base.

This is a staple of direct mail marketing – a field in which marketers often give free complementary products such as pens, writing pads and office accessories – to the large B2B firms they’re targeting.

If your business offers a product or service for which an affordable complementary product is available, use it to your advantage. This type of offer typically generates high quality, motivated leads for your business to market itself to.

From posters to menus, many restaurants are heavily dependent on printed signs and content. Signage brings in customers, while menus and other forms of in-store signage give customers the knowledge they need to place their orders.

While menus and exterior signage might be promotional staples of the restaurant industry, there are many other ways to use signs – and sign holders – effectively in your restaurant to increase sales and encourage customer loyalty.

From promoting your daily special dishes to encouraging people to order sides and drinks, in this post we’ll share five ways that you can use plastic sign holders in your café or restaurant to improve customer loyalty and drive sales.

Promote your daily specials

Does your restaurant or café offer a daily list of specials? From your business lunch to your daily menu, promoting your restaurant’s special offers using a blackboard is an old fashioned and somewhat ineffective way to catch diners’ attention.

A far more effective way to promote your daily specials is by using in-store signage – particularly plastic sign holders on tables and your countertop – to draw customers’ attention to the unique dishes, meals and snacks that you have on offer each day.

Focus on inexpensive upsells

From drinks to desserts, upsells are an important part of running a successful café or restaurant. Since upsells typically have a high profit margin, it’s in your interest to promote them to customers in order to enhance their dining experience.

Instead of asking customers if they’d like dessert or drinks while serving their food or taking their orders, keep a list of inexpensive and popular upsells on an in-store sign located at each table. This will naturally drive a steady flow of upsell orders.

Bring attention to great dishes

One of the most important aspects of building customer loyalty, particularly in a café or restaurant environment, is making sure that diners have a good experience when they’re at your restaurant or eatery.

The best way to make sure diners have a great experience is by recommending your best dishes to them. Use tabletop sign holders to draw attention to your best dishes, encouraging first-time diners to choose something they’ll enjoy and return for again.

Promote your loyalty program

Does your café or restaurant offer a loyalty program? From coffee card programs that reward loyal customers with a free drink to special offers for customers that return to your restaurant frequently, loyalty programs are great for retention.

The only problem, however, is that many customers are unaware that your café or restaurant might offer a loyalty program. Keep a plastic sign holder on top of your counter or dining tables so that people are more likely to ask about your program.

Connect using social media

Thanks to the massive popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, it’s no longer optional to have a social media presence. Today, if your restaurant or café isn’t on Facebook, it’s missing out on a large audience of customers.

In-store signage is a great way to promote your social media presence. Print a QR code on each of your tabletop signs to make connecting with your business as easy as possible for diners that use social media frequently.  

From restaurants to retail stores, any type of business can benefit from upgrading its in-store signage. Whether to increase sales, generate leads or improve customer loyalty, an effectively designed sign can have huge effects for your business.

Many business owners, however, make the mistake of thinking that quantity of in-store signage – rather than quality of in-store signage – is the key to attracting the attention of customers and encouraging them to take action.

In reality, it’s just the opposite. While a large quantity of signs can amplify the effects they have, no amount of signage can make up for a design that just doesn’t catch the attention of your target audience.

There are two keys to designing effective in-store signage: creating an eye-catching design and writing copy that truly engages your target audience. In this guide, we’ll share five tips to help you design and create more effective in-store signage.

Focus on readability

Many business owners, particularly small business owners, make the mistake of using a “creative” font for their sign design. The end result is a sign that might be charming and unique, but is often too hard for customers to read and understand.

Unique fonts might stand out, but they’re often less readable than classic serif and sans-serif typefaces. There’s a reason direct mail marketers and newspapers have relied on the same typefaces for so long – they work!

When you’re designing in-store signage for your business, focus on readability first and style second. It’s far better to sacrifice unique style for a message that’s easier to read than to compromise your message by using an unusual, reader-unfriendly font.

Use the AIDA formula

When you’re writing copy for your in-store signs, it helps to keep the AIDA formula in mind. The formula is simple: first you aim for attention, then interest, then to get the prospect to make a decision, and finally to take action.

In a sign or poster, the AIDA formula means that your title should be the first aspect of your poster that prospects notice. The purpose of the title is simple – to give your target audience a reason to continue reading the rest of the sign.

Designing your signs and preparing their copy in a step-by-step process using the AIDA formula might seem too simple to work, but it’s a proven sales and marketing technique that’s been in use for decades.

Pick contrasting colors

Contrast is the key to catching someone’s attention. The reason we notice bright red stop signs is because they stand out from the road environment. The reason digital signage stands out is because it’s bright and colorful in bland, plain surroundings.

Make your in-store signs stand out as much as possible by choosing combinations of colors that contrast heavily. Black and white, yellow and blue or red and white stand out from each other and create a powerful visual impact.

While it’s great to use contrast to attract attention, it’s also important to remember that too much contrast can affect the way people perceive your brand. If you offer a high-end, exclusive product or service, contrast can negatively affect your branding.

Choose a great offer

The key to an effective promotion is a great offer. No matter how well designed your signs are or how carefully written your copy might be, your in-store signage will fail to have much of an effect if it’s promoting an offer people don’t care for.

Highly effective signs combine a great design and engaging copy with an offer that’s truly appealing to their target market. From free giveaways to exclusive discounts, a sign needs to promote a valuable offer in order for people to respond to it en masse.

Which offers have been the most successful for your business in the past? From free giveaways to membership in your company’s loyalty club, promote something that’s truly valuable for your target audience and you’ll create a successful campaign.

Use humor to stand out

In a world where most advertising is straight to the point and simple, using humor is a great way to stand out. Clever, interesting advertisements naturally get noticed by their target audience and often receive free promotion via word of mouth.

If you can think of a clever pun or funny joke to include in your in-store signage, use it to your advantage. Humor makes people far more responsive to advertising, even if they would usually ignore it.

There’s a careful balance that needs to be struck between funny and effective. Focus entirely on humor and your signage will be noticed but ineffective; combine humor and sales-driven copy and your ad will be noticed, enjoyed and responded to.

Trade shows are fantastic opportunities to promote your business to a responsive, interested audience. With the right signage and marketing message, your business can stand out from the crowd and attract hundreds of prospective customers.

With the wrong signage, however, your business can easily blend into the crowd of other companies at the trade show and generate mediocre results. Trade shows are far from cheap, making it essential that you maximize your business’s visibility.

There are many ways to stand out at a trade show, from designing an eye-catching booth to having a unique offer. One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd is by giving away great brochures and using retail signage to your advantage.

In this post, we’ll share three techniques that you can use to make your business far more visible to attendees at your next trade show, fueling lead generation and sales that help your business grow.

Give away engaging, effective brochures and documents

One of the most important – and unfortunately, one of the most frequently ignored – aspects of trade show marketing is creating engaging and effective brochures, signs and other corporate documents.

Not everyone that visits your booth will stay to interact with your sales reps, but the vast majority of people that pop by to take a look around will take a brochure home with them to read after the show has ended.

Designing and printing an engaging, sales-driven brochure is one of the best ways to generate leads and close sales after the show is over, giving your business a distinct advantage over its competitors.

Start by using a high quality sign or brochure holder so that your brochures are as visible and accessible as possible to attendees. Back it up with a stylish design and benefits-driven copy to make your offer stand out from other exhibitors.

Sometimes, getting your brochure into a prospective customer’s hand is all it takes to kick start the sales process. Make your brochures as appealing as possible with a high quality holder and unique design and you’ll rarely fail to make an impact.

Use high-contrast color combinations in your booth design

The key to standing out at a trade show is contrast. If almost all of your competitors’ exhibits are decorated in a conservative blue, could you possibly fail to notice a red trade show booth in the middle of the exhibition hall?

Contrast is essential not just for designing a great booth, but for designing corporate brochures, business card and other documents that people want to pick up and take with them to learn more about your business.

Use a high-contrast color combination – yellow and black or white and dark blue, for example – to make your booth and graphic design stand out. The greater the level of contrast, the bigger its visual impact and visibility will be for attendees.

It’s always best to choose color combinations that match your brand identity – don’t use colors that your business isn’t associated with. However, increasing the level of contrast to stand out can be more effective than using your exact brand colors.

Don’t just be visual – use a product to attract prospects 

Great visual design is one of the keys to standing out at a trade show, but it’s not all there is to it. One of the best ways to attract attention at a trade show is by showing off one of your latest products, prototypes or technologies.

If your company has an interesting product that you think the trade show audience will be interested in, make it the centerpiece of your booth to attract the attention of attendees and stand out from the crowd of other exhibitors.

Product displays can often be combined with signage and brochures to increase the level of awareness attendees have of your business as a whole. Your latest product, for example, could attract people to your booth that enquire about other products.

Combine a product display with an engaging, interesting brochure and you’ll get the ultimate combination: lots of foot traffic from people eager to see your new product, as well as plenty of sales leads from customers interested in your business.

When used effective, in-store signage can be a powerful marketing tool for any retail business. The right signs can significantly increase awareness of your best products, encourage customers to join your loyalty program and increase total sales.

One of the keys to effectively using in-store signage is making sure your retail store has the right sign holders and accessories. High quality sign holders give your signs a more professional look and make them far more visible to customers.

From your store’s countertop to between products in an aisle, good sign holders are ideal for making your signs more visible and noticeable for shoppers, regardless of their specific location within your store.

Buy low quality sign holders and your signs could become less visible to shoppers and look less professional, leading to less effective results. In this post, we’ll share four essential features and characteristics to look for in a retail sign holder.

Sturdy construction

Since most in-store signage is printed on relatively thin paper, in-store sign holders don’t necessarily need to be able to support a lot of weight. Despite this, high quality construction is a necessity due to the wear many sign holders need to deal with.

From being bumped off your store’s countertop accidentally – a common issue for retail stores that often have queues near the counter – to being brushed by carts in the aisles of your store, sign holders deal with a surprising amount of wear.

When you’re buying sign holders for your store, choose high quality models that are built using thick plastic. This prevents them from cracking or suffering damage from normal use – something that’s surprisingly common with thin sign holders.

Easy paper insertion

Does your store frequently run sales and promotions? If you run frequent discount offers and promotions, you’ll need to choose sign holders that allow you to change your in-store signage quickly and easily.

Make sure you choose plastic sign holders that are top or side loaded – this allows you to easily slide out the existing signage and replace it with a new sign without having to spend too much time with each specific unit.

Being able to switch signs in and out quickly means you’ll spend less time replacing signs when running a promotion or in-store sale, letting you spend more time on the aspects of your business that matter the most.

Great sign visibility

One of the most important aspects of marketing is visibility. The more visible your signage is, the greater its effect. No matter how well designed your signs are or how engaging your copy is, without visibility your marketing will rarely have an impact.

The quality of plastic used in your sign holder and the design of the holder have an incredible impact on its visibility. Cheap, low quality sign holders often use plastic that’s not completely transparent, reducing the visibility of your in-store signage.

Make sure you choose high quality plastic sign holders that are built for maximum durability and visibility. Remember that many shoppers will spot your sign out of the corner of their eye and then pay attention, making optimal visibility essential.

Customizable sizing

Are all of your in-store signs the same size? In the world of retail, different sizes of in-store signage are used for different purposes – a large sign might be ideal for an exhibit or checkout counter, while a small sign is perfect for product pricing.

When you’re shopping for sign holders, make sure a wide variety of different sizes and dimensions are available. This will let you use the same type of sign holders for all of your in-store signage, creating visual consistency that’s great for shoppers.

From vertical advertising frames ideal for catalogs and large-print signage to small, horizontal sign holders suitable for pricing information and smaller print copy, the various different sizes of sign holders all serve a different in-store purpose.

Placement is one of the most important aspects of marketing, but it’s also one that many business owners ignore. No matter how eye-catching a billboard or brochure might be, without the right location it’s unlikely to attract much attention at all.

Brochures might be smaller than billboards and retail signage, but they’re still an incredibly important aspect of marketing for retailers. Place your plastic brochure holders in the wrong location and you’ll rarely make much of an impact.

Place them in the right location, however, and you’ll reach customers that would otherwise spend their time in your store or sales office merely browsing through your stock and leaving without expressing any interest.

In this guide, we’ll share the four locations where you should keep plastic brochure holders in your store or sales office in order to maximize visibility, shopper interest and, most importantly, results.

At your checkout counter

Have you ever wondered why supermarkets always keep chewing gum, chocolate, energy drinks and other inexpensive but tasty treats close to the counter? It’s not a mistake, but a deliberate strategy designed to increase sales.

People that are completing their purchases are already engaging in a transaction, making the cost of a single energy drink or pack of gum insignificant to them. This means that they’re more likely to pick up a product and add it to their basket.

The same logic applies to brochures. Since customers are already completing their transaction at your counter, they’re more likely to see something they like in your brochure and inquire about it in order to add it to their purchase.

This technique is most effective for selling inexpensive items, but it works for just about anything. Position your brochures close to the counter and customers won’t view them as outright marketing, but as a chance to discover new items to buy.

Next to your products

Placing brochures close to your products is an excellent way to encourage shoppers to find out more about your product line-up. People that are interested in a product will often turn to a brochure for more information – and to view similar products.

The logic behind this is similar to Amazon.com’s “similar items” section. Although the items listed below the product often aren’t complementary, they appeal to people’s natural desire to learn more about similar items to the one they’re viewing.

This technique is most effective in big-box retail, when a store has a large line-up of products and can categorize them easily. In a large store, different brochures can be used in the electronics, furniture and sports sections, for example.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t effective for small retailers. Place brochures next to a product that attracts people’s attention – an in-store exhibit is a great idea – and they’ll quickly attract readers and produce customers.

At your store’s entrance

Contrary to popular retail belief, the majority of customers don’t enter your store knowing exactly what they want to buy. Most customers browse your products to work out what they’d like to purchase before choosing what they’d like.

Because of this, positioning your plastic brochure holder at the front of your store is a great way to use your brochures in order to educate customers on what your store has to offer and where it’s located.

Categorize your items by type and provide a map of your store showing customers exactly where they can find a particular item. Half of retail success is often simply showing people what you have to offer and where they can find it in your store.

An effective brochure won’t just inform shoppers of where items are – it will also produce a feeling of curiosity, prompting shoppers to spend more time browsing your store than they would if no brochures were provided.

On top of your sales desk

The above three techniques are aimed at retailers, although they also apply in high-value sales environments. If your business sells expensive products – for example, a car dealership – and depends on upsells, place a brochure holder on a sales desk.

Ideally, the brochure should promote a product or service that your company offers as an upsell. In the case of a car dealership, this could be an extended warranty or a car maintenance service aimed at reducing stress for customers.

The goal isn’t to outright sell the product or service to a customer, but to make them notice it. Once a customer notices the brochure, they’re much more likely to mention the upsell to your sales team, making it a far easier optional extra to sell.

“Warming” a sale using this strategy is an excellent way to make customers familiar with a product or service you offer and avoid the resistance that customers have to the “hard sell” tactics often used when dealing with upsells.

In the fiercely competitive world of retail, getting your brochure into a customer’s hands – and later in the marketing process, into their home – can be the difference between success and failure.

One of the most important aspects of successful effective marketing is making sure your brochures are highly visible within your store and easy for customers to pick up, put inside their bag and carry home with them.

In this guide, we’ll share five ways that you can use a plastic brochure holder as an immensely powerful and effective tool to improve brand recognition and generate leads, sales and recurring customers for your business.

Place a brochure holder on your shop’s countertop

Only a small percentage of consumers go out of their way to pick up your brochure while shopping in your store. This makes it essential that your brochures are kept in an easy-to-access location that shoppers can easily see.

A great place to keep your brochure holder is on your store’s countertop. This has two key benefits – it’s extremely easy for customers to see and access, and because its on the countertop, it will appeal to customers as they complete their purchases.

Keep brochures close to sale items and in-store exhibits

There’s a reason supermarkets locate their heavily discounted sale items close to in-store exhibits – people associate the value that the sale items offer with other items inside the store, leading to increased spending.

Since sale items attract a lot of attention, it’s a great idea to keep your brochures in a nearby location. When shoppers pay attention to a sale item, they’ll see the brochure and pick it up due to the link between the value of the sale item and the brochure.

Offer a loyalty program and promote it using brochures

Loyalty programs are excellent marketing tools for retailers, especially if you sell a product or service that people buy frequently. Offering a discount of special deal for returning customers sets your store apart from the competition, creating loyalty.

The best way to promote your loyalty program is through your brochure. Keep your brochures on your store’s countertop and offer them to customers as they complete their purchases to maximize the number of people that sign up.

Advertise your best deals, offers and special discounts

When used effectively, brochures can quickly make your retail store’s target market aware of its best deals, sales and offers. Mix your in-store brochures with direct mail by sending brochures listing your best deals to the local community.

Direct mail is a great complement to in-store brochure marketing because it allows your business to access an entirely new audience. Once new customers enter your store, you can market to them further using a brochure-based promotion.

List your company’s phone number and website URL

Brochures might be thought of as an old-fashioned marketing method, but they’re often far from it. Listing your phone number and website URL on your brochure is an excellent way to generate steady traffic and calls from the community.

Many people keep their brochures on the countertop or stick them to their fridge, referencing them when they need a specific product or service. If your brochure is well designed and written with sales in mind, it will generate plenty of phone calls.

Could your business generate more leads using brochures?

Regardless of whether your business sells consumer electronics or real estate, an effectively designed and well written brochure is often the key to turning the local community into a loyal audience of customers.

Is your business currently generating leads using brochures? If your business has a local audience and depends on customer loyalty, investing in brochure marketing is a great way to generate recurring sales and develop customer loyalty.

Over the last decade, integrated marketing has grown from a strategy used by the world’s largest corporations into something that even small businesses can make work for them.

The basics of integrated marketing are simple. Instead of having multiple different marketing messages, particularly across different platforms, companies only have one brand message that’s consistent across every marketing platform.

Their direct mail campaigns use the same design and marketing message as their digital banners, while their radio ads use the same message as their TV ads. With this strategy, a consistent and more memorable marketing message is created.

Integrating signage into your company’s marketing message is simple, and it’s one of the most effective ways to put your integrated marketing campaign – especially print and direct mail marketing – into practice.

In this guide, we’ll share four techniques that you can use to make signage part of your integrated marketing strategy and create a powerful synergy between all of your marketing mediums that produces fantastic results.

Use the same message on your signs as in your advertising

How effective is your company’s advertising? Many businesses, even multi-billion dollar enterprises, are unaware of how effective their advertising is because all of their messages are different.

With conflicting messages – one focused on value, the other on quality and another on products, for example – the full synergistic value of their marketing is impossible to achieve, let alone measure.

Make your marketing message consistent by using the same message – whether it’s a focus on pricing or product quality – in your signs and posters as you do in radio advertisements, print media, digital advertising and on other platforms.

Keep your color and design elements consistent across mediums

Consistency is the key to effective integrated marketing. By using not just the same message, but the same image, across multiple platforms, you can achieve a massive amount more than what’s possible with a traditional marketing campaign.

Color plays a major role in marketing, and consumers will begin to associate your advertising’s color scheme with your brand over time. Use the same color scheme across platforms and you’ll achieve a synergistic effect that improves results.

The same design elements – from your logo to typefaces – should also be used not just on one marketing platform, but on all marketing platforms. Use the same font for your posters and signage as you do for your online banners and TV ads.

Use the same call to action online, offline, in print and on your signage

The final component of an effective integrated marketing campaign is providing the right call to action on all mediums. From “Call Us Now” to your website URL, think of the single most important contact method and use it in all of your marketing.

Can you remember any corporate jingles? The reason jingles have been so effective is because they focus on helping you memorize two things: a benefit of a product or service and a way to get that product or service.

If your print and digital advertisements feature your website’s URL, make sure your signage also features it. Being consistent with the call to action you use in your print, digital and physical advertising creates a compound effect that improves results.

Color plays a huge role in marketing and perception. The right color can make your brand stand out from its competitors and position your business as creative, sleek, traditional, trustworthy or any of hundreds of other qualities.

The wrong color, on the other hand, can have a negative effect on your company’s image and set it apart not as an exceptional brand, but as one that consumers will likely avoid.

Marketers often engage in color mismatch – the choice of a color that, while great for another industry, simply doesn’t suit their product or service. This can lead to clashes between the perception of a brand or product and reality.

In this guide, we’ll share five colors that you should avoid, based on your industry and product type. From bright colors to deep and bold ones, read on to discover which colors don’t match your brand image and market sector.

Natural products should avoid colors that don’t occur in nature

Does your company manufacture natural, chemical-free products? If so, you should avoid using any colors in your marketing that don’t also occur in nature – colors like pink, bright red or yellow.

People associate the colors used in your branding with the quality of your product – in this case, using earth tones and colors such as dark green or blue in your design creates the impression of a natural, chemical-free product.

Avoid bright colors for financial services, insurance and investments

While bright colors like yellow and orange inspire optimism and are great for some products, they’re exactly the wrong choice when your business is trying to convey a conservative, reliable image.

Banks, investment firms and other finance industry businesses should focus on the deeper, more trustworthy colors. Colors such as dark blue, which signifies trust and dependability, are more suitable for financial products and services.

Exciting, modern products should avoid conservative colors

The same colors that create a conservative, dependable image for financial firms and banks can create a boring, traditional look for modern products. If your product sits on the cutting edge, it’s better to focus on high-contrast color combinations.

Black and white or yellow, orange and other bright colors are ideal for modern and exciting products. While dark blue might inspire confidence in a bank, it can lead to a boring look for an exciting new sports product or personal accessory.

Avoid unnatural colors for food packaging and ingredients

Which colors make you feel hungry? If you’ve ever seen a chocolate advertisement on TV, you’ll know that the color brown, when used alongside a tempting food, can inspire feelings of hunger and temptation.

Artificial colors, on the other hand, are rarely appealing when it comes to food. The more closely your product’s color scheme aligns with its taste profile, the better it will be from a marketing perspective.

Avoid using weak colors to position and market bold products

Some products are bold and powerful – they stand apart from their competitors and make a statement. There’s a reason so many Ferraris are red – the color matches the vehicle perfectly, right down to the statement it’s making.

If your product is bold and powerful, its color needs to be equally as powerful. Using a weak color – a grey or light brown, for example – to market a product that needs a red, yellow, orange or purple is a major branding and design mistake.

Which color best defined your product or service?

From yellow inspiring feelings of confidence to purple creating the look of creativity and style, certain colors will always be associated with certain qualities, personality traits and characteristics.

If you’re just starting to develop an identity for your business, think carefully about the type of color you use to market your products. While the right color can have a huge positive influence, the wrong one can have a negative effect on your brand.

From brochures to posters, the headings and calls to action you use in your print and direct mail marketing materials can make a huge different to the efficacy of a campaign.

A great heading can inspire interest in your product or service and pique people’s curiosity. A bland, generic heading, on the other hand, can fail to create interest in even the most impressive product.

Likewise, a powerful call to action can encourage your audience to claim your offer and purchase your product, while a mediocre call to action can result in a fantastic offer – one that offers unprecedented value – being ignored.

In this guide, we’ll share three simple but highly effective techniques that you can use in your posters, brochures, signs and other print marketing materials to make sure you get the highest possible response rate and the best results.

Include a benefit in your call to action

Every call to action you use in your marketing should include a benefit. From the sign outside your retail store to the call to action near the end of your brochure, each should clearly outline a reason prospects should complete the action.

Imagine you’re promoting a magazine and encouraging people to become loyal subscribers. Instead of just saying “Subscribe today,” you can add a benefit and incentive by saying “Subscribe today for more insightful, educational content.”

A call to action isn’t merely a call for prospects to do something – it’s a fantastic opportunity to remind them of the value you’re offering them and the benefit of responding to your offer.

Write down the three biggest benefits of your offer or product and try to include your top benefit in your call to action. From learning more to saving money, your biggest benefit will have a huge effect on the response rate of your call to action.

The key is to be unique, personal and targeted. Avoid the generic “Call Now” and “Contact Us Today” messages that people are familiar with and give them a great reason to respond to you – if it’s compelling enough, they’ll take it.

Never assume people know how to respond

To you, a marketer, it might seem obvious to call for your free sample. But to your audience – an audience made up primarily of non-marketers – the right thing to do in order to claim your offer isn’t always obvious.

Because of this, your call to action should always spell out exactly what prospects need to do in order to claim your offer. From sending in a coupon to calling your toll-free number, make it clear what steps are required to claim your offer.

It’s best to lead or end your call to action with the instructional aspect of claiming your offer. Start with a benefit and end with instructions or start with instructions and end with your product, service or offer’s key benefits.

Be direct, but avoid being too “high pressure” for your audience. An effective call to action is clear and unambiguous without making prospects feel as if they’re forced to complete the action you’re requesting.

Command attention with your heading

The goal of your heading is to get people to read your subheading. The goal of your subheading is to get people to read your copy. The goal of your copy is to get people to read your call to action and, eventually, to respond to your offer.

Can you see a pattern emerging? Each element of your print marketing leads into the next, making people more familiar with your offer and its benefits as part of the process. The first step in the process is getting their attention with a great heading.

Many marketers make the mistake of trying to explain their offer entirely in their heading. That’s not the goal. The goal of your heading is to command the reader’s attention – your subheading and copy will explain what your product’s all about.

Keep your heading simple and direct and focus on the element of your product or service that’s most likely to capture people’s attention. Then, once you’ve got your target audience engaged, use your copy to explain your offer in greater detail.

While design plays a huge role in print marketing, it’s often the choice of words that you use in your advertising that determines whether it’s a successful and profitable campaign or a costly failure.

From descriptive words to action words, certain words and phrases can have a huge impact on the influence of your advertising. They can inspire people to take instant action, ease their fears or confirm your product’s value. 

Including these words in your marketing can make a huge difference. A single word is often the difference between a successful campaign and one that, while good, just fails to make the right impact.

In this guide, we’ve listed 10 of the most powerful and effective “action words” that you can use in your print marketing. From brochures to direct mail sales letters, put these 10 powerful and highly effective words to the test in your next campaign.

You

The best marketing is personal, and there’s no word more personal than “you.” This word can have a huge impact on your campaign by developing a close bond with an audience and helping prospects identify themselves with your product or service.

Try

Prospects will often be interested in using a product, yet not interested enough to buy it immediately. Using the word “try” in your marketing reminds them that it’s possible to try your product before buying, easing their apprehension to buy it.

Easy

Everyone likes something that’s simple to use. “Easy” immediately sets your offer apart from the competition and brands it as something that’s easy to use, especially if your competitors’ products are complicated and confusing.

Start

The key to effective marketing is encouraging people to take action. Using “start” in your print marketing encourages prospects to give your product a try and reminds them that it’s possible to get started right away, without any delays.

Proven

Many prospects fear that a product isn’t as effective as it claims to be. Using “proven” in your print marketing copy gives people peace of mind by showing them that your product isn’t just all hype and buzz, but something that’s already been tested.

How

Everyone wants to achieve new things, but many people are skeptical of how your product or service can help them do so. “How” lets you introduce the mechanics of your product or service to make prospects more interested and persuaded.

Guaranteed

One of the keys to effective advertising is building confidence in your product. By offering a “guarantee,” you remind prospects that they have little to lose by trying your product or service, since you’ll guarantee its value or effectiveness.

Learn

Who doesn’t like to learn something new? “Learn” is a fantastic word to use in the marketing of informational and instructional courses, as it immediately shows the audience how they can improve themselves by using your product or system.

Discover

Learning is one thing – discovering is another. When you use the word “discover” in your print marketing copy, you frame your product or service’s unique features as a hidden secret that offers great value to people that are aware of it.

Free

There’s no word quite like it – “free” is arguably the most powerful and effective of all of the action words. People love getting something for nothing, and giving away your product for free is a great way to encourage people to take action and try it.

Which action words could enhance your print marketing?

From print advertising to direct mail, using action words can energize your target audience and improve the results of your campaign. Which of the 10 action words above do you think would have the greatest impact on your next campaign?

From designer handbags to high-performance sports cars, expensive items require a significantly different marketing approach to their less expensive, less luxurious and less exclusive counterparts.

While the fundamentals of marketing are largely the same for any type of product, it requires a different approach to successfully sell high-ticket items than commodities or standard consumer goods.

From selling the experience rather than the product itself to never mentioning price, we’ve put together a list of four effective tips and techniques for creating brochures for high-ticket, luxury items.

Sell the experience instead of the product

When you read the brochure for a Swiss watch manufacturer, do you see an endless list of features and technology or isolated photos of the product? Of course not – you see successful people wearing and experiencing the watch.

Likewise, the brochure for a designer handbag doesn’t talk about how large it is or its numerous compartments – it talks about the experience of having it on your arm and the way you’ll feel when you own one.

Luxury goods are as much about feeling and experience as they are about quality or exclusivity. Focus on selling the experience – both in your brochure’s images and its copy – and you’ll achieve far better results.

Never mention the price, unless absolutely necessary

One of the keys to effectively marketing luxury items is qualification – making sure the prospects your marketing is targeting aren’t just interested in the item you have for sale, but able to afford it.

One of the most effective ways to screen out people who aren’t likely to complete the purchase process is by never including the price of your item in your brochure, no matter how important it is to the sale.

This self-qualifies your audience by selecting people who simply aren’t concerned about the price of the item. By enquiring without knowing the price, they indicate their ability to afford the product and their interest in acquiring it.

Pictures are essential for selling an experience

Pictures are arguably the most important component of selling a luxury item. The right photo can tell a story and transport the prospect into the world you’d like for them to occupy.

Look at the way first class seats are advertised by airlines. They don’t talk about the comfort or seat size, but instead use pictures that show successful, beautiful people relaxing and enjoying themselves while flying.

The effect is obvious: the contrast between the comfort of first class and the crowds of economy is communicated by the image, without ever having to include a single line of copy or bullet point stating such.

Be descriptive without using industry jargon

You’re creating a brochure for a high-end automobile. Do you talk about its engine capacity and raw power, or use your copy as an opportunity to discuss the joy that someone can experience by driving it?

Selling an experience means being descriptive – describing the rush of wind that’s going to run through a driver’s hair in a convertible or the soft feeling of a certain vehicle’s leather seats on long journeys.

Be as descriptive as possible in your copy to make the prospect feel as if they’re part of the experience already, but avoid using jargon. Buzzwords and jargon can remove people from the experience and distance them from your product.

From family homes to inner-city apartments, selling real estate can be a rewarding and challenging experience. With the right marketing materials, however, it can be far easier than many realtors assume it to be.

Just like your business card is often the key to closing B2B sales, the real estate sign used to promote and market a property is often the key to finding the perfect buyer and closing the sale.

Real estate marketing signs tend to be straightforward and simple in their design, but that doesn’t mean a lot of strategy doesn’t go into them. The right elements are often the key to a sign’s success as a marketing tool.

In this guide, we’ll share five must-have design and marketing elements for your next real estate sign. From personal branding to contact information, read on to learn what goes into the perfect real estate promotional flyer.

Your agency’s branding

Great realtors don’t just think about this sale – they also think about the next one. By including your agency’s branding in your real estate sign, you market your services to a wider audience, even people who aren’t interested in this particular home.

Include your agency’s name, logo and other information on your sign so that people who drive past the home you’re marketing aren’t just aware that it’s available, but that your company is selling it.

This way, should they ever need to sell their own property in the future, your agency will often be first in line to receive their business based purely on the branding from its previous real estate signage.

Your personal branding

There are two sides to real estate branding: the brand your agency creates and the brand you create as a realtor. Often, it’s your personal brand that ends up driving a continual stream of sales leads to your phone number or personal inbox.

As well as including your agency’s branding in your real estate sign, make sure you include your personal branding. Put your personal headshot on the sign and make sure your name is clearly visible for anyone that drives past.

If you have a personal slogan, include it. Building a reputation as a successful and results-focused realtor within the community is a great way to make sure anyone else in the neighborhood interested in selling their home comes to you.

Your website URL

It’s hard to include more than a few photos of a property in a real estate sign. Your company’s website is a great place to list more information about a property, from high-resolution photos to floor plans and neighborhood information.

Include both your company’s website URL and a direct URL – that is, a web address that links directly to the property’s profile on your company website – to make it as easy as possible for prospects to find out information about the property.

If you’re promoting the property to a modern, highly connected audience, you could also include a QR code in your sign. This allows prospects to directly visit your URL without having to enter it into their smartphone’s browser manually.

Your phone number

Although the Internet is starting to play a larger role in real estate marketing than it once did, most sales still begin over the phone. Include your office phone number in large, bold and easily readable text so that it’s obvious for passersby.

If your sign is situated beside a road – for example, in a suburban area – make sure that the typeface used for your phone number is large enough for prospects to read if they’re driving past in their vehicle.

Make sure the phone number used in your marketing sign reaches you at all times, even when you’re at home. Many people will view your sign on the way home from work and express interest in the property after regular office hours are over.

An eye-catching title

Every great property sign includes an eye-catching, engaging title. The title you use in your sign is often the key to engaging people in its content and building interest in the property.

Emphasize not just the property’s features – for example, the house’s square footage or its number of bedrooms – but its benefits. What is a unique benefit of living in the property that other properties in the area can’t offer?

Standing out often means thinking outside the box. Think of unique benefits to help your property stand out from the crowd and you’ll attract the attention and interest of a wide audience of prospective homebuyers.

A great business card can make a huge difference to your sales team’s success. From standing out from the crowd and making prospects take notice to building authority and prestige for your brand, a good business card can have a huge range of effects.

Despite this, business cards are often the one aspect of corporate branding that get the least amount of attention. Entrepreneurs and designers will obsess over logos, taglines and other visual identity, only to neglect their business card’s design.

When designed effectively, a business card communicates your position within your company, your company’s purpose and gives prospects and potential partners the information they need to get in touch with you.

When designed poorly, a business card can cause you to stand out for all the wrong reasons, from giving your business an unprofessional image to branding your firm as something that it simply isn’t.

In this guide, we’ll share five essential elements to include in your business card, from different contact options to typefaces. Read on to discover what goes into a perfect, results-driven business card.

Multiple contact options

In the pre-Internet days of business, the standard contact information to include in a business card was a phone number and physical address. Today, however, there are a wide range of contact options you can include as part of your business card.

If you work in a digital industry, make sure to include your email address. Another great idea is to include your social media profiles – Twitter usernames, Facebook Pages and other social identities make it easier for people to connect online.

This is particularly important if you work in digital B2B sales. Add your LinkedIn profile ID to your card to make it easy for sales and business development reps to connect with you online and initiate new deals.

Your company’s logo

If you work for a prestigious company, it’s essential that you include some aspects of its branding in your business card. This allows you to use your company’s brand as a point of influence – a statement that you’re established and trustworthy.

While a well-known brand lets you capitalize on your company’s identity, a lesser-known brand has the opposite advantage: by including your logo on your business card, you enhance your brand recognition whenever you give a card to someone.

Branding is an important part of building your company’s image, and it’s not one that you can neglect. Include your company’s logo – preferably on the rear of your business card – and you’ll improve its long-term branding.

Your professional title

The days of titles might be largely over, particularly in digital industries, but they’re still a major component of networking. This is particularly true if your business does a lot of trading with larger, more “traditional” companies.

Include your professional title on the front side of your business card, underneath your name and in a smaller typeface. Including your title allows people to work out your role in your business or organization to a greater, more detailed extent.

If you have an unusual title – for example, “Director of Growth,” which is becoming a more common title in digital industries – it’s important that your target audience is able to understand how it relates to your role within your company’s structure.

If you work in tech, a QR code

Who says you need to type in your email address to contact you online? By adding a QR code to your business card, you make it easier for people to get in touch with you online by letting them scan your card with their smartphone.

QR codes are square barcodes that can be assigned a unique URL. When a code is scanned by someone who receives your business card, their browser is sent to the address you’ve assigned to the QR code.

This can save a huge amount of time if you’d like to send prospects to a specific URL such as your LinkedIn profile, your personal page on your company’s website or a specific landing page as part of your marketing campaign.

A suitable typeface

Fonts say a lot about you, particularly on your business card. While a stylish, ultra-modern font might look great on a card for someone in the technology industry, it probably won’t make such a good impression in the investment banking world.

If your company works in a traditional, trust-driven industry such as banking or accounting, use a serif typeface on your business card. If your industry is far less traditional, feel free to be more creative and modern with your choice of font.

First impressions matter a lot, and a business card with its text printed in a strange or unique typeface can often make the wrong impression, costing you the trust and respect your business needs to close deals and make progress.

Creating the perfect brochure for your business can be difficult, with a wide range of different factors to consider. From color to copy, working out what to include – and what to exclude – can be a challenging, time-consuming process.

The ideal information and design elements for your brochure can vary based on the type of product or service your selling, your target audience and your overall sales and marketing strategy.

Direct sales can demand an information-rich brochure packed with persuasive and informative copy, while a long sales process (such as those seen in B2B) can often require a different, less direct approach.

In this guide, we’ll share four tips, tactics and techniques to help you work out what information and design elements to include and exclude in your brochure to achieve the maximum response rate.

In B2B, leave out key pricing information to generate more leads

One of the keys to effective B2B sales is to focus on fewer leads and invest more of your sales team’s time into each lead. This makes generating sales leads from your brochure a far greater priority than generating immediate sales.

People are unlikely to buy a $10,000 business service just from a brochure, but the chance of them indicating interest in your service – provided it’s something they’re truly interested in – is quite high.

Because of this, it’s often best to leave key pricing information out of your brochure when you’re selling B2B services or products. With the pricing information absent, prospects will need to contact you to learn more, initiating the sales cycle.

In B2C, make pricing obvious and easy for prospects to understand

When it comes to B2C, the B2B process is flipped on its head – instead of spending a lot of time on each prospect, it’s better to take a “wide” approach to marketing your product or service and make information as accessible as possible.

If you’re marketing a B2C product – particularly an inexpensive product – make sure your brochure includes detailed pricing, purchase and delivery information so your audience can make a decision right then and there.

There are very few impulse buys in B2B, but a great deal of on-the-spot decisions in the world of B2C sales. Offer as much information as possible to drive home the sale and inspire prospects to take immediate action.

Include authoritative colors and elements to build trust in your brand

You’ll rarely find a brochure for an investment firm or major bank with bright pink or orange lettering. This is because color plays a huge role in how we perceive not just value, but reliability and trustworthiness.

If your product or service depends on trust – for example, an investment or a B2B service – it’s vital that you use colors and design elements that encourage trust and respectability in your brochures and other marketing materials.

Colors like dark blue and dark green inspire people to trust your brand, even if used relatively lightly. Likewise, design elements such as serif fonts, which create a more esteemed, prestigious look, add additional credibility to your offer.

Include several different ways to contact your sales team

If your campaign goal is to generate leads, it’s important to give reader a variety of ways to contact your sales team. Not all prospects will want to connect with your team over the phone – some may wish to visit your nearest store, for example.

Include as many contact methods as possible and you’ll maximize your response rate. In a direct mail campaign, for example, you’ll want to include your company’s phone number, mailing address, website and the address of your nearest store.

The more options you give your target audience, the larger your target audience’s ability to respond becomes. By maximizing your audience’s ability to respond, it’s far more likely that your campaign will achieve (or exceed) its objective.

Never miss an opportunity to include your logo

Have you ever looked through a brochure for an established brand? Have you seen a print advertisement for Nike, McDonald’s or Toyota? All of the world’s largest brands understand the importance of showing off their logo whenever possible.

There’s a reason you remember the Mercedes Benz or Apple logos instantly – they’ve been shown to you so many times that they’re imprinted into your memory. Use the same strategy to develop the strength of your logo and increase brand recognition.

Use your company’s color scheme for all brochures

What’s your company’s color scheme? Every company has its distinct colors – from the colors used in its business cards and branding to favorite colors that stand out from the crowd and look great.

Just like it’s a good tactic to show off your logo whenever possible, it’s important to always use your company color scheme in brochures and other print items. This is an excellent way to increase brand recognition and help people remember you.

Stick with simple concepts that reflect your values

Have you ever noticed how simple Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola and other leading brands make their advertisements? The best brands don’t need complex ads to stand out – they understand that it’s often better to be simple and easily understandable.

Instead of trying to cram information into your next brochure, stick with the most simple concepts and design elements you can think of. Simple is memorable, and it helps brand recognition to have a simple brochure that any reader can understand.

Understand the importance of engaging copy

Great brands understand the importance of engaging copy. Many small businesses, unfortunately, don’t. Copy is what helps people connect with your brand and form their own relationship with it, making it the most important aspect of any brochure.

Instead of focusing solely on design, split your focus between design and copy. An incredibly simple design with highly engaging, effective copy will often beat a slick, stylish design with copy that fails to connect with and engage your audience.

Use contrast to make your key points stand out

Every brand has unique selling points – things like low prices, outstanding features or amazing benefits that separate it from the competition. Visual contrast, such as a light typeface on a dark background, can help make these key points stand out. 

From bullet points to subheadings, use visual contrast in your brochure’s design to help the most important points of your brochure stand out. A slight change in your background color can make text more readable and increase reader engagement.

Remember that your offer reflects your brand

Your brochure’s offer – often a free sample, consulting information or anything else – has a major impact on how people perceive your brand. The wrong offer can have just as profound effect on your brand as ineffective design or badly written copy.

Think about the image that you’re trying to portray – whether it’s exclusivity, value or something else – and make sure your offer matches the copy used in your sign or brochure and its visual identity.

The difference between direct marketing success and direct marketing failure can often be incredibly small. Minor factors such as calls to action, headlines and other design elements can turn a campaign from a loser into a winner – or vice versa.

While it’s easy to test these elements online, testing design elements, copy and the other components that go into marketing materials is significantly more difficult in the world of print media.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. With the right strategy, it’s easy to split test your brochures, posters and other print marketing materials to find out if one version is more effective than another.

In this guide, we’ll share a simple strategy that you can use to test the response and conversion rate of your next marketing brochure. If you’d like to discover which of your marketing materials is best, try it out at your next trade show or event.

Split testing your brochures using different phone numbers

This strategy has been used effectively by radio, television and print advertisers for decades. Instead of sending all of your prospects to a single phone number, use two or more phone numbers to track which one receives the most calls.

It’s simple: for every variation of your brochure design, print a different number for prospects to call. If you’re split testing two designs, have two phone numbers ready for your campaign and print each one on a different variation.

Make sure that both phone numbers forward to your sales office, and that you can monitor each phone number to determine which receives the most calls. Tracking each number’s response rate is possible using Google Voice or other applications.

Split testing brochure performance using CRM software

While split testing brochures using two different phone numbers lets you find out which is the most effective at generating phone calls for your business, it doesn’t let you find out which is the most profitable from a marketing perspective.

This is where CRM software – software that lets you track leads and deals – comes in as part of the split testing plan. After you receive each phone call, track the source of the lead (using the brochure ID) in your CRM software.

This can be done using tags – applications like Salesforce feature tags for “source” or “referral” that are ideal for tracking brochure IDs. Assign each brochure you give out a unique ID and track its performance throughout the sales process.

Determining winning brochures and losing brochures

It can take several weeks for the sales process to complete, particularly in the B2B world in which large deals are the norm. Track each sale as it progresses with your CRM software and note the value of the deals each brochure ID produces.

After a month or two, you’ll be able to return to your CRM application to find out which of your brochures had not just the highest response rate, but the best sales results after it was handed out to prospects.

This approach lets you determine a brochure’s profitability and value using two different metrics: a short-term metric (its response rate) and a long-term metric (the amount of revenue it produces) for the greatest level of insight.

Are you ready to split test your brochures, posters and more?

Split testing might seem like something that’s exclusive to online marketing – after all, it’s far simpler online. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t also split test your offline campaigns.

In exchange for a small amount of your time and effort, you can gain insight into the way your brochures perform that can help you get far more – both in response and revenue – from your future brochure marketing campaigns.

It’s a question marketers have struggled to answer for decades: Should you include your product or service’s price in your advertising, or should you leave it for people to find out after they express an interest in what you’re selling?

Pricing can have a huge psychological impact on consumers, and it can, in turn, have a big impact on the effects of your brochures, signs and other marketing materials. A listed price can improve results sometimes; in other situations, it can ruin them.

In this guide, we’ll share four factors to consider when it comes to including pricing in your brochures, signs, advertisements and other marketing materials to help you get the most from your campaign.

Including your price creates a psychological hurdle to overcome

Have you ever been interested in a product only to change your mind upon finding out how much it cost? Pricing can often create a barrier for consumers, but in many cases this barrier can be overcome by not disclosing pricing immediately.

When there’s a significant amount of time between a consumer finding out about your product and discovering its price, they’re more likely to overcome the usual objections to its price than if they had found out its price immediately.

This is particularly true of high-ticket, costly items. There’s a reason luxury goods are never advertised with their price attached – by building desire and anticipation in their target audience, price becomes less of a barrier to making a purchase.

Excluding your price can leave prospective customers guessing

If you’re selling a product that many consumers view as a commodity, excluding the price of your product can leave customers guessing not just to how much it will cost them to buy, but how much it’s worth.

There’s a reason electronic goods are often marketed based on price – in a crowded industry with massive amounts of competition, disclosing the price of a product can increase desire and set your brand apart from the competition.

If your product is viewed as a commodity by consumers or you operate in a highly competitive, crowded industry, including your product’s price in your brochures or advertising can reduce ambiguity and make it more appealing to consumers.

Including your price could cheapen your product’s perceived value

In some cases, including the price of your product could make it seem lower quality than it really is. A classic example of this is in the fashion industry, where products that cost less are routinely thought of as being worth less on a quality basis.

There’s a reason luxury brands never market their products with prices attached – it creates, in many people’s mind, a cheapening effect on the product itself. Including a price brands your product as a commodity rather than as a luxury item.

If you’re selling a high-ticket item or high-end B2B service, it’s often worth leaving the price out from your marketing materials. Not only does this often increase the perceived value of your product, it also encourages people to call and inquire.

Excluding your price can make people assume your product is costly

There can be a downside to excluding your price with goals of increasing perceived value – it also often makes people assume that your product is costly and thus out of their price range.

If your product is competitively priced and affordable, you should think of this as a marketing asset. Excluding it for psychological pricing reasons can discourage many of your prospective customers from taking action due to its perceived expense.

When you’re selling something that’s competitively priced and marketed as a low-cost alternative to its counterparts, it’s vital that you include it’s price. As price is a major part of your value proposition, leaving it out could cost you sales.

Is it a good idea to disclose your produce or service’s price right away?

Depending on your target audience and the type of product or service you’re selling, it can make sense to both include or exclude your price in brochures, retail signage and other marketing materials.

Is your product a high-end, high-priced option? If so, exclude its price and market it as a luxury good. Is your product a low-cost, competitively priced commodity? If so, market it with its price as a prominent aspect of its value to attract a large audience.

The most effective B2C brochures aim for immediate sale

In the world of business to consumer marketing, products and services tend to be on the inexpensive side – at least compared to B2B – and easy to sell immediately. This means that the goal of B2C brochures is often to produce an immediate sale.

This factor influences the design of B2C brochures. Rather than focusing on reasons the product may be better than other options on the market, they focus on benefits and unique selling propositions that result in prospects taking direct action.

Marketing tools like discounts, which aren’t as effective in B2B brochures, are highly effective in B2C. This is because they create a sense of urgency and provide an extra source of motivation for prospects to take action and purchase the product.

The most effective B2B brochures aim to generate leads

Since B2B products and services are so much more expensive than B2C products and services, they have a far longer sales cycle. This means that the goal of many B2B brochures isn’t to lead to an immediate sale, but to generate leads.

In B2B marketing, it’s far more effective to dedicate a lot of time to each lead and focus strongly on each sale than it is to spread your marketing far and wide. Thus, the instant sale focus of B2C simply doesn’t work in a B2B brochure.

Rather than designing your B2B brochure to lead people to take action immediately and make a sale, design it to increase interest in your product or service so that the reader is inspired to call in and ask for more, making them a valuable sales lead.

B2B customers typically have more questions to answer

Because the cost of B2B products and services is so much greater than B2C, as well as their scope typically being much greater, the average B2B customer has far more questions than the average B2C customer.

This means that the goal of many B2B brochures isn’t simply to promote a product or service, but to answer many of the most common questions prospects have about the offer itself, encouraging them to take action.

B2B brochures tend to be more informational and direct, stating features and major benefits, as well as providing direct answers. Design your B2B brochures to make it as easy as possible for people to take action in search of more information.

B2C brochures should focus primarily on benefits, not features

Many B2C sales are driven by emotion rather than cold logic. People buy new cars because they like the feel of driving them (or, in many cases, being seen in them) or purchase new clothes because they like the way they make them feel.

Because of this, it’s often far more effective to design your B2C brochure to show off a product or service’s benefits than its features. Features are a much more powerful selling point in B2B than in B2C, since transactions are considered for far longer.

If your B2C brochure is struggling to have the impact you’d like it to have, look at its focus. Is it designed to emphasize a product’s unique features, or is it designed with the benefits of the product in mind?

Have a mission statement that guides your design principles

Every great business has a mission statement. This statement generally guides the company’s decisions and actions – the products it designs, the marketing methods that it uses and the focus of its activities.

A mission statement can also define and direct your company’s visual identity. The right mission and values can influence your choice of images, help you choose what fonts should be used in your logo and influence your company’s slogan.

When you’re designing a brand for your company, keep its mission statement and major goals in mind. The design of your brand shouldn’t just be due to aesthetics – for a truly great company, it should be a visual statement as to its mission.

Make your company’s brand part of everything it creates

Here’s an important aspect of branding that many businesses forget about. While it’s obviously important to include your branding on signs and business cards, it should also appear on everything else your business creates.

Look at an Apple iPhone or MacBook – not only does their unique design identify the product as belonging to Apple, but it also features a large logo showing who designs and produces it.

This concept is taken to extreme extents in the fashion industry, where a brand isn’t just part of everything the company creates – it’s also often the selling point. As part of your brand strategy, make branding part of everything your company produces.

Be consistent with your use of colors, typefaces and other elements

The world’s most powerful, memorable brands share one feature in common: they are extremely consistent. From color to fonts, the design elements used by many of the world’s top companies are rarely different from one another.

Companies like Nike, Coca-Cola and Apple have used the same color schemes and fonts over and over again in different products, advertisements, corporate letters, press releases and more.

Consistency is the key to memorability, and the best brands are always consistent when it comes to design. Once you’ve discovered your company’s best fonts, colors and other design elements for branding, be absolutely consistent in their use.

Understand who your company’s target customers really are

Entrepreneurs and investors often talk about product-market fit – the fit between a product and the market it serves. A far less talked about concept is design-market fit – the fit between a company’s branding and design and its target market.

Your company’s brand shouldn’t just represent its values – it should represent them while targeting its real audience. Think about who uses your product or service and design with them in mind, representing their needs, desires and values.

Understanding the type of design that your audience responds to is the key to great branding. It guarantees that your brand doesn’t just represent your company, but it does so while connecting with the people that matter the most: your customers.

Designing effective signs for your retail business is a valuable skill. While a massive number of businesses focus on being clever or funny in their advertising, it’s often the simplest and most direct of signs that produce the biggest amount of sales.

As consumers, we’re exposed to hundreds of marketing messages every day. Radio ads, online banners, search advertisements, billboards, sponsorships and hundreds of other marketing platforms each compete for our collective attention.

With so much competition for the attention of consumers, how can your business stand out? One of the most effective ways for retailers to stand out is by designing signage that attracts the attention of their target audience and inspires action.

From choosing the right fonts and colors to using action-focused language, read on to discover four techniques that your business can use to design signs that increase its response rate and drive profitable sales.

Use powerful, high-contrast color schemes

Retail giant Best Buy recently discovered that 17 percent of all of its customers did not have any attention of stopping to shop at Best Buy – that is, until they noticed a sign and walked into the store.

Signs can be incredibly effective at influencing consumer behavior if they’re clearly visible. Using color schemes with a great amount of contrast is one of the best ways to make your signs more visible, and thus more effective.

When you’re designing signage for your company, choose color combinations that produce contrast. Black on white, blue and yellow, red and black or white and dark blue all stand out and catch people’s attention, increase the focus on your store.

Whenever possible, choose a larger size

The bigger your sign, the greater its visibility. Being visible is a key part of bringing people into your retail store, and having a large sign can often double or triple your total visibility and encourage people to shop with you.

While zoning regulations may prevent you from choosing a sign that’s as large as it could be, it’s almost always best to stick to the large side of average when choosing what size to make your signage.

It’s not just your sign that should be big. The text you use on your sign, as well as the graphics or photos you add to it, should all be nice and big to increase visibility from far away and draw people to your store.

Choose fonts that are easy for everyone to read

That curly, charismatic typeface you like might perfectly suit your daycare business, but is it easy to read from afar? Visibility doesn’t begin and end with color and size – an important aspect of visibility is choosing fonts that are easy for people to read.

Stick with simple fonts that scale nicely to a larger size. Fonts with lots of aesthetic embellishments – exotic serifs or unusual letter structure – can be very difficult for many people to read, especially from afar.

Keep your fonts nice and simple, and use a different font for the body copy of your sign to the one used in its headline. This creates visual contrast that makes it easy for your audience to separate your messages and respond to your marketing.

Keep your sign’s goal direct, straightforward and simple

The most effective signs are usually the simplest. Signs that instruct people to do multiple things – or signs that talk about several different offers – can often create more questions than they solve, confusing your target audience.

Your signage should never split the attention of your target audience between two different things. Focus on one benefit of your business, one product or one offer in your signage and dedicate 100% of your message to your desired action.

 Keep your sign’s goal direct and simple, and use wording that’s impossible for your audience to misunderstand. In almost all cases, signs that are simple and direct are more effective than complex, wordy signs without clear goals or objectives.

Choosing stock photos for your company’s brochures, print advertisements and online content can be a challenge. With millions of images to choose from, often available for just a few dollars, which should you select to represent your brand?

Stock photos can range from excellent – many may perfectly capture your target audience or company values – to low quality or contrived. We’ve all seen generic corporate stock photos before, and most of us can spot them immediately.

Because of this, choosing the right stock photos for your company’s branding and marketing materials can have a huge impact on their efficacy. In this guide, we’ve shared five tips to help you choose effective stock photos for your branding.

Choose photos that depict your target demographic

Does your business offer consulting to Fortune 500 companies? If so, represent your audience in your marketing materials by using stock photos of executives, people in the workplace and other professionals.

Does your company sell products to middle-aged homeowners? If so, choose photos of people that match your audience. Is your product aimed exclusively at 20-30 year old women? Use photos of young women to identify your audience in your branding.

The most effective stock photos are those that directly represent the audience your business is targeting. The more closely a prospect identifies with the people in your imagery, the greater their response to your marketing efforts will be.

Adding text? Choose photos with lots of usable space

Stock photos are often paired with text, such as in a direct mail postcard or printed advertisement. This means choosing a stock photo that’s suited to the use of text as an element – preferably one with lots of usable space.

The best photos for use with text tend to have small points of focus that are away from the center of the image. They have colorful backgrounds that make white or light text visible and large amounts of space to insert your text content.

They also tend to have very little visual business. Photos with a lot of action – from fast-moving objects to visually dense backgrounds – aren’t suited to text, because a viewer’s attention will be forced to choose between text or image content.

Match your stock photos to your company’s identity

Is your company hip, young and modern? If so, choose photos that represent the type of people working in your business or the values it holds instead of generic, corporate-style images.

Many stock photos are of individuals, often posing in a workplace setting. Here’s a good test to see if such a photo is suitable for your business: Could you imagine the model in the photo actually working for your business?

A professional in a black suit carrying a briefcase might look perfectly in place in an investment bank, but they probably don’t match your creative agency. Pick images of people that match your company’s culture, not mismatched or generic photos.

Avoid photos that look artificial, posed or too unusual

The purpose of most stock photos is to represent your brand and fill in important visual space in your branding, not to stand out on their own. A stock photo should never be the focus of your marketing – instead, it’s just part of the background.

Because of this, it’s important to avoid using photos that look too posed, artificial or unnatural. Stock photos that look staged will immediately stand out to your target and distract people from your marketing message.

When in doubt, go with the least artificial, posed or unnatural stock photo you can find. Audiences are easily distracted by unusual stock photos, but natural images blend into your marketing and rarely distract from your core message.

What design elements do you think have the greatest impact on your brand? While most business owners think of color as having the greatest effect on the way people perceive their business, the typefaces you use often have an even greater effect.

Choosing the right font can set your business apart from its competitors and give it an unforgettable visual identity. Choosing the wrong font, on the other hand, is one of the biggest branding mistakes your business can make.

From quirky fonts used to promote serious businesses to archaic fonts used in the high-tech sector, there have been plenty of font and business mismatches over the years.

In this guide, we’ll share four tips to help you choose great fonts for your corporate identity. From business cards to brochures and more, read on to learn how you can choose the right font for all of your company’s print and digital marketing material.

Group the fonts you use by category

One of the most important aspects of choosing fonts for your business is aesthetic consistency. Fonts with similar characteristics look good beside each other, while dissimilar fonts can clash and produce an unusual, uncomfortable look.

When choosing fonts for your corporate identity, it’s important that the fonts you select match each other by category. Traditional fonts look good alongside other traditional fonts, while modern fonts look good alongside other modern fonts.

Group fonts into categories – classic, geometric sans-serif, slab serif and more – to give them a distinct identity. Your company’s branding should only ever use one or two font categories – use more and you risk creating visual disharmony.

Choose the right font for your industry

What beliefs and benefits are key to your product or service’s success? Each and every industry has a unique benefit or characteristic that sells it to prospects – a vital component of your brand’s identity that can’t be neglected.

It’s important to choose a font that matches your industry’s demands, values and beliefs. A “funny” font like Comic Sans might look great for a children’s daycare or preschool, but it’s obviously not suitable for a forensic accountancy firm.

Choose the right font not just for your business, but for your industry. Use the font categorization technique above to group fonts by type, and study your competitors to see which font categories they use most prominently in their branding.

Use simple, readable fonts for paragraph text

Although the current tastes of graphic designers tend to be simple, there’s nothing wrong with using a heavily stylized font for your heading or corporate logo. Stylish fonts look good when used properly, and can make your brand stand out.

However, using a heavily stylized font for small text can often make it difficult for people to read. Fonts with accents and lots of aesthetic personality can look overly complex and ornate when downsized into a dense block of text.

While it’s fine to use stylized fonts for your headings and logos, avoid using anything but the basics for paragraphs and small print. Simple fonts should always be the first option you choose for paragraph copy, as they’re typically the most readable.

Create aesthetic harmony by pairing different fonts

The world’s most memorable compositions – from classical music to 20th century rock – used musical contrast to great effect. Loud, heavy sections were matched by quiet, laid back periods to create a sense of contrast and harmony.

The graphic design equivalent is aesthetic harmony – pairing two different fonts to create a sense of balance. In the case of a business card or corporate logo, this could be a dark, heavily stylized font paired with a light and simple sans-serif font.

Aesthetic harmony adds balance to your company’s image, making it more visually appealing to your target audience. Instead of going all light or all bold, pair both to create interesting visual contrast that balances your company’s branding.

Many business owners think of brochures as corporate documents explaining their business to people. This isn’t far from the truth, but it’s not on the bullseye either; a brochure is equal parts informational document and persuasive advertisement.

Just like the design of a banner ad or newspaper ad can affect its response rate, the design and layout of your company’s brochures can have a significant effect, either positive or negative, on their response rate and return on investment.

Structure your brochure right and you’ll gradually warm prospects up to your offer and generate responses. Structure it the wrong way and you’ll end up with very few convinced prospects and a great deal of lost attention.

In this guide, we’ll break down the structure of an effective brochure into five parts, from heading to call to action, to help you design, write and publish more profitable and effective brochures for your business.

Heading

The heading is the first thing readers will notice, so it’s important to get it right. A great heading will draw in prospects and encourage them to read the rest of your brochure; a bad one, on the other hand, will quickly repel them.

The best headings catch your audience’s attention and give them a reason to read on. They’re often provocative, thought-provoking, funny, controversial, interesting or straightforward and simple.

Your heading should give readers an idea of what to expect, making it easy for them to continue into your subheading and copy. Don’t be too clear – a little bit of mystery is a good thing – but let readers know what to expect to avoid losing them.

Subheading

The subheading expands on the themes mentioned in your heading, giving readers a more complete description of your product, service or brand. A heading of “We Have The World’s Most Effective Vacuum Cleaner” could be followed by:

• “Clean your whole home in less than 10 minutes!”

• “Designed for carpets, wooden flooring and tiles!”

• “Now learn how you can use it to clean your home!”

A good way to write effective subheadings is to think of the text as a caption for your heading. Just like a caption below an image explains and expands on the content you view in the image, a good subheading expands on the topic of the heading.

Image (and caption)

Images are hugely important in marketing documents, particularly in brochures and other items that are largely visual. A good image can increase the number of people that read your brochure and convince more readers to take action on your offer.

Choose an image that either matches your target audience (for example, a successful middle-aged male in an advertisement for golf clubs) or matches what your audience wants to be.

It’s also important to use a caption below your image. People typically read captions before viewing the image they’re related to, making a caption a great opportunity to introduce a benefit or product or unique selling point.

Sales copy

While your heading catches the audience’s attention and your subheading explains your product in greater detail, it’s your sales copy that draws readers closer to your product and finally encourages them to take action.

Good copy is descriptive, interesting, engaging and action-focused, encouraging the audience to learn about the product or offer. It’s also typically focused on the offer’s benefits for customers, rather than its features or technical specifications.

If your brochure isn’t drawing people in, or you notice that people finish reading but fail to take action, your copy may be failing to connect with your audience and bring them into a buying mood.

Call to action

Every effective brochure ends in a call to action – a message encouraging readers to call your business, visit your website, drop in to your store or send an email in order to learn more about your offer.

Without a call to action, only a fraction of your readers will respond to your message and act on it. An engaging call to action mobilizes your readers and makes them act, increasing your response rate (and profitability) significantly.

The best calls to action encourage responses that work for your business and your audience. Think of the best way to interact with your customers – by phone, email, in person or online – and make it the primary goal of your call to action.

Is your retail store’s signage failing to attract the attention it should? Signs are great marketing tools when used correctly. However, the wrong design can often result in almost no response to your signage and little effect on your store’s revenue.

Signs are advertisements for your business, even if they’re located close to (or right outside) your store. Like any advertisements, they can be designed to enhance your brand or to produce an immediate, action-driven response.

In this blog post, we’ll share four design tips that you can use to give your signs the highest possible response rate, leading to more foot traffic, more attention in your area and, most importantly, more sales for your business.

Use an eye-catching, engaging headline

The best signs are written like direct response advertisements. Since the headline is the first part of your sign that most people will notice, it’s important to make sure it attracts attention – and more importantly, the right type of attention.

Your sign’s headline should be eye-catching, engaging and action driven. The most effective headlines typically list your product or service, tell people the best reason to shop with you or sell a major benefit of the product or service you’re offering.

“Clever” headlines attract attention, but only from passersby that are attentive and intelligent enough to notice them. Many people won’t understand your puns or take notice of your jokes, no matter how clever or amusing they are.

Keep your sign’s headline simple, eye-catching and engaging in order to produce the best possible response rate. Make sure it’s action-driven and inspires people to visit your store; if it doesn’t, it will often be read, processed and promptly ignored.

Include a unique selling point

Imagine you’re walking down a busy street feeling hungry. You pass two identical Italian restaurants, each with signs advertising their menu. The only difference is a small sign on one restaurant’s door saying “Home cooked by an Italian chef.”

This is a unique selling point – something that differentiates the business from its, in this case very nearby, competition. A USP adds additional value to your business and sets it apart from its competitors, encouraging people to enter.

If your retail store, café or restaurant is located in an area with lots of competition, a USP can give you a huge advantage over your competitors. Study what they lack and make it a point of strength for your business that you can use in your branding.

Signage appeals to impulse shoppers – people who’ve noticed your business purely by chance and feel like browsing inside your store. With a USP, you provide another reason to enter your store, café or restaurant instead of the competition.

Focus on benefits, not features

The most effective advertising focuses almost entirely on a product or service’s top benefits, not its most interesting or impressive features. The reason for this is easy to understand: people are far more interested in themselves than in the product.

Instead of listing features in your signs, list the benefits of coming into your store or buying your product. If you sell health supplements, mention how people will “look and feel better” about themselves – a focus on the benefits, not the product itself.

If you’ve got a new vehicle to promote, mention its unparalleled comfort, not how many seats is has. If you offer a professional service, mention how much time you can help people save, not your qualifications or experience.

People are sold on features, but they’ll enter your store and inquire about your new product or service because of its benefits. List benefits prominently in your signage and you’ll notice far more curious shoppers entering your retail business.

Include a persuasive call to action

Just like every great advertisement includes a call to action, every great sign should include a message telling people to come into your store. Calls to action encourage your audience to act on the marketing message in your sign.

Your call to action can either be explicit, such as “Come in to learn more” or implicit, such as “500+ other products inside.” It can even be non-verbal, like a pointing arrow or icon showing people how to enter your store.

What’s important is that it’s there. Without a call to action, even the most interesting and persuasive sign will often be ineffective. People need to be inspired to act on the copy in your signage, and a call to action does just that.

Choose a call to action that’s congruent with the message in your signage and built to encourage immediate action. The right call to action will give people a reason to take time off from their day and enter your store, even if just for curiosity’s sake.

How effective is your signage?

Are your signs performing as well as they could? With the right blend of headline, unique selling point, benefit-focused copy and call to action, your signs can make your store stand out from the crowd and attract a qualified, interested audience.

What makes a sign, brochure or business card prestigious? We can often sense if a brand is prestigious and trustworthy within seconds of noticing its logo, without a deep understanding of its history or culture.

This is because certain design elements – from fonts to color schemes – are used by marketers and designers to make their brand look and feel more prestigious than its competitors.

If you’d like to make your brand seem more authoritative – whether on your signs or in a brochure – try incorporating one of the four design elements listed below in your next marketing campaign.

Use black and white photography

Black and white photography is an excellent element to use in order to build trust and prestige. This is because black and white photography creates the impression that your brand is old and established with a rich, detailed history.

Monochrome imagery also has a reputation as being more artistic and authoritative than color imagery. When people see a black and white image, they assume it has a deeper level of meaning – one that can indicate depth and history to your brand.

From brochures to signs, using black and white photography in your graphic design is a great way to set your business apart from its competitors, especially if the type of business you operate benefits from prestige.

Choose script and serif typefaces

Script typeface, in which all letters are linked with each other, and serif typefaces, in which letters feature small accents (or serifs) at the end of each line, are both suited to developing a prestigious and authoritative look.

This is because script typefaces, like black and white photograph, create an image of age and prestige. They mimic the appearance of handwritten text and printed type – in turn, your business is associated with centuries of publishing and writing history.

Script typefaces are best suited to established businesses with reasons to stand out as historical or prestigious. Likewise, serif typefaces are ideal for service businesses and other companies that want to have a handmade, service-focused appearance.

Use laurel leaves and other icons

Have you ever noticed that laurel leaves – the mirrored leaves icon used to mention awards and critical success on film posters and in other media – are often enough to make you think of prestige and value on their own.

Certain icons can be used to make your business look more trustworthy and reliable in the eyes of your target audience. Logos of leading publications, laurel leaves and a wide range of other symbols all have a significant effect on marketing perception.

Study your competitors and see if they use any symbols in their design and company branding. From laurel leaves to signatures, the right visual elements can have a huge effect on the way your target audience perceives your brand.

Prioritize colors like brown, gray and purple

Color has a huge effect on the way consumers view your brand, especially when it comes to building trust. Many of the world’s most trusted and prestigious brands have one feature in common: they focus on brown, gray, blue and purple.

These colors are closely associated with luxury and prestige. From Rolls Royce to Gucci, many of the world’s most prestigious and historically important brands are built around eye-catching, memorable and trustworthy colors.

The combination of scripted or serif typeface and the right color can be a hugely valuable asset to your business. Study your competitors (and brands you aspire to equal) and look closely at the colors they use prominently in their branding.

How could you make your branding timeless?

All four of the tactics above will help you improve your brand’s prestige and trust, whether used alone or in combination. How could you make your brand timeless, trustworthy and prestigious using graphic design?

Color is one of the most important aspects of visual design. It’s also one of the least understood and studied, with many designers preferring to focus on structure, lines and shapes, as well as other design elements.

Design can have a huge effect on how people perceive your products, your services, your brand and your business as a whole. In this blog post, we’ll share four ways how the colors used in your branding and marketing can affect people’s brand perception.

Create urgency

If you’re involved in direct marketing, whether on television or via direct mail, you may want to create a sense of urgency in your audience. Urgency inspires people to act quickly in order to claim your product and encourages immediate action.

We’ve all seen bright red “Limited Quantity” notices or yellow “This offer expires in 90 minutes” messages. This is for a reason – bright and hot colors like red, yellow, orange and more command attention and create a feeling of urgency.

This is the reason that many call to action buttons in digital marketing and graphic design are red or orange. If you want to create a sense of urgency, the bright, warm colors at the best choices.

Develop prestige

Have you ever noticed that luxurious brands – from Rolls Royce and Mercedes Benz to Rolex and Louis Vuitton – use the same colors very frequently in their marketing and branding campaigns?

Colors like brown, purple and royal blue are used to develop a prestigious image – one that elevates your brand above its peers. Luxury brands in a range of different markets all use these colors to create prestige and a sense of elevated status.

If your business sells products or services that are more expensive than those your peers offer, using color to increase your prestige and set your brand further ahead than its major competitors is a great way to increase your audience’s desire.

Inspire relaxation

Advertising doesn’t just inform you of great deals or illustrate a product or service’s value – it can also inspire certain feelings. One of the most valuable feelings to create through advertising is a sense of relaxation, calmness and tranquility.

Light colors, particularly light blue, green or pink, are calming. They create a sense of relaxation and calmness that’s made them a favorite of spas, salons and various other relaxation-focused businesses.

From shampoo to body massages, products and services that are all about calmness and relaxation are best marketed using calm colors. Baby blue, light pink, green and other colors all inspire feelings of relaxation and make your offer more appealing.

Emphasize trust

From banks to insurance companies, many businesses depend on trust to acquire and retain their customers. There’s a reason so many financial companies use blue heavily in their advertising: more than any other color, it effectively builds trust.

Trust is an important element of marketing, and colors like blue (and dark green, to a lesser extent) are ideal for building trust. Ask yourself: Would you trust a bank if it used pink, orange or bright green in its marketing instead of old fashioned blue?

If your product, service or business is heavily dependent on trust, consider using a dark, trust-building color like blue or green. Doing so can set your business apart as a trustworthy brand and increase both customer interest and retention rates.

Ask any entrepreneur for the key to their success and they’ll respond with a simple answer: sales. Great sales are the difference between success and failure for many businesses, from exciting startups to friendly local retail stores.

Unfortunately, many businesses view sales and marketing as an optional extra that is only worth investing in during good times. They see marketing as a luxury rather than as the driving force behind the growth and development of their business.

A classic example of this is the cutback in advertising that occurred following the financial crisis. Short on cash, companies reduced their advertising budgets to cut expenses; the end result, of course, was that their growth completely stopped.

Selling isn’t just verbal or personable. Sometimes, the best way to sell is through a great advertising strategy or, in the case of a retail business, signage and displays that make your business more visible to prospects and customers.

Why is signage so important?

No matter how good your products are, few people are going to purchase them if they never find out about them. Many potentially great businesses fail because of poor sales and awareness – symptoms of ineffective, reserved marketing.

In the world of retail, being seen means success. Effective signage is just one aspect of success in retail, but it’s one of the most important. More signage visibility means more foot traffic in your store, which in turn means significantly more revenue.

The right signs are a huge part of increasing your store’s visibility for prospects and customers. From exterior signs (which bring in customers) to interior signs that tell them where to go, all signage has a serious impact on your retail store’s bottom line.

Getting the most from your signs

There’s more to raising awareness of your business than simply showcasing its logo or branding to the public. The best signs don’t just tell people about your business – they tell people what you have to offer and how they can claim it.

Get the most from your business’ signage by focusing on three key things: visibility, purpose and action. Each plays a significant role in catching people’s attention, then converting that attention into commercial intent:

• Visibility helps people notice your business, understand what it’s about and consider its value

• Purpose explains what your business has to offer and why it’s worth buying or investing time in

• Action inspires people to go from being interested in your business or retail store to being actively involved as a prospect or customer

How could you make your business more visible?

Whether in retail or hospitality, your business wins no prize for being modest and reserved. Visibility is the key to success, and well designed signage is often the key to visibility.

If you’d like to increase your store’s foot traffic, drive more sales and produce more revenue, think carefully about how you could make your store more visible. There’s a good chance updating and optimizing your signage is the best step you could take.

Ask an expert marketer, however, and you’ll only ever hear one response: trust.

From building confidence in your brand to encouraging people to buy your latest product, trust is the glue that binds the vast majority of marketing efforts together and produces real results.

Building trust is difficult, especially for a new business. People trust brands like Nike and Microsoft because they’ve known them for years. How can your small business, with its limited marketing budget, ever hope to compete?

The key to building trust quickly is design elements. From laurel leaves to logos and testimonials, using certain elements in your brochures, direct mail pieces and other marketing items will build trust in your business, even if it’s relatively new.

In this guide, we’ve listed five design elements to use in your marketing materials to increase trust in your business. If your business is new and looking to grow, try each and every one of them and watch as your brand’s trust level grows exponentially.

Logos from trusted clients

Does your business provide a useful service? If your company is trusted by brands that your target audience is familiar with, make sure you feature the brands you’re working with in your marketing communications.

Speak to your existing clients and ask if you can use their logos in your brochures or on your website to build trust. The logos of trusted brands you’re currently working with strengthen your company’s image and increase trust among prospects.

Testimonials from customers

Testimonials are incredibly powerful marketing tools, especially when they’re from people similar to your target customer profile. If you have satisfied customers, talk to them and ask if they could provide a testimonial for your marketing efforts.

Satisfied customers will be happy to support your business, as associating with your brand also strengthens their own company’s brand. Use testimonials strategically in brochures and sales letters to increase confidence in your business.

Laurel leaves and other symbols

Some symbols carry a huge amount of prestige. Laurel leaves, for example, are the sign of authority and artistic prestige, particularly in the film industry, and are one of the biggest features of awards and other congratulatory documents.

What symbols are associated with prestige in your industry? Using symbols, signs and other visual identifiers of your brand’s prestige and trust in your marketing is an excellent way to strengthen your brand and increase customer confidence.

Photos of happy customers

Did you know that photos can build trust in your business? Instead of using photos of your product in your advertising, use photos of people using your product. This seemingly tiny change has a huge effect on people’s trust in your brand.

Why? The answer is simple: people become more confident when they see others using your product or service successfully. A smiling, happy customer is a simple, effective visual indicator that your product is worth purchasing and using.

Awards and seals of approval

Has your product been recommended by a magazine or newspaper? If your target audience is familiar with the publication, use its logo – along with test stating that your product was featured or reviewed – to build trust and authority status.

Likewise, if your product has received an award or seal of approval from a famous or well-known brand, use it to your advantage. Logos of approving publications or organizations can have a huge positive influence on your marketing campaigns.

Without an in-house design department, it’s easy to let your small business’s brand and looks slip. From unsuitable fonts to kitsch color schemes, we’ve all seen a case of poor graphic design from a small business before, perhaps even frequently.

As a small business, your budget is understandably smaller than that of your larger, wealthier competitors. Because of this, the design elements that are most important to your business are different to those a Fortune 500 brand would pay attention to.

In this blog post, we’ll share five design elements – from logos to fonts – that should always be a focus of your small business. Use each element in your branding to give your business a better visual identity and improved design focus.

Simple logos

The best logos are almost always very simple. Nike’s famous swoosh, Apple’s iconic bitten apple, the McDonald’s arches, Mercedes Benz’s three-pointed star and others all share a simplicity that makes them easy to identify and remember.

Small businesses are even more suited to simple logos than larger brands. Keep the logo your business uses straightforward and simple and you’ll create a more iconic, memorable identity that makes you stand out locally, nationally or internationally.

Clear fonts

Just like your logo should be straightforward and simple, the fonts you use in your corporate identity and branding should be clear and timeless. Small businesses are often guilty of using typefaces that are too silly, bold or ‘gimmicky.’

Avoid cartoonish or silly fonts unless your business is aimed at a young audience. A sans-serif font with minimal decoration is ideal for creating a timeless identity that’s unlikely to age or date your business to a certain period

Subheadings

Differentiating your small business from its competitors can be difficult. Coca-Cola and Pepsi, for example, both sell cola, but their brands have very different values that differentiate the two similar products in the minds of their audience.

Your pet shop and another local pet shop don’t enjoy this same brand distinction. A subheading lets you explain your business’s personality and differentiate it from its competitors in just a few words on business cards, posters and brochures.

Contrast colors

Contrast is the key to visibility, and visibility is one of the most important aspects of marketing your small business. Just like the most effective logos are easy to identify and simple, all of the most memorable logos use contrast very effectively.

Maximize the effects of your small business’s marketing efforts by using colors that contrast in your branding and advertising. Combinations like red and yellow, white and black or blue and red stand out and make noticing your small business simple.

Texture

Texture is an often ignored element of design that’s hugely important to small and medium sized businesses. The texture of your business cards, brochures and other printed media has a huge impact on the way in which people perceive your brand. 

Thick card and embossed typography can make your law or accountancy firm stand out from the crowd. Likewise, glossy paper can make your brochure feel much more professional and help your retail business differentiate itself from its competitors.

While hundreds of thousands of small businesses take part in trade shows each and every year, many achieve unimpressive results due to poorly designed booths that – despite looking professional – fail to stand out and attract attention.

From eye-catching color schemes to branding that sets your business apart, using the right combination of design elements is essential for trade show success. While some booths stand out and command attention, others fail to make an impact at all.

In this blog post, we’ll share five tips that you can use to design a great trade show booth that stands out from the crowd, attracts the right type of attention from the event’s audience and increases the amount of leads your business generates.

Study the event before you attend

Are you familiar with the trade show you’re attending? Past knowledge of an event can give you a big advantage when it comes to design, since you can study examples of competitors’ booths and learn what works – and more importantly, what doesn’t.

If you’re taking part in a trade show for the first time, study the event online to look at past years’ booths. Take note of the booths with the largest audiences and look at the design elements and color schemes they use.

Focus on either lead generation or branding

The best trade show booth designs have very focused goals. They’re either entirely dedicated to lead generation and direct sales, or they’re designed solely to improve and strengthen the company’s brand.

What’s your goal from your business’s next trade show? If you’re focused on direct sales and lead generation, use your booth to show off your company’s benefits and advantages. If branding is your goal, make sure your logo is clearly visible.

Make your product easy for visitors to notice

What does your business have to sell? Whether you offer a consumer good or a B2B product, it’s important to make sure your product is highly visible inside your trade show booth to increase the quantity and quality of leads you generate.

From product displays to banners promoting your latest product or service, make sure your offer is clearly visible for passersby. Trade shows are all about visibility, not just for your business, but for your products, services and offers too.

Create mystery with a simple, eye-catching design

Sometimes the simplest booths are the most impressive. Keeping your booth simple and sticking to branding in its design can often increase interest in your product or service, since attendees need to enter to learn what’s inside.

Many businesses make the mistake of designing a cluttered and busy booth. It can be a far better strategy to keep the design of your booth simple and focused purely on your brand as a way to increase attendees’ interest in your product or offer.

Design using a bold, eye-catching color scheme

Does your booth stand out from the crowd? Trade shows are lucrative opportunities to market your business, but competition can be fierce. A bold color scheme is often the best tool for standing out from the competition and attracting attention.

Use contrast to make your booth stand out from the crowd. Most attendees will visit your booth if it stands out and attracts their attention – focus on catching their eyes to get them inside your trade show booth and interacting with your sales team.

Is your trade show booth design up to scratch?

A great booth can be the difference between success or failure at your next event or trade show. Does your company’s trade show stand out from the crowd and attract the right amount of attention?

One of the biggest problems businesses face in marketing is getting their message out there into the hands of their customers. In business development, a frequent issue is getting your business card into the hands of potential partners.

In this blog post, we’ll share five techniques that you can use to solve both issues and get your brochures, business cards and other corporate marketing items into the hands of your target customers, clients and partners.

Add a voucher or coupon code

Here’s an innovative way to encourage people to pick up your brochure or business card: add a voucher to it. For brochures, add a cut-out voucher that people can bring in and use in your store to encourage return purchases.

For your business card, why not add a discount promise? If you run an online store, you can also add a custom discount code. Both tactics encourage people not just to pick up your business card or brochure, but to act on the message it contains.

Use a creative, eye-catching design

The better your brochure looks, the more likely it is to be picked up. Brochures that are cleverly designed with high-contrast, attractive color schemes tend to be picked up more than those with bland, uninspiring designs.

Instead of sticking with the ‘safe’ design for your brochure or business card, mix it up a little and make your card stand out from the crowd. Not only will more people pick it up; its innovative design will make it more memorable for customers.

Place it right beside your checkout

Do you want customers to pick up your brochures when they check out from your store? There’s no better way to encourage people to pick up your latest brochure or catalog than by placing it right beside your checkout.

Using one of our brochure holders, keep a stack of brochures at the ready for your customers to take home with them. In B2B, a business card holder pointed towards the customer can be all it takes to inspire them to pick one up and take action.

Make it part of your checkout process

Even if you place your brochures right next to your store’s checkout, you still might only get a few customers picking them up and taking them home. A far better way to get your brochures in customers’ hands is by giving them out as they check out.

Ask your counter staff to give out brochures or catalogs with every purchase. Add an extra reason for customers to read through your brochure by mentioning that there is a discount coupon or special offer inside that they can claim next time they visit.

Place brochures throughout your store

Many shoppers are rushed and in a hurry by the time they reach your checkout. Not only are they short on time, but they’re also no longer in a browsing mood; the idea of looking through your catalog isn’t one that’s appealing to them at this moment.

While they’re browsing your store, however, their thought process is different. Get more of your brochures, business cards or catalogs in customers’ hands by placing them at intersections and highly-trafficked points throughout your store.

Designing a logo is one of the toughest parts of creating an identity for your small business. In fact, it’s such a tough process that many large companies have spent a significant amount – often millions of dollars – on the task.

While you don’t need to spend millions of dollars to get a good logo, you do need to understand the basics of logo design. Even if you’re not personally designing your logo, knowing the fundamentals will help you get the best results.

In this blog post, we’ll cover five fundamental principles of logo design that you can use to make your company’s logo stand out more, properly define your brand, show off your best qualities and project the values you want to project.

Keep it nice and simple

The best logos are always the simplest. Shell’s classic shell-shaped icon. Apple’s half-bitten apple. Nike’s iconic swoosh. When your logo is nice and simple, it’s far easier for your target audience to remember.

Many small businesses make the mistake of thinking that their logo has to capture all aspects of their business. It doesn’t; all it needs to do is give the public an idea of what your business is about.

Be as original as possible

There’s no use copying or adapting someone else’s logo to save time or money. Not only could you face a potential trademark lawsuit; you’ll also miss out on the brand recognition that an original logo can produce for you. 

Don’t copy or imitate your competitors or companies you like. Instead, be as original as possible. The logos that we remember the most tend to be distinctly different and undeniably unique – copies and imitators tend to be quickly forgotten.

Use high-contrast colors

From Silicon Valley technology companies to oil and gas suppliers, the best company logos always use high-contrast colors. Think of Facebook’s blue and white or Shell’s yellow and red – they’re packed with contrast and easy to identify from afar.

Your logo will play a prominent role in your advertising, so it needs to be clear and distinct. Use a color combination that makes your logo clear, visible and packed with contrast to make it easy for anyone of any age to recognize.

Know your brand well

Different types of brands have different types of logos. A crisp corporate logo with a serif typeface suits a bank, not a small town gardening supply shop. Likewise, a cute and colorful logo suits a children’s daycare, not an accounting company.

The key to creating an effective logo is knowing your brand well. What are your core values? What want or need does your company solve? The best logos are matched to the brands they’re designed for – when there’s a mismatch, it tends to be obvious.

Don’t follow design trends

From grunge textures to embossed text, design trends come and go every couple of years. Designing an ultra-trendy logo might look great for now, but in a year or two it could severely date your business.

Embrace the fundamentals of timeless graphic design – simplicity, clarity and real purpose. When you latch onto trends to make your logo stand out in the present, it often damages your brand as you progress into the future.