December 2009

Yard Sign Placement Strategies

Super Cheap Signs December 21, 2009 0Comment

Yard Signs and their many uses

Yard signs are one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising. Whether you are promoting your home-based business or some type of event, yard signs are a great way to get the word out. Yard signs are used for a variety of reasons besides advertising a business or products, such as:

o Selling a vehicle
o Houses for sale
o Property rentals
o Political campaigning
o Network Marketing entities
o Loan and mortgage companies
o Landscapers and lawn maintenance
o Churches
o Builders and contractors

Because yard signs are such an effective form of advertising, all types of businesses and organizations can benefit from using them. When you take the cost of yard signs into consideration, you’re looking at one of the most affordable forms of advertising that a business or organization can use.

Things to consider when placing your signs

It is always recommended yard signs be colorful so they attract the attention of the people driving by. However, the key aspect here is: if you have a nice looking piece of property, you do not want the yard signs to detract from the looks of the property. Make sure that you signs have pleasing and easy to read color combinations and deigns. A nice sign is all well and good, but without a placement strategy, it may not be as effective. Here are a few tips to consider where the placement of your yard signs is concerned.

The placement of your signs is typically determined by the location of your property. In other words, if your house or place of business is located in the middle of the block, you’ll obviously want to place your signs at both ends of your property. If your lot is longer, you might want to consider placing an additional sign in the middle of your property as well as the ones on each end. We also suggest that the signs at the ends of your property are angled slightly so that they face the oncoming traffic as well as the street.

Additional strategies include the following:

Signs should be placed in an upright position so that they are at a 90° angle to the ground and should not lean either backward or forward.
The signs should be sitting between 6 inches and a foot above the ground once you have them staked in.
Place the signs as close to the road as what city regulations will allow – it’s a good idea to check with your local authorities about the rules and regulations involved.
Another strategy involves the clumping of business or campaign signs in groups of from three to five yard signs using the same message on each, or a message that reads as a sentence from sign to sign.
Timing should also be a part of your sign placement strategy – in other words, if you’re planning a special time-sensitive sale, put your signs out the night before the sale begins and be sure to remove them the evening that your sale ends.

Five Marketing Cheat Codes That Will Help You Win at Small Business

Super Cheap Signs December 14, 2009 0Comment

I grew up with a mom who was adamant that I always follow the rules. Never hit, always do your homework, never cheat… It was while playing CatchPhrase this weekend with some friends that I discovered cheating is OK. Bear with me for a moment. If you don’t know CatchPhrase, it’s a hand held electronic game that shows a short phrase on it’s digital readout while the beep beep beep increases with speed while you try to get your friends to guess the phrase so you can pass it to the next person for their turn. After playing this thing all weekend, my wife and I noticed the phrases starting to repeat themselves. My wife and I suggested we should find a new category or game to play. But our friends never stopped! They kept right on going along playing the game and passing it along. It was then I realized that they weren’t cheating (as my mom would have told me), they were just getting better because they had played the game enough to have seen all the phrases and they weren’t going to let the fact that they knew the answers get in the way of their enjoyment of winning.

So with my wonderfully competitive friends in mind, and the competitive space getting increasingly more threatening, this list can help you cut through the self imposed regulations you put on yourself that keep you from getting the success you deserve in your small business.

Set Easy Goals

Why bother with sky-high goals? Not saying you shouldn’t write down “Be a millionaire”, this is more about having something specific to shoot for like, “Sell Widgits”. Keeping it simple like this make sure that everything else you do is built around this primary purpose. It’s too easy to get distracted in today’s world with “value ads”, “it’s not what you sell, it’s how you sell it”, etc. Write this on the top of your to do list every day to remind you what your primary purpose is; it will keep you from getting off track.

Take short-cuts

My mom had me thinking it was better to take an “F” on my book report than to read the Cliff Notes. I can understand that reading “Huck Finn” is a more than just book, but give me the gist of the story now and I’ll do the full read on my next vacation. I f there is a way to shave off time or money to get the job done, take advantage of it!

Get Help

It’s out there, and in more forms than you might think. Sure, you could spend money on good consulting help – nothing wrong with bringing in an expert. But I’m a people person. I like surrounding myself with people that are smarter than me. In addition, there are oodles of podcasts, RSS feeds, blogs, magazines, tweets, etc. that will give you little bits of great information. This kind of atmosphere keeps me learning, and keeps me humble enough to keep asking when I don’t know – or even when I think I do!

Compromise

There are two main types of compromise. First is the kind where my wife is involved, not what I’m talking about here. The kind of compromise I’m talking about is the Information Compromise. It’s nice when you can make a fully informed decision. Nice but rare. My operations guy is detail oriented to the nth degree which is great! But he’ll spend 15 minutes mining data to get 80% of what we need, and several hours trying to get that last 20%. Making decisions with partial information is a compromise, and I say make the decision and move on to the next one.

Copy Somebody Else

Mom said not to copy others so I naturally thought that I had to come up with completely original ideas. Wrong! Some of the best ideas is taking some other idea and improving on it! Just make sure to add you own spin to it to keep your business unique.

Laugh

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Remember that creativity comes much easier when you’re not trying so hard.

Five Ways To Entice Clients Using Yard Signs

Super Cheap Signs December 7, 2009 0Comment

For all practical purposes, there is no more affordable and effective form of outdoor advertising than yard signs. Dollar for dollar, they are the most cost-effective way to drive foot traffic to your business or organization and generate sales. The key to having effective yard signs involves using creativity in the design of them. Be careful that you don’t overdo it though because you could detract from the impact that the sign will have on passersby. Additionally, an overly flashy sign can also be garish and detract from the looks of your business or home property.

Creativity leads to greater effectiveness when designing your yard signs. The following are five creative ways to bring in customers using yard signs:

You obviously want to put your name, address, and phone number on your yard sign. However, the creativity you use in the way you display those can make a difference in the amount of foot traffic that sign does or doesn’t generate. We recommend that you use large block 3-D lettering for the name of your business so it looks like your name is jumping off the face of the sign.

Add directional information that stands out and attracts attention. If you place signs away from your business to direct them to it, using a map that shows your location or employing direction arrows make the sign more creative and effective at attracting customers to your business. Placing a map on the sign means that you will have to use a larger sized sign so that people can see your map.

Put your company logo on your yard sign. This is what we call a “no-brainer” and is a creative way to make your yard sign more effective and bring you more customers. Your logo is the recognizer for those potential customers as it serves to identify you. The more people see your logo, the more market awareness is created.

Images and photos are creative ways to entice more customers to your place of business. It’s a psychological fact that placing a face with the name of a business or a particular product on the yard sign breeds trust for you and your business. Additionally, the use of an image, such as a photo of a product you are promoting on sale is another creative way to get potential customers to pay attention to you.

Use multiple signs in groups of three to five to send out your message. Remember the old Burma Shave or Stuckey’s signs you used to see when you were driving down the highway? That was creative genius in the finest sense of the terms where the use of road/yard signs was concerned. It should also serve as a good idea on how to be more creative with your yard signs. Use groups of three to five signs to get your message across either by having them all be identical or by spelling out a call to action.

December 2009

Yard Sign Placement Strategies

Five Marketing Cheat Codes That Will Help You Win at Small Business

Five Ways To Entice Clients Using Yard Signs

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