If you’re a business owner with a physical store or location, you surely feel a sense of pride every time you take a look at your sign. It represents so much hard work on the part of you and any members of your team, and from the very basics of its design to the place where it stands, it represents you as a business and what you have to provide. Who wouldn’t love seeing that?
However, your sign also serves a functional purpose– in fact, it serves several! You don’t get a sign just because it’s beautiful or because it’s a symbol of your business, you get them to improve the experiences of your customers and convey important information. There are five main purposes of retail signage, so let’s go through them!
Attract Customers
The last thing you want is to lose out on potential customers because they can’t actually find your location. If you don’t have a sign, or your sign is too small and isn’t very visible, you not only are unable to attract people who are passing by on the road or the sidewalk, but you make it more difficult for customers who came looking for your business specifically to locate you. You need signage to let people know where you are and what you do so that they can decide if they should stop in!
Wayfinding and Helping Customers Navigate
Whether you have a simple storefront with one main room or a complex setup, you want to take away all the guesswork for your customers of where they’re supposed to be and where they can find what they want. Wayfinding signs help to guide people around, like the signs that point you to your destination in a mall or an airport, but they can also be as simple as letting your customers know where they should wait to be seated in your restaurant, where to form a line to get to the register, or what section of your store they can find different products in.
Marketing and Advertising
The main purpose of any kind of marketing is to help convey to your customers that your business exists and can offer them something that they want, and a good sign is one of the most effective ways to get that message across. Not only do signs make your business easier to identify, they’re also useful for advertising specific products or services that you have available or spreading the word about sales and other temporary promotions that you might want to advertise.
Safety
Some types of signs are either required by the ADA for safety purposes or are just very handy to have to ensure that none of your customers or employees get hurt in your store. Labeling accessibility features like ramps, automatic doors, or handicapped bathrooms, identifying potential hazards like wet floors, making safety signs high-contrast and easy to read and including braille signs not only serve to protect the wellbeing of everyone in your store, they also make your customers feel welcome no matter what their situation in life is!
Branding
Building a brand relies on the creation of a unified message and style across all of your marketing materials, and signs play a crucial role in that task. Your signs are one of the first things that your customers interact with, and they are an incredibly useful platform for conveying your message clearly and concisely, right from the start. When your signs tie in to all of your marketing materials, both visually and in terms of content and intent, you’re well on your way to building a strong brand that will be easy for customers to recognize and grow familiar with!
As you can see, your signage is a lot more important than it often gets credit for! Putting in the time and effort to make your signage something special will be well worth the work, but you can only get so far without a reliable signage company at your side. Bartush Signs can help you there! We are the premier display signage company in Orwigsburg, PA. Contact us today to get started.
