Corporate Marketing Signage

Corporations need signage to help them establish their identity and share important messages with their target audience.

Consumers make choices with their eyes. Businesses only have a few seconds to convince viewers their products and services are the right ones, often competing with other stores and offices simultaneously for the same attention. Marketing signage helps your business stand out — and for all the right reasons. Consider the creative ways you can turn corporate signage into engaging, one-of-a-kind branded visuals.

WHAT DOES SIGNAGE HAVE TO DO WITH CORPORATE MARKETING?

Marketing encompasses all practices and platforms your business uses to form connections with customers. It’s a broad term — and for understandable reasons. Corporate marketing can span everything from promotion and sales activities to social media management, data analytics, product development and continual market research. In other words, if an activity is geared toward delivering value for someone, that activity is marketing.

Corporate marketing signage is a specific visual medium that helps you establish high-value connections with customers. It’s an essential arm in a company’s overall visual communication strategy. As with your other marketing channels, signs can help you reach different marketing goals and reach various audiences.

WHY DO I NEED CORPORATE MARKETING SIGNAGE?

Imagine a department store with absolutely no signage. How would you even know what store you’re in, let alone how to find the department you want? How would you know there’s a sale going on or that the store closes in an hour?

Signs are all around us, so much so that we often take them for granted. Corporations need signage for many reasons, and these reasons become clear when you imagine a world where your facility — whether it’s an office building, store, salon or restaurant — lacks any signage.

Signs are essential in your business, and they can also help you advertise to people waiting at the bus station, walking down the sidewalk or driving across town. Wherever they are, signs can communicate valuable information about your company, and because signs are visual in nature, they can also hint at your overall brand identity and the experience that awaits customers who interact with you.

Some companies think the prevalence of digital media means they should focus their efforts on digital marketing. While a robust digital marketing plan is critical for companies that want to succeed in the 21st century, so too is a robust corporate signage strategy. Signs are part of a person’s physical environment, which can give them a unique level of impact compared to an email in their inbox or an ad on social media.

WHAT CAN I ACHIEVE WITH CORPORATE SIGNAGE?

Corporate signage can help you achieve a variety of important marketing goals. Let’s look at some of these goals and how high-impact signs can help you attain them.

1. CULTIVATE A STRONGER BRAND

Think of brand identity as a personification of your company. Your company itself should have a distinct set of values and personality that appeals to your audience. Corporations invest heavily in developing their brands, but it’s all for nothing if you don’t expose consumers to your brand.

Marketing signage can raise awareness of your brand identity and help you make your mark. As you design corporate signage, you carefully select the most meaningful words, shapes, colors and images illustrating the heart and soul of your brand. Those messages and visuals, in turn, becomes synonymous with your company. Whether people encounter your brand in your facility or out in the world, this touchpoint should create a positive and lasting impression.

2. ADVERTISE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

The public can’t know they want or need your products and services unless theyf know what those products and services are. Signage can help you get the word out. Whether through vehicle wraps on your service vans advertising your plumbing company or window graphics showing off some of your most popular products, these signs can bring your business to people’s attention.

Corporate signs offer a range of ways to display your products or services. Because there are so many corporate marketing signage types, so many industries where signs work for and so many environments where signs shine, your design imagination is the limit to showcasing your merchandise or the services you offer.

3. PROMOTE NEW PRODUCTS

New products and services deserve a spotlight on them. After all, you add new products or services for good reasons. They’re developed to meet the needs of your current and target customers better, simplifying tasks and solving problems more reliably than any competitors.

When you launch a new product, use this as an opportunity to get the attention of existing customers and yet unconverted consumers alike. This may mean hosting an exciting launch event, complete with banners and other large-scale displays. Or, it could mean eye-catching point-of-purchase displays in stores to call attention to your new product.

4. REBRAND YOUR COMPANY

Rebranding means launching your business into its next chapter. In many cases, this involves creating a new logo or at least slightly changing your existing logo. As the face of your company, logos imbue personality with pithiness. Just a few colors and shapes relay the unique meaning behind your company. Customers are drawn to corporations that have a purpose to what they do — plus personality behind that purpose.

The most successful brands in the world also happen to be the ones with the most renowned, universally recognizable and personality-distinct logos. If you want people to recognize your logo, you need to update all your visual media with this new logo. You can also add more signage types you may not have used before, such as vehicle wraps or wall murals, to show off your new logo.

5. KEEP YOUR MESSAGING FRESH AND INTERESTING

Employing the same graphics and the same marketing messages turn your branding efforts into white noise. Customers easily block out the familiar. Ensure you’re gaining and retaining coveted attention with corporate signs that intrigue and inform, all to stay top-of-mind for those bases that mean the most:

• Re-engage current customers: Appeal to the very people who help your business thrive. Re-engagement is an essential branch of overall corporate marketing that keeps people plugged in and involved in your business’s latest developments.
• Captivate new audiences: Custom marketing signage also pulls in the people who haven’t interacted with your business yet, turning even passive eyes into prospective customers.

6. FORM AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

Emotions establish the kinds of bonds necessary to make lasting consumer connections. People will be drawn to your business because it produces high-value services or sells quality goods — but also because they feel good transacting with you. Maybe you’ve made them laugh, maybe you’ve made them nostalgic, or maybe you’ve simply made them hungry.

The most successful signs capture and nurture emotions like this in their audiences. One study found that ads focused purely on emotion did about twice as well as ads focused on rational information. If you want people to feel drawn to your brand, then use signs to draw them in. Include colors, graphics and text that appeal to their emotions, and they may become loyal customers.

7. CONVEY CORPORATE CULTURE

Signs can also play an important role for your employees in the workplace. In addition to serving wayfinding purposes and providing directions, you can also use signs to create an environment that is unique to your corporate culture. Marketing to your customer base is certainly necessary, but so is marketing to your own employees.

Offices reflect their leadership’s and employees’ personalities, communication styles, values, incentives and org hierarchies. Every business maintains its own distinct atmosphere. Corporate marketing signage is a great way to capture your individual store or organization’s environment, using language and visuals matching that personality.

TYPES OF CORPORATE MARKETING SIGNAGE

SpeedPro’s network of studios can consult, design and print large-format marketing signage in a diverse set of options. Some signage types to consider include:

• Vehicle wraps: Vehicle graphics can help you turn your work car, van or truck or your entire fleet into branded vehicles that promote your company wherever you go. These displays capture the attention of drivers and pedestrians, especially since colorful displays stand out among a sea of neutral-colored cars on the road or in the parking lot.
• Contour-cut signage: Contour-cut signage breaks the mold from simple, two-dimensional signs. With modern print technology, you can create signs that cut out 3D shapes and letters. These signs can serve as a centerpiece in your lobby or as an eye-catching way of identifying your company on your building’s face. You can even backlight contour-cut signs for an extra pop.
• Smart signs: Smart signs use modern technology to make a print sign interactive. With InfoLnkX signs from SpeedPro, for instance, people can hold their phones near the sign, and an NFC chip in the sign will cause their phone to pull up a landing page of your choice online. This is a perfect option for touchless menus, for example.
• Banners: Standing, grommet and pole-pocket banners made from vinyl or canvas materials (among others) are an attention-grabbing and versatile piece of corporate signage. Banners are also highly customizable. Select from various pre-fabricated shapes, heights and widths or opt for floor-stand or wall-projecting banners of your own custom dimensions, retractable and easy to relocate throughout the day.
• Elevator wraps: Elevator wraps are custom graphics printed for elevator walls, floors, ceilings and interior and exterior doors. Panel prints can last for years, making them popular aesthetic choices for multi-story offices and headquarters displaying their corporate culture. They’re also captivating templates to advertise products and services in public, catching the attention of shoppers at malls or residents in high rise apartments and condos.
• Wall murals: Wall murals make a blank wall a bright, bold marketing canvas. They’re a category of corporate marketing signage perfect to showcase company colors, logos, mission statements and branded imagery for employees and guests to admire. Wall murals also serve to spruce up stores and retail businesses. Imagine the environmental boost a wall-to-wall mural can have inside a restaurant or the impact of mosaic-like action shots adorning a sports venue’s walls.
• Window graphics: Choose from window clings, stickers, decals or full-blown perforated-film coverings that take your storefront’s windows from bland to on-brand. SpeedPro’s window graphics services are some of the most advanced in the large-format industry. We print first-surface and second-surface window graphics, as well as short-term static clings or low-tack stickers on half a dozen base materials, each utilizing color-matching, UV-resistant inks.
• Floor graphics: Floors can be an afterthought when it comes to branding your commercial space — if they’re thought of at all. Floor graphics remedy this opportunity gap by accenting wood, tile, concrete, asphalt and more. Layer anti-skid logos, text, icons and promotional messages where people can’t help but spot them. In fact, with the average American staring down at their cell phone screens over 50 times a day, floor graphics are a smart marketing tactic to catch eyes where they already are.
• Point-of-purchase displays: Easily assembled and completely customizable, point of purchase (POP) displays are creatively designed stands promoting a specific product or products. Point-of-purchase stands aim to increase sales of items on display. They can jumpstart items with slow turnover, highlight new merchandise or be set up near complementary products to increase sales volumes. They consist of reconfigurable 3D panels, shelving and structural stands for easy set-up wherever they’re needed.
• Event graphics: Showcase your products and your personality in style at any industry event, B2B or B2C. Trade show and conference booths can be head-to-toe branded with hanging, standing, tabletop, digital and interactive event graphics fitting your overall visual communication footprint. Likewise, community events like fundraisers, auctions, sporting functions, parades or festivals will have your business jumping out to the crowd with branded tents, table coverings and more.
• Flags: SpeedPro produces large-format flags perfect for outdoor advertising. Select from custom corporate flags in vinyl and canvas base materials, cut into blade, feather, flutter, teardrop shapes and more. SpeedPro can also outfit flags to be standing, pole-mounted or nearly any other installation configuration, printed single- or double-sided.
• Digital signs:  Digital signs use monitor screens and allow you to change the message as needed. Corporate digital signs can be installed anywhere messages need promoting, from bright, attractive restaurant menus to advertising a storefront’s daily specials to interactive screens adorning a trade show company booth.
• A-frames: Indoor and outdoor A-frame signs add a classic touch to business messages. They’re perfect for daily sidewalk promotions or as part of special event displays at fairs, farmers markets and charity events, drawing foot traffic when and where you want it most.

 

TIPS FOR MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR CORPORATE SIGNAGE

SpeedPro studios work with clients individually to ensure design needs are satisfied, company values conveyed and target audiences fully captivated. We create big, bold marketing graphics that follow these leading design industry tips and tricks.

1. DESIGN WITH YOUR MARKETING GOALS IN MIND

As with any marketing communication strategy, it’s important to match what you’re trying to say with how it’s being said. Matching these two concerns begins even before creating sign drafts. For example:

• Looking for your storefront to stand out on the street? Feather flags, window decals, illuminated graphics and contour-cut signs with 3D elements add a pop that also serves this purpose.
• Wishing to boost web traffic? Add your website URL to vehicle wraps as well as A-frame signs placed on the sidewalk. Higher website visibility should lead to higher website traffic.
• Itching to increase product or service awareness? Install interactive digital signage in high-traffic areas where prospective customers can click through information about your company at their own pace. Or place eye-catching point-of-purchase signs in-store, which by their nature are meant to highlight goods or services.
• Searching for ways to draw more people to your booths? Step-and-repeat banners are fun twists to create interactive experiences at industry events, while wall murals and environmental graphics are impossible to ignore even amidst the rows of competitor booths and stalls.

2. MAKE IT INTERACTIVE

Advances in technology mean signs today can be interactive and experiential. Digital signage and smart signage especially give you the freedom to create two-way interactions that surprise, inform and delight. Plus, research shows people rate brands with interpersonal, interactive touchpoints as more trustworthy and authentic — powerful attributes any company covets.

• Utilize user-generated content, such as selfies or videos people submit for display on your digital signs or event graphics.
• Create branded hashtags and add them to your signage, then have your signs encourage shares to win a freebie or coupon.
• Sponsor games or competitions where winners earn a free product or service, with rules or details incentivized on your custom marketing signage.
• Use smart signage to connect people to your website, your online menu, your social media accounts or other landing pages.

3. SET AND MEASURE GOALS

Define what success looks like for your visual communication strategies. These definitions become your key performance indicators (KPIs), the benchmarks tracking the success of your signs as well as what ideas, images and words on them consumers respond best to.

Setting KPIs also means finding ways to measure them. SpeedPro studios can help outline methods for intuitive metric tracking across all printed corporate signage, such as including a custom website URL on signs to help measure traffic changes.

Overall, having a clear goal for your signs allows you to focus your marketing energy to work smarter, not harder.

4. MAKE YOUR SIGNS POP

Corporate marketing signage marries strategic direction with design. The best of such signs are the ones where KPI-backed goals are enhanced — indeed, defined — by creative, captivating and customer-value oriented graphics.

The sign medium itself can help your message pop. For example, installing unique sign backlighting, 3D contour-cut pieces or digital elements are all ways to make your signs visually engaging. You can also use traditional, flat signs but design graphics that are visually arresting. Use contrasting colors and bold lettering to get the attention of passersby.