Add some Punch to your Interiors with Vinyl Decals

Business and homeowners of today are keener than ever before in differentiating themselves. As the Internet shrinks the world, and social media highlight one’s signature lifestyle, homeowners and businesses are leaving no stone unturned in incorporating the latest trends into their decor.

Minimalistic trends in the recent past

Interestingly, the latest trends do not necessarily mean the most expensive trends. For example, minimalism is an enduring movement that is as popular with the rich and the famous as it is with the artistically inclined. Homeowners keep exploring simple and inexpensive, and yet highly effective means of improving the aesthetics of their homes.

A case in point is wall treatments. All of the following have been experimented with: expensive and large-sized canvas paintings, richly patterned tapestries, wall hangings, metal or ceramic art, wall paint in one or more colors, and wall paint in textured patterns.

Vinyl decals: features and benefits

A more popular trend in recent years is wall decals. These are vinyl stickers that can be ripped off an adhesive base and pasted on the wall, or ripped off the wall and replaced with a new one. These new décor elements combine the artistry of all of the above wall treatment options into a much simpler and inexpensive choice.

That explains why vinyl decals are inevitably ubiquitous today. Decals are in use everywhere: the walls of drawing, dining and bedroom spaces of homes; executive cabins and conference rooms of offices, hotels, restaurants and resorts; vehicles and sports equipment! Decals can transform even a small or simple enclosure, giving it a significant prominence.

Decals are made of high quality, interior-grade and removable vinyl with several advantages:

• Ease of application: There is no preparation involved. The wall must have a smooth texture, must be painted more than a week earlier, and be absolutely dry with no seepage issues. There is no curing, drying, or cooling time and once applied, it is good to go. However, one should avoid self-application, as there can be warps and wrinkles. Professional signage companies have the necessary skills and techniques to apply the decal flawlessly.
• Durability: Outdoor decals that bear the brunt of the elements have served well for 5 years and in some cases for 10 years. When used indoors, say on walls, their life span is 6 years and more.
• Range of designs: While simple designs inspired by nature were popular in the initial years, homeowners today keep experimenting with artistic motifs from cultures around the world, or images of religious and cultural significance. Silhouette images of favorite icons are popular with younger customers.  
• All sizes: While the smallest decal may be the size of one’s palm, the largest can occupy an entire wall or adjoining walls.
• Colors: While black is popular because it contrasts with any wall color, people try out other colors, as well as multi-colored decals.
• Self-provided design: Customers can either choose from a catalog or provide a design they appreciate: the décor company can create that decal design.
• Self-art: You can even turn your self-created artwork into a decal you love.

Wall decals are here to stay for long because of their flexibility and convenience of use. Engage a professional signage company who can suggest various decal options for your home or business establishment and implement the same efficiently to your immense satisfaction.

Using Monument Signs to attract Customers

In a recessionary economy, marketing departments are under constant pressure to conserve capital and justify ‘marketing spend’. Advertising budgets suffer cuts and cost-effective ideas of increasing visibility are in demand.

Thankfully, there are plenty of options of cost-efficient promotional tools. Outdoor advertizing and more specifically high-quality signage is one such option. It can create subtle magic that can draw customers to your business. Monument signs are the most popular of signage choices.

What are monument signs?

A monument sign is a freestanding, outdoor, ground signage of about 5 feet, positioned at your eye level; it has a huge advantage in that it can attract the most significant category of prospects – people driving or walking by. That is why they are very popular with shopping malls, real estate agencies, community centers, restaurants, pubs, cafes, bistros, libraries and theme parks.

The name comes from the fact they are large enough, and are fixed firmly on to the ground. They are made from a wide variety of durable materials such as block/brick, polystyrene or aluminum. They are mounted on a base of concrete, wood, brick or stone with side pillars or on side posts. Being low on the ground, they are a lot more noticeable than billboards and pole-mounted displays.

Monument signs are designed to be weather-resistant and have a life span of a minimum 10 years. They show resilience in the face of rain, snow, sandstorms and even hurricane-force winds, the strongest of winds; that is why they are so popular all over the world and not just the US.

Trends and variations in monument signs

A monument sign has two main components – the signage and the structure. Businesses can play with both these elements to create a wide range of styles of monument signs.

Structures could be made of a block with stone or brick veneer, fabricated steel cage with stone or brick veneer, or expanded polystyrene. Another option is electronic paper sign (EPS) that can be used for both the structure and signage, and can replicate stone or masonry look.

When it comes to the signage, they could be illuminated sign cabinets, dimensional letters, channel letters or LED message boards.

Thus, one can create multiple combinations of structure and signage; however, the most popular ones are:

• High Density Urethane (HDU) foam monument and signage with raised metal letters: Here the monument is built from a solid EPS foam core. It is then sealed in a thick polyurethane hard coat that makes it durable and pest-resistant. Metal letters are then partially embedded into the base and partially projected out.
• Fabricated aluminum monument signs: Here, the structure is a fabricated aluminum box that can be painted in your logo colors. Signage letters are of raised cut metal, either illuminated with LEDs or non-illuminated. The base is generally a concrete pad.
• Lettering made of cut metal or fabricated stainless steel: Stainless steel letters are popular as they are low on maintenance. Other equally popular metals are copper, brass and bronze. Metal letters can be easily installed on stone, masonry and concrete structure.
• Backlit lettering: LED backlighting for metal letters creates a halo effect that can be dramatic and breathtaking.

Monument signs with an aesthetic landscaping backdrop can be a very cost-effective way of generating buzz for your business. It would be best to engage a competent signage agency that would create excellent monument signs for your venture.

Tradeshow Collateral : Getting them Right

Across industry sectors, tradeshows are the most important weapon in the arsenal of Sales and Marketing departments of small and mid-sized organizations. They provide an opportunity to study in a quick and convenient manner the level of competition, the emerging trends in the business, and the cream of prospects.

No wonder, tradeshows are big business in the US; in 2015 alone, they consumed a whopping amount of 12.6 billion USD (source: Statista.com).

Addressing tradeshow challenges through collateral

Despite their popularity, tradeshows are not without their share of challenges, some of which are listed below:

• Booth Management: The first major challenge is to arrive at the right number-and-profile mix of competent people that would operate effectively the booth.
• Outsourcing or not: While it has become a trend to outsource booth staff, it doesn’t work well for every type of business.
• Effective Communication for Conversion: Clearly, the most important aspect of the tradeshow is to convert warm prospects that visit the booth into hot leads for sales. This requires effective communication and meaningful interaction.

Booth graphics have emerged as a common and dependable solution to address these challenges. A judicious blend of fixed and mobile signage elements of different sizes would be handy: they can answer graphically frequently asked questions of prospects, impress them with stunning imagery, and coax them into a decision by presenting insightful data.

Getting right tradeshow collateral elements

• Logo or Header Banner: Tradeshow exhibitors today junk away the simple nameplates provided by tradeshow organizers, and replace them with custom-made, large-sized banner or panel with the company’s logo, tagline and impressive imagery. These are backlit or frontlit to stand out from a distance and attract visitors. Some companies have even gone on to replace this with an LCD screen that plays videos and animated graphics.
• Booth Wall Graphics: Also called backdrop panels, booth wall graphics can occupy either part of or the entire wall space provided by the organizers. These are usually vinyl rolls, which can be rolled and carried in a canister. The panel banner can reflect spotlights all around and can be distracting; but rolls that have a pebble finish surface can solve this problem by deflecting part of the light.
• Standees or Banner Stands: Since the late 1990s, collapsible standees or banners have become the rage at tradeshows. This is because they are retractable rolls that can fit neatly into a metal container. Unlike booth graphics, these are mobile enough to move around and ease human traffic, or entice visitors when kept at booth entrances. These can feature eye-catching imagery and thought-provoking copy.
• Signage: Signage could be hanging posters and banners that carry little nuggets of information about the company, or products. These can feature attractive images and could be given away as souvenirs.
• Tabletop Displays: In addition to brochures and printouts given to prospects, tabletop displays too could be small, foldable paper knick-knacks that contain useful information, prizes, offers or coupons. These can charm prospects and incentivize them into making a decision.

Booth Graphics can make or break your tradeshow participation by alluring or turning off prospects. Engage a competent professional agency that can develop high-quality booth graphics and other tradeshow collateral, which can make prospects spend more time in your booth. This in itself is a big victory for you and goes a long way in increasing sales.

Business and Goodwill Promotion : Exploiting Window Graphics

The promises of global economy have created unprecedented opportunities for businesses worldwide. However, the vulnerable aspects are recessions, slowdowns and business disruptions due to economic crises in one or more parts of the world.

These are challenges for every kind of business, including small and medium businesses that play a dominant role in the local market. Such businesses have to project their offerings with a new accent in order to beat the competition, or augment their marketing efforts to widen the prospect funnel.

The need for window graphics

Below-The-Line (BTL) advertising strategy, which typically covers direct mail campaigns, trade shows, printed marketing collateral, search engine marketing, etc, addresses a larger cross-section of the prospects market. The success of such BTL campaigns depends on various tangible or intangible business parameters.

Passersby may constitute a small segment of the prospects market; however, they make up a very tangible segment; window graphics, a much-ignored marketing tactic addresses specifically this section.

Window graphics are typically stickers or decals stuck on glass windows/doors/partitions of storefronts; they can accomplish what the most prominent signboard cannot. Signboards can only carry the name, logo and tagline of the business.

Window graphics can advertise promotional offers; they can carry contact information and images of some of their offerings; they can display as well any important advertising message with potentials of conversion of passersby into regular customers.

Retail businesses desiring to stand out from the crowd are increasingly turning to window graphics, which can captivate passersby into the shop.

Advantages of window graphics

• Inexpensive advertising:  Window graphics are less expensive than vehicle wraps or billboards. Imaginative and thought-provoking promotional messages through window graphics can spark off word-of-mouth marketing.
• Brand recognition:  Visually rich and well-designed window graphics can subtly create brand imagery for the business and improve memory recall of prospects and customers.
• Added privacy:  A well-designed window film addresses in interesting ways the problem of outside distraction or lack of privacy.

Dynamic advertizing: Window Graphics can be easily ripped and relocated/replaced; businesses can thus exploit seasonal demands to their advantage, and push hard promotions.

Trends in window graphics

1. Complementing online presence: Businesses are experimenting with precious window space to project their image as digitally savvy. You can find these days QR Codes on window graphics to replicate online presence.
2. Forming a large banner: Large vinyl banners, which carry interesting imagery and messages, can cover the entire storefront, including the window.  The storefront becomes thus one large billboard.
3. Targeted messaging: As businesses become more customer-centric, a set of windows can carry a series of messages targeting specific customer segments.
4. Product-centric marketing: New products and slow moving or costly ones already in the market can be promoted for an entire month by displaying their images on windows. This can be very effective in setting off more and more impulse buying on the part of customers.
5. Creating faux decor: Window Graphics can be used to create on the passersby an impression of chic interiors. Interior and decor companies specialize in conjuring up a wow factor and thereby entice prospects into the showroom.

Window graphics may be a rather simple concept that anybody can try to exploit. Yet, it’s surprisingly underutilized, considering the lasting impact it can have. It would be best to engage a reputed professional signage company that can guide you on exciting options to harness window graphics for competitive business edge and enhanced footfall and revenues.

What You Need to Know About Lobby Signage

As trade and business everywhere go global, organizations are under intense pressure to brand and project themselves with a compelling edge. In a recessionary economy where margins are falling, organizations cannot but examine every aspect of their business for better performance and acquisition of larger customer base.

The ambience of business premises is an area, which is increasingly coming under focus. This calls for intelligent and imaginative experimentation rather than costly makeovers. Front office signage accommodates such experimentation with reassuring outcomes.

How lobbies can create best impressions

The reception and lobby spaces of a company are the first point of business interaction with clients and prospects. You can exploit this area to achieve for your business the following:

• Establish authority: A neat, clean, stylish and well-maintained lobby announces to the world that you are in solid business for the long run, and that you value professionalism.
• Establish clarity: At large offices with numerous departments, signage and wall art can provide clear directional clues and help visitors navigate your office quickly with ease.
• Foster brand identity: Brand logos and colors provide you with immense possibilities for rich business imagery, effective slogans, arresting taglines, and useful information that reinforce brand recall in prospects.
• Display laurels: The lobby area provides the right stage to display awards and accolades your company has won, which you can highlight with additional vital information.
• Market offerings: You can display in the lobby brochures, videos, sales scripts and other marketing collateral of your company. You can thus project efficiently your products and desired offerings.

Lobby signage as a huge differentiator

The impact of lobby signage becomes quite effective when all the functions and benefits listed above go nicely hand in hand. Having evolved through time keeping with advances in décor and material options, lobby signage has been in vogue for nearly half a century.

Simple plastic or metal nameplates were one of the earliest forms of lobby signage. Today, cost-effective metal finish laminates have replaced real metal. Foam letters are a popular option if you want to create an embossed effect of the lettering. The face of foam letters can be plain or digitally printed in striking patterns and colors.

Acrylic panels are very handy when logos, captions and imagery need to be projected as three dimensional with layered paneling. Acrylic letters can combine the utility values of all these varieties; they have remained therefore the number one option in recent years.  

The future is that of digital signage, which has already made inroads into hundreds of offices and commercial establishments all over the world.  

Lobby signs: dos and don’ts

1. Avoid extremely colorful signage, which can be distracting and cheapening your brand identity.
2. Ensure a prominent placement of the signage in the lobby; it should be neither obstructed nor obstructing.
3. Avoid in the lobby bright lights that reflect on the signage and irritate the visitors seated there.
4. Match the size of the signage letters with the lobby space: they should be neither too small to read nor too large to be distracting.
5. For greater aesthetic effect and variety, experiment with multiple signage structure and medium.

To achieve the maximum benefit and impact of your lobby signage, you would do well to engage a reputed professional signage agency that can design and develop the best signage for your business.

Vehicle Graphics : Why It Matters

Marketing and advertising needs vary from business to business. While product companies in the high-tech sector prefer more online and social advertising, those in other sectors prefer billboards and a combination of print and online advertising. Here, the unique features of a product become the focal point of advertising. Such information is required when one is decided about buying the product.

Service companies are a whole new ball game; the differentiators here are more subtle and are built around brand perceptions of the service. It makes more sense to keep pushing the brand name in multiple channels. Given that people need service businesses all the time, improving brand recall this way can drive sales growth. Vehicle graphics is precisely one such outdoor mode of advertising that helps improve memory recall.

Vehicle graphics and their types
 
Vehicle graphics are the most effective means of advertising a service on a moving vehicle such as a car, truck and bus; they vary in size, price and material used.

• Vehicle lettering: This uses a small number of vinyl pieces or vinyl sheets on which the company logo, message, or an image is printed digitally and then pasted on to the vehicle. This takes less time to create or apply, and costs less.
• Vehicle Graphics: Vehicle graphics, although a generic name also refers to the combination of painted letters and decals (stickers) made of digitally printed vinyl sheet; they are then cut into desired shapes, or cut out from one single vinyl sheet. After the paint dries, the vinyl pieces are cut and then pasted one after another. This takes a little more time than vehicle lettering and is costlier.
• Auto-wraps: Auto-wraps are at the top end where both cost and time-to-apply are much more. Here, entire or partial body wraps made of vinyl are printed using large-format printers. Highly skilled technicians apply them on the vehicle carefully. This is necessary as the vinyl can shrink or wrinkle at places if not applied properly.

Benefits of vehicle graphics

• Reach a larger audience: Vehicle graphics impinge on the memory of a lot more people and are equivalent to 40000-60000 impressions per day of other formats of advertising.
• Non-intrusive yet effective advertising: Vehicle ads are observed voluntarily, unlike TV ads that frustrate viewers to the point of tuning them off, or print ads that can be ignored altogether.
• Mobile, not static: Because they are mobile not static, vehicle ads come into the vision of prospects more often than other types of advertising in many business sectors.
• Cost-effective: After the one-time expense, you can use and reuse vehicle ads several times at no cost, compared to TV or print ads that can be prohibitively costly.
• Get local: With vehicle ads, local businesses can reach prospects much better and faster, unlike newspaper ads or inserts.
• Free of restrictions: While billboards, print, and TV ads come with umpteen restrictions, vehicle ads give your business complete freedom to experiment, at no additional cost. Protect the vehicles: The vinyl wrap is quite durable and lasts long. Furthermore, it protects the vehicle from scratches, fumes, and the extremities of weather.

Vehicle Graphics bring enormous returns on the marketing spend, both in the short and long runs. You would do well to engage the services of a professional agency that will create stunning visuals and crisp copy, to make your vehicle graphics more effective.

Frames and Displays: Getting them Right

Business development of any company depends on signage – an integral part of its brand messaging or brand communication. Unlike other media and channels that are time- or space-bound and short-lived, signage is a permanent entity that heralds to the world 24x7 the organization and its business message; it triggers better memory recall and enhances impulse buying.

Frames and displays

A-frames and display boards are among the oldest forms of advertising and signage; they are used at the point-of-sales or point-of-purchase (POS/POP) across industry verticals and sizes of business.

Frame display boards find wide usage from restaurants, bars, pubs, cafes, hotels, motels, and salons, to offices, factories and tourist locations. They are simply placed on sidewalks, or propped up on poles without much fuss.

They are thus very efficient and cost-effective. They can be used at all outdoor locations; their modern versions are spring loaded to prevent tipping over by strong gusts of wind.

They are in wide use indoors at hotels, conferences, symposiums, social gatherings, schools or colleges in the form of tripod displays in the lobby or main venue; they promote business or share secondary information that enhances the brand message.

Benefits of their use

Various surveys and studies conducted by Signs.org, Bang Advertizing and What’s your Signage highlight the importance of on-premise signage systems such as frame display boards. According to their findings, such signage can achieve the following:

• Alert prospects about your presence: In the small and medium business segment, 85% of the prospects targeted belong to the neighborhood.
• Bring in new customers: Signage can attract passers-by effectively; as much as 35% would miss noticing your business unless there is catchy on-premise signage. A recent survey to find out how customers discovered a business revealed that about 50% of them were solely drawn by on-premise signage; 33% by word-of-mouth referrals; the rest by print and broadcast media.
• Attract impulse buyers: One survey showed that 20 to 45% of window shoppers who passed by were impulse buyers. This is quite significant, considering the revenue payoffs that come from spending small amounts on signage.
• Increase profits: Adding or changing pole signage, directional signage or plaza identity signage for retail businesses can increase revenues in the range of 8.6% to 15.6%.

Getting frames and displays right

• Planning: Give yourself 2 to 3 weeks to come up with the right themes, draw the best designs, do error-free proofing and printing, and think of the most appropriate installation.
• Format and location: Given the wide range of formats and locations available on your premise, map them precisely for maximum business impact.
• Weather factor: Install wind- and rain-proof frame displays; factor as well the need to use tent pegs or cables to fasten them secure, so that they can withstand the worst of any weather condition.
• Maintenance: Check the signage regularly for signs of damage or impact of weather and fix/replace them accordingly.
• Transportation: If you need to use the frame display boards at other locations or events, move them with care, as slipshod transportation could lead to damage.

Frame display boards are easy to use and cost-effective as well. Invest in a professional signage agency and you can rest assured of excellent design and installation, and maximum returns.