Do you have a retail storefront?

Are you a contractor that is supplying services at someones house or place of business?

You should be using a business sign, like a sandwich board or a lawn sign, to draw in traffic or build awareness for you business. Signage is an excellent way to help generate sales leads for your company.

Below are 7 tips that will help you generate a higher percentage of sales leads:

Phone Number

This is just basic common sense.  But believe it or not, business owners forget to add this one important piece of information to a business sign.

So that you can track your results from any lawn signs, use a unique phone number that people can call. By doing this, you will be able to see how many leads came from that phone number. A great service for this is Toll Free Forwarding or Google Voice.

Your Address

If you have a retail establishment that you want people to go to, why not list your address on your business sign?  It should help you to drive foot traffic to your retail location.

A Strong Call To Action For An Offer

Do you want to get someone to do something? If so, you need to have a “call to action.” Basically, you need to tell people what you want them to do.

A suggestion that ties into the next 2 tips (QR Codes and Text Codes) is to have a coupon or special offer that allows you to capture an email and other relevant information.  By capturing an email, you will have the ability to continually market to someone with an email newsletter.

A QR Code

Add a QR code to your business sign that is tied to a special offer or something that a potential customer may want. The QR Code should send the person to a mobile ready landing page that has a sign up form.

Once the person signs up for your offer, they will be sent an email with a code or a coupon.  A service that I have used before is Kawya.

Text Code or SMS Code

A text code or SMS code will allow a person to text a specific keyword to and assigned short code. This may sound confusing, but in reality, all you do is find a SMS marketing provider and register a keyword. Then you will be able to start directing people to a specific landing page on your website.

I interviewed Jed Alpert, who wrote “The Mobile Marketing Revolution” and he stated that the:

“. . . response rate from adding a text code on a sign is up to 10 times greater compared to no code.”

I can confirm this as I have a client where we added a text code to a radio ad they were running and they saw a twenty-fold increase in sales leads from that spot.

Here’s one more use for a text code:  Place one on your vehicles so that people will connect with you.

For the QR code and the text code, have separate landing pages and coupons and coupon codes. You want to do this so that you can track a conversion rate.

For example, you can see how many people used your text code by the number of hits to a specific page. Then you can see how many people sign up for an offer and finally, the amount of people who redeem your coupon or offer.

Website Address

Make sure that you add your website address to your business sign. If your domain is too long, use a shortener like Bit.ly or get a separate shorter domain that redirects to your website.

Bit.ly allows you to make a vanity url and you can also track the clicks from that specific url. As a suggestion, make sure that if you have an offer on your business sign – that the Web address corresponds with that offer. Don’t just send them to your homepage as your conversion rates will be far lower by doing this.

Email Address

Create a unique email address to put on your business sign so that you can track the amount of inquiries that come in.

Add all of these tips to your business sign and you should see an increase in the amount of sales leads that you generate.  By the way, this isn’t just for signs.  Use these different tactics on business cards, letters, mailers and other printed material that you have as well.

If you have other business sign tips, please share them in the comments.

Courtesy: Small Biz Trends

About Chris Hamilton