The Sign Connection: Evolving Trends in Marketing and Advertising that Impact our Industry

Our industry and our world are constantly changing. How we respond to change makes all the difference. I recently came across the quote, “if you don’t like change, you will like irrelevance even less.” The last thing we can afford to do is become irrelevant. Whether you were an early adopter of mobile marketing or are just considering digital signs, the New Year is a great time to analyze your business, review your goals, and ensure that your marketing and advertising plans reflect your goals and your products and services are relevant and competitive.

Reaching Out with Integrated Marketing

Integrated marketing is a highly effective way to reach prospects and customers using different media to communicate and repeatedly reinforce your same message. Doing so increases your potential audience reach and ensures that people viewing your message in more than one channel receive the same message. A well-crafted integrated marketing message is designed to spur action and keep your business top-of-mind. If customers and prospects receive your message via a combination of mail, email, websites, radio and TV, you can make a significant impact in the market.

And, offering integrated marketing helps your customers maintain a competitive edge and provides you with increased revenue. You can incorporate QR Codes or other 2D Bar Codes in signage and graphics and provide a mobile-optimized website. Making your customers’ signs and graphics interactive is an effective way to seize the mobile marketing opportunity.

Seizing the Mobile Marketing Opportunity

The world is becoming more mobile every day. More people are accessing the web on the go with smartphones, tablets and laptops. Mobile marketing is expanding as more advertising and sales opportunities allow us to reach more people in more ways. Companies should optimize their websites for mobile browsing to ensure that messages display well on smaller viewing formats (see ours at m.fastsigns.com). FASTSIGNS is helping people realize the value of mobile marketing; SMS text and QR codes added to signs provides the immediacy of promotional offers and blends marketing efforts with more content than a static sign. In addition to helping customers with mobile marketing, FASTSIGNS is using mobile to promote our brand via pay-per-click advertising and we are making it easier for people to do business with us on smartphones and tablets.

Engaging with Social Media Marketing

Social media continues to explode. Companies are engaging in conversations with audiences, responding to customer service issues and learning more about users to promote their businesses. Translating social media efforts into actual sales and ROI remains a significant challenge, especially in the B2B world. And, social media has shifted an enormous amount of power into the hands of customers. With a few key strokes, customers can post about a good or bad experience. The impact on your business can be positive if you listen to customers and respond in a more personal way, thus creating customer loyalty and building repeat business. Just one negative review can have an impact on your business. The goal needs to be to develop loyal, raving fans as customers that promote your business. The standard for measuring customer loyalty is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures whether a customer is a “promoter” (the highest measure of loyalty), a “detractor” (a person working against you), or a “passive” (a person who would move to the competition). If you don’t have a way to measure your customers’ loyalty—which combines a measurement of the success of your marketing message/promise and the delivery on that promise—we suggest you implement one. Maintaining a high NPS is one way to ensure you have happy customers working on your behalf.

Embracing Digital Signage