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Home Run Businesses Use Custom Metal Business Signs

Small business operator raises his gross revenue by using a custom metal sign at the baseball park.

If you are a small business owner like me with constricted resources and infinite ambition, then you probably make the most of any guidance you can find that relates to making yourself more successful. As a matter of fact, I keep a file cabinet in my office filled with clippings from newspapers, magazines and books that I have received over the years, all of which contain jewels of knowledge that I consider useful in my endeavor as my own boss. Some people call me a pack rat for keeping all of this information, but I discount that opinion because I often find myself referencing these materials that I have kept.

Can you share one of these "jewels"?

Absolutely! One clipping that I have held onto involves a man named Rich who makes his living selling handmade baseball bats. When Rich first got started with this endeavor, in order to advertise, he used a customized fold-up metal sign that he could place anywhere, because he worked out of his home and city zoning would not let him put a permanent metal sign in his front yard. He made the folding double-sided custom metal sign very fancy, and expected that as long as a lot of people saw the personalized business sign and saw what he could do, he would inevitably get SOMEBODY'S attention and thus some business. Rich put his business sign in the middle of the busiest intersection in town, and was positive that his well-designed sign would grab the attention of drivers passing by and those people would call him for all of their baseball bat needs.

So was he right? Did his business begin to flourish?

Well, not really. Rich did got busier making customized baseball bats, but not as busy as he had hoped. People were calling Rich off of his fold-up sign, but the calls were not always relevant to his business. The people who placed orders either were baseball fans or were related to baseball fans, but a lot of times the calls were from people simply admiring his artwork and other times they were just prank calls. Rich was happy that he was getting some business from his personalized sign, but he started questioning the success of his marketing strategy.

Poor Rich! What did he do?

Rich invested in a few custom metal signs that he could hang in permanent locations. He decided that he would save his creativity for the baseball bats and opted to be very direct with his new metal business signs, so he included only his name, phone number and a brief description of his business. Since the customers he already had were all baseball fans, Rich decided that he would market his metal signs towards baseball fans and thus hung the custom metal signs in the outfield at the local ballpark.

Did this new strategy work?

It sure did! Shortly after he put his metal signs up, Rich's business more than doubled! Rich learned that many of his customers were from out-of-town and traveled to his city for games. He also discovered that these people hadn't even heard of his business until seeing his metal fence sign at the baseball park.

So they had never seen his recent fold-up sign?

Nope. Rich therefore realized that even though his fancy fold-up metal sign was seen by more people at the busy intersection, these impressions were not as productive as those made at the ballpark because only a small percentage of the people who saw the sign at the intersection needed his services.

What's the moral of the story?

The principal thing to recall when thinking about Rich and his advertising experience is that a extravagant business sign is ineffective if it is not well-positioned. As a small business owner, you have to be where your potential customers are. And once you're there, you can get their attention with a personalized metal sign!