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custom metal sign, metal business sign, metal signs, metal signage, outdoor metal sign, metal fence sign

Salesman Hits Home Run With Well Placed Metal Signs

Small business owner increases his sales by hanging a customized metal fence sign at the baseball park.

If you're like me, a small business owner with modest resources and infinite aspirations, then you probably take advantage of any help and advice you can find relating to making yourself more successful. In fact, in my office I keep a file cabinet stocked with clippings from newspapers, magazines and books that I have collected over the years, all of which contain jewels of knowledge that I consider both useful and interesting in my journey as my own boss. Some people call me a pack rat for keeping all of this paper, but I ignore that concept because I very often find myself referencing these materials that I have kept.

Can you share one of these "jewels"?

I sure can! One clipping that I've held onto involves a man named Rich who makes his living selling handmade baseball bats. When Rich first got started with this endeavor, he used a custom fold-up metal sign that could be placed anywhere for his advertising, 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 custom 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 the city, and was certain 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 Rich right? Did his business start booming?

Not exactly. Rich did got busier making custom baseball bats, but not as busy as he would have liked. People were calling Rich off of his fold-up sign, but the calls were not always relevant to his business. The people who did place orders either were baseball fans or were related to baseball fans, but a many 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 new business from his personalized sign, but he started questioning the performance of his marketing strategy.

Poor Rich! What did he do?

Rich invested in a few custom metal signs that he could display 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, including 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 business signs towards baseball fans and thus hung the custom metal signs in center field at the local ballpark.

Did this new strategy work?

Absolutely! Shortly after he put his 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 learned that these people hadn't even heard of his business until seeing his metal 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 business sign made more impressions at the busy intersection, the impressions were not as productive as those made at the ballpark because a smaller percentage of the people who saw the sign at the intersection needed his services.

So what is the lesson in this story?

The major thing to remember when thinking about Rich and his experience with advertising is that a creative and well-designed business sign is ineffective if it is not strategically placed. As a small business owner, you have to be where your potential clients are. And once you're there, you can get their attention with a custom metal sign!