Sign Shops are something near and dear to my heart.

I actually left my corporate pharmaceutical sales job to start a trade show display company. At the time it was myself and 2 other friends under one roof with 3 businesses.

This was circa 2007 and the 3 of us shared the space and cost of a 3,600 commercial building. My friend Jason was starting his own local sign shop and I learned a ton. From the early days of vehicle wraps to wall murals and yes plenty of die-cut stickers and vinyl banners.

I learned even more about marketing for Sign Shops.

With a defined geographic location in most cases, word-of-mouth reigns supreme. Nothing like those $0 cost-of-acquisition for new customers. Followed by a close 2nd with wrapping your own company truck with your sign shop branding and contact info.

But you know what? Google Ads combined with Google My Business are HUGE and not to be overlooked.

Chances are some of your competitors are using Google Ads for their sign shop and I think you should be on there too.

Inbound leads are hard to beat, but it’s not uncommon for someone to try and fail to make Google Ads work for them as a long-term sustainable marketing channel.

Why?

Simple reason- It’s too easy to overspend for qualified leads. I don’t mean that Google Ads is just too ‘expensive’.

Rather, I mean there are a number of things that need to be done right to prevent wasteful spending and target the right people at the right time. All totally do-able through any search marketing campaigns but it does have to be done right.

So I put together a list and hopefully this provides some value to you and your Sign Shop-

Know Your NUMBERS

“If it don’t make dollars it don’t make sense”

This is so important. Plain and simple, what you would be willing to pay for a vinyl banner lead is going to be wayyyyy lower than you’re willing to pay for a full Vehicle Wrap lead or Channel Letters lead.

Know your numbers and you will need to answer the following for each product line category.

Are you ready, because this is really important?

• Average Sales Price for each product category (banners, vehicle wraps, stickers, channel letters, monument signs, etc)
• Average Gross Margin (%)
• Average Gross Profit ($)
• Average Close Ratio (%)
• Number of Leads to Get a Sale (how many leads does it take to get 1 sale)
• Number of Clicks it take on average to get one Lead
• Number of Clicks it takes on average to get one Sale

Based on this information we can infer some key numbers to take over to our Google Ads Campaign including:

• Maximum Price we are willing to pay for each Click
• Maximum Price we are willing to pay for each Lead

Does it sound expensive to pay $18 for each click? It certainly does, but what if you land a $6,500 Channel Letters job from it at a 28% gross profit margin? All of a sudden that $18 per click isn’t so bad.

So let’s run the math…

Channel Letters job

• Average Sales Price- $6,000
• Average Gross Margin- 30%
• Average Gross Profit- $1,800
• Average Close Ratio- 20%
• Number of Leads to Get a Sale- 5
• Number of Clicks it take on average to get one Lead- 10
• Number of Clicks it takes on average to get one Sale- 50

Based on our numbers above did you know you can pay all the way UP TO $360 for each lead and have your campaign be profitable or breakeven? We can also pay on average UP TO $36 per click and the campaign will still be profitable or breakeven!

Now, of course our job is to do more with less and pay far less than $360 per lead and far less than $36 per click, but this at least stresses the point that there is a lot of meat on the bone for us to create and deliver a long-term marketing channel with Google Ads for your Sign Business without having to guess when the next referral will come in.

Accurately Track ALL Leads from ALL Sources

This one many Sign Shop owners are probably aware of, but you know what? This is the one that gets the most neglected. It may seem like it’s super technical to track all leads, but it’s super important and it’s really what is needed to take your business to the next level, prevent wasteful spending and flying blind.

For each of our clients we always track every lead from all sources which include-

• All Phone Calls
• All Website Contact Forms
• All Website Chats
• All Marketing Campaigns

The only ones that we can’t automatically generate lead information from is walk-in traffic, but for those you’ll usually know where they came from or if you’re not sure, then just simply ask the customer and make note of it.

Our automated system when set up will tell you extremely important information such as:

• Where the visitor came from (IE- Google Ads, Direct, Referral, Facebook, Organic Search, etc)
• Meta Data such as name, phone number, the converting keyword, chat messages, geographic location and which page they landed on, etc

You know what’s really cool is getting the email notification with all of this information sent to you directly the moment the lead is received or you get off the phone with someone.

No guess work, not ever.

If you get 12 calls that day, you will know where and who each one came from and thus making sure the performance of any marketing campaign (especially the ones you are paying money for) are tracked accurately.

Create Narrow and Broad Campaigns for the same Product Categories

Now that we’ve talked about the importance of ‘knowing your numbers’ and tracking every lead that comes in, let’s dive into Google Ads and talk about structuring your campaigns.

Some product categories in the Sign Shop world are pretty cut and dry. Take vinyl banners for example- If somebody types into Google ‘Vinyl Banners‘ or ‘Soccer Banner‘, we can almost 100% correctly infer what they are looking for and trying to find.

Some other product categories are more difficult.

For example, there are some technical terms that you may be familiar with yourself being a Sign Shop owner, but your customers may call them something else.

For Example:

You may call an item a ‘Banner Stand‘ or ‘Retractable Banner Stand‘, but your customer may use keyword phrases like ‘Pull Up Banner‘ which is more descriptive in nature even if it isn’t an industry related term.

Here’s another one:

You may call them ‘Channel Letters‘ but your customer may call them ‘Storefront Signs‘ or ‘3D Store Letters‘.

But here’s the tricky part-

We know that somebody searching for ‘Channel Letters‘ are indeed looking for the same thing you call ‘Channel Letters‘ however the person searching for ‘Storefront Signs‘ may be looking for ‘Channel Letters‘ or their intent may be for something else like a storefront window sign or something else non-Channel Letter related.

We usually will break these into two separate Adgroups with one being narrow in nature with targeted words all relating to ‘Channel Letters’ such as:

• channel letters for businesses
• channel letter signs
• 3D channel letters
• channel lettering

Notice how they all revolve around the targeted term ‘Channel Letters’?

The separate and more broad Adgroup would be for selling Channel Letters but for terms that your customers or visitors may type in but not have that specific word.

For example:

• storefront signs for my business
• storefront signs near me
• 3D lettering for stores
• 3D retail letters

Now that you have 2 separate Adgroups you can try to capture people looking for Channel Letters who are not actually using the industry terminology.

Important:  Just remember, your Numbers like we talked about above may change some because your close ratio on the broad campaigns may be less than the narrow Adgroups since there will be more waste built in.

Create Custom Landing Pages with Multi-Step Lead Forms

We are big fans of creating custom landing pages and sending paid search traffic to them with one clear goal in mind- LEADS (AKA- Conversions).

Let’s face it, 99% of the time we are focused on what is right in front of us and spend our time taking on new jobs and responding to customers for quotes, orders, etc. Making website improvements are something we’ll do “next month” or when things slow down.

The problem with this is when we’re slow, we’re busy trying to get un-slow.

Rather than sending all paid traffic to our imperfect websites, it can be more productive and easier to focus on your bread-and-butter jobs that you want more of.

Let’s say, you’re known for Vehicle Wraps and they are higher dollar and higher margin than some of your other jobs.

Building a Custom Landing Page for Vehicle Wraps specifically can pay dividends for paid search campaigns.

We use really great landing page services like Unbounce and Instapage to create landing pages that are designed to convert using all the same elements on your website (like logo, images, colors, text, etc) but without all the other distracting content.

Over the last year we have experimented with Multi-Step Lead Forms that ask a series of questions before asking for their personal contact details.

This helps to ‘warm up’ the visitor and help them know they are in the right place for what they are looking for.

For example a Custom Landing Page for Vehicle Wraps might ask if they are wanting a Full Vehicle Wrap or a Partial Vehicle Wrap > Then ask what kind of Vehicle they have > Etc and then finally asking for their contact details.

This works really well and is far more engaging than a static page asking for contact information straight away.

Here’s an example of one we built that has been cranking out the hits:

Automate Follow-Ups for your Prospects

All prospects should be followed up with.

We know this a million times over, but few actually do.

The time during the day is always shorter than it seems and there is always something else more pressing. Or so it seems…

But, there is a super easy way to do this and make it 100% automated.

Email is still the perferred method of communication for most businesses and the easiest way to send over quotes, etc.

So we recommend setting up email follow up sequences using software that make it a cinch. We love, love MixMax for this task.

We recommend following up with qualified prospects a total of 6 times including the initial email.

So how does this work? Simple really.

You have 5 pre-written emails + the email that you will originally respond back to with a quote, etc.

It looks a little something like this:

Email #1 Responding to initial inquiry with quote, answering questions, etc

Email #2 (Follow Up #1- 2 weeks later)- Thanks again for reaching out, here is a little more about us as a company and what makes us different.

Email #3 (Follow Up #2- 2 weeks later)- Now that you know a little bit about us as a company, here are the range of products and services that we offer.

Email #4 (Follow Up #3- 2 weeks later)- Now that you know about us and the services we offer, here is a little bit of information about our process.

Email #5 (Follow Up #4- 2 weeks later)- Thanks again for reaching out and I hope you have enough information to make a decision, is your project still on your radar?

Email #6 (Follow Up #5- 2 weeks later- “Shut the door”. Looks like we weren’t able to help with your project this time around, but please keep us in mind for any future projects and if you need any quotes, I’m certainly available for this.

…You’d be surprised how many email responses we get after Email #6 (Shut the door). Often they just aren’t ready yet, but still very much interested.

Timing is everything and different product categories have different average sales cycles. Soccer Banner- short sales cycle, Monument Sign- long sales cycle. Email sequences over a period of time helps stay in front of them.

Notice one big important thing?

We weren’t pestering them all along the way about whether or not they were going to buy. We were adding more information and value at each point all while still reaffirming our presence and eagerness to help them with their project.

Question- Do you think your competition is doing this? Probably not and all the more reason to do it.

All automated using your templates and working behind the scenes without you having to lift a single finger once the first email is sent. The rest are simply sent out at pre-defined time intervals and if a prospect replies to any one of the messages they are automatically removed from the sequence and won’t receive any other messages.

Signing Off for Sign Shops for Now

I hope I dropped some nice nuggets with this post. I really do have a passion for the Sign Shop industry and feel lucky that we have gained enough experience in paid search marketing that we are able to offer these services to this niche market and make Google Ads campaigns wildly successful.

Much of what we do for our Sign Shop clients is the same thing we have done for our own business over the years.

Let’s hold our marketing accountable and if you feel like you could use some extra hands on your campaigns and set up, please feel free to reach out to us below.

Bye for now, off to get more leads!