A Smart Way to Stretch Your Marketing Budget

If your marketing budget is smaller than you’d like, you still have a powerful resource at your disposal to help you share on-brand messages with your audience: The walls and windows of your office, client sites or other facilities you operate.

Creating great signage can be one of the most cost-effective ways to show visitors what your organization stands for, inviting new supporters and cementing the loyalty of your existing community. Yet so many organizations forget to utilize this medium to promote their messages.

Where might you post your values and Belief Message? How can you capture the impact of your work through words and images? Are there sound bites critical to understanding your work that you can post for all to see?

Regardless of the size of your office or facility, you can use that space to promote the big ideas about your organization and why it matters. Even if your space is visited only by internal stakeholders (staff and board) you have the opportunity to imbue those stakeholders with compelling messaging that they then take outside and share with friends, peers and colleagues.

We know that seeing a message repeatedly helps us register it. If you worry that even your staff and board colleagues are not using your key brand messages effectively, your signage will help them become better acquainted with those messages. That makes it more likely that they’ll become more effective ambassadors for your work. Practice makes progress. So every time someone sees your key message and reads it, actively or subconsciously, it makes a deeper impression and gives them a chance to practice it in their own minds. That kind of familiarity with your message makes it more comfortable to use it when representing your work.

And if you’re lucky enough to have a public space where prospective donors, volunteers, clients, ticket-buyers and other supporters pass by, you can really promote your work to a wider audience. Don’t assume that because someone is already at your organization that they have a full understanding or appreciation for your work. Take the opportunity to educate and inspire them, deepening their sense of connection to your mission. This blog on ensuring your signage is on-brand and evokes emotion is a great place to start.

Take action: 

• Make a list of all the places you could add signage. Be creative!
• Make a list of the messages and sound bites that support your brand.
• Make a list of the images that tell a story about your impact.
• Enlist a designer to help create space-appropriate signage you can post.

Have more questions? We’re glad to answer them! Leave us a comment below and our brand and design experts will get back to you shortly.