How Poor Quality LED Signs Can Affect Your Bottom Line

When deciding to look for a new LED sign for your business, it is important to consider several aspects to ensure that you get the very best one. Ask yourself' “What is the best product?  What will give you the best value for your money? What support does it come with? Does it come with a warranty?"  When it comes to buying other things like, say, TVs or microwaves, you can easily check for reviews online and it makes the job of choosing that much easier. When it comes to LED signs though, it becomes much trickier since there are actually very few reviews.

What happens is that you will have to rely on your own research, your gut, and the information fed to you by an eager salesman. Many times, you will find offers for products that allow you to “buy direct” or “get the same sign at half the cost” and they are tempting, no doubt about that. But they are inferior products. 

Inferior LED Signs

Most people would settle for poor-quality LED signs thinking that they could use the money saved on the purchase to buy a new one when the one they have breaks down in a year or two. But poor-quality LED signs do not wait one year or two to stop working. No, they break down continuously until they just finally die. Check out some of the costs associated with poor quality LED signs below

Service Costs

Digital signs are not like your mobile phones or cars where you bring them to the shop and they can fix them for you in a jiffy. These signs are high up in the ground and you will need a truck with a bucket to get to them and fix them. Average costs are listed as follows:

• Charge for standard bucket truck with technician - $150/hour and usually takes 2 hrs.
• Extended bucket or crane with technician - $250/hour and usually takes 2 hours.
• Service for sign troubleshooting - $450-$750 and usually takes 2-3 hours.

There are others involved but as you can see, it gets very pricey and there goes all the money you saved on your poor-quality LED sign. Some of you might insist that you get your cheap signs from companies that do not charge for service, but what if they go out of business or are slow to respond? You will be left with a sign that does not work.

Other Costs Related to Poor-Quality LED Signs

If you are using your signs in your business and your signs go on the blink, you will essentially lose money because you are not drawing people into your business with your signs. Time is money in business, and when your sign is on the blink and you waste time getting it fixed, then you will be wasting money all the same. First impressions are everything in business and if you have a sign that is not working for periods on end, what impression does that give passer-bys about your company? Nothing good I can assure you. Keep in mind that cheap is not always best and spending a little bit more can help you save a lot of money and headaches.

How to Create Effective Content for Your LED Display

Content is King, or so says Bill Gates. How as a small business owner, can you make sure that your ads are getting enough attention amidst all the competition? What factors will affect the efficiency of your ads? Below are four of them.

1. Duration

How many seconds do you need to get your message across? That actually depends on your product or the location of your LED screen. If you’re targeting pedestrians and you’re addressing passersby in front of your store, chances are, you can display your ads a little longer. Keep it under 30 seconds. If your targeting drive by customers, the ads should be no more than 15 seconds to make sure that your ads can be seen from start to end while passing by. Longer ads are pointless because your target  won't see the entire ad from start to finish.

2. Format

Can they clearly read your LED message board? If you want to make your ads effective, it’s great to determine what is the right size, and font style you should use in your ads. Always try to achieve balance and let people focus on the more important details down to the least important ones.

1. Make Letters Big! Letters should be easy to read, so make them big, at least 1/4 of the screen. Small text might look nice on your computer screen, but it won't when broadcast on the LED screen. 
2. Do Not Apply Shades on Text.  Fancy fonts might look nice on the monitor, but they won't on the LED screen. The reason for it is that, despite of its large size, the LED  display has less pixels than you PC monitor.  
3. Plain Text is Better. Use Sans-Serif fonts such as Verdana or Tahoma, as they appear much more crisp and readible. Serif fonts (ie. Courier, Times New Roman etc) look very nice on the PC monitor,  but they have the serifs which add pointless "noise" to the text and make it look blurry. Recall point #2 above, that the LED screen has less pixels than you monitor. This noise will be amplified even more if your screen uses virtual pixels.  
4. Use Contrasting Colors.  Over 20 years ago Ms Karen E. Claus published a table, indicating the colormatch with the best contrast ratio. She did it for the classic static signage, but the principle is still valid today. According to her research, the best matches are the following: Black on Yellow,  Black on White, Yellow on Black, White on Blue, Yellow on Blue, Green on White, Blue on Yellow and  White on Green. Avoid color combinations such as Pink on Red. 

3. Design

An ad with sloppy, cheap design will never have a chance against your competitors. With good design, your ads will sell themselves. You have invested a lot of money in this advertising tool. Don't put up up mediocre content and let it go to waste. Sit down and take some time to decide how you want your LED screen to look. There are many pre-made graphics that can be loaded or purchased at a reasonable fee or hire a graphic designer to create custom ads for a strong presence.

4. Content

Do you need text heavy ads or should you go for image driven content? If you’re in a business that relies on visual signals like the auto industry, real estate, or a travel agency, definitely go for large and vivid images. Otherwise, you can use short, witty tagline to represent your brand and your product. Displays with text only are highly effective too. Keep the content fresh, updated, and useful. Display public notices, weather reports or up coming events. Make your sign a community center piece, not just an advertising portal, otherwise people will get accustomed to the LED screen and will stop looking at the messages. Ideally you should upload new content every day. Yes, every day! Don’t forget to infuse fun in your content to keep it light and easy for your readers. 

How to Link Digital Displays with Social Media

When you look back at other types of technology and compare them with technology used in social media and digital signs, the two are mere infants. However, as these two young technologies grow and develop together, they can bring about tremendous opportunities especially for businesses in the aspect of branding and customer engagement.

Digital signs, with their many strengths, will never quite be able to deliver large amounts of content to customers. This is to say that businesses cannot really count on them to deliver detailed information and they are not meant to. These signs are most effective when they contain limited word usage and content. On the other hand, you have customers going online to do research before they even endeavor to get in touch with the company – and this is where social media comes in.

The Numbers Tell the Story

A survey conducted by the Merchant Confidence Index last February 2011 showed that among 8,500 local and small businesses in the US, 70% utilize Facebook for their marketing activities. The same study showed that Facebook ranks higher than Google in terms of marketing method used by local business owners. Looking at it this way, it just makes sense that social media go hand in hand with electronic signs as a way for consumers to get their hands onto more detailed information regarding a business using different computing devices.

Smart Practices to Consider

1. Broaden your existing customer base – It is a good idea for businesses to include social media icons on their digital sign boards to build Twitter followers and Facebook fans. By broadening your follower base, you can establish more concrete relationships with your customers and strengthen loyalty. Once you get people to follow you on social media, you can inform them about sales, promos, and other events and offers without spending a dime.
2. Guide customers to additional info located in social media accounts – Digital signs are indeed limited in terms of the amount of detailed content they can deliver but social media is not. Using your accounts, you can link product spec sheets, photos, flyers for sales, and even coupon codes among other marketing information.
3. Play up your strength using the right social media platform – Take a good look at your business and it will be easy for you to see which social media channel will benefit you the best. If you own a car dealership or a catering company then your business is highly visual and you will do well to use social media sites like Instagram or even Pinterest. If you have sales and new promos frequently then Twitter will suit you best. For real conversations to build your brand, Facebook will be your best option.

Establishing a presence for your business in social media will not take long but you have to really work hard at it. You have to really pay attention to what you post and when you post - it is hard work but it really does pay off and helps you get more out of your digital signs.

What Size LED Text do I Need on my Display?

Proper selection of letter height is critical to ensure a LED display is legible to its intended audience. To make sure you select the correct letter height, LED Sign Authority has included a useful visibility chart that shows an approximate letter size required to be legible at a designated distance from the sign.  

Calculations based on an externally (or naturally) lit sign with all uppercase letters. Factors that may affect required letter size include: color scheme, font selection, traffic and weather conditions. Please refer to the complete study by the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, Penn University and the United States Sign Council.

Is It Wise to Import LED Signs from China?

If you take a look at all the products you use, chances are you will find that a majority of them are made in China. It has become so prevalent that there happens to be hundreds of “made in China” jokes told every minute. However, there is a good reason for this abundance of China-made goods and that is they offer cheap labor which translates to more profit for companies that get products from them.

Getting more bang out of your buck is a great business ethic but questions are raised on what you are actually getting when you go for China-made goods. Any serious American company that goes to China for their manufacturing needs will always want an on-site quality engineer in the factory because as the saying goes about China-made goods, “You get what you inspect and not what you expect.”. Just read the book ”Poorly made in China” by Paul Midler, to get a better understanding of how things can go wrong when doing business with China.

LED Signage from China

This is not to totally discredit the quality of China goods but it bears something about the subject. When you factor in the fact that quality is 50-50 and the fact that you need to pay for shipping, wait for the cargo, and pay taxes—well, it seems more trouble than it is worth, doesn't it? It is for this very reason why more and more companies are bringing their manufacturing back to the good ol' USA.

This should be a heads-up for businesses and other people in charge that are thinking of getting their LED signs from China. It might be tempting to save several hundred bucks on your LED sign and get it from Shenzhen but what if it arrives and it doesn't work as it should? Do you have to ship it all the way back to China? Can you get technical support without communications difficulties? Try getting support at 2 pm in the afternoon on a Friday when it is 4 am on a Saturday in Shenzhen. Ever play phone tag? Communication can be bad enough even when people are in the same time zone. If you do manage to contact someone will you be able to understand them through the language barrier? Compare that to buying your LED sign in the USA. If there is a problem you have someone you can speak to within hours not days to get your sign back up and running.

Things Can and Do Go Wrong

It is hard to talk about LED signs from China and not sound like a complete black propaganda instigator but the fact stands that when you order LED signs from them at deeply discounted prices, you get what you pay for. You will be surprised at how creative they can become in using old parts for “new” LED signs just to save dollars and cents from the total cost.

Lets talk design. In China the LED signs are designed to be mounted within in a waterproof surround on the side of a building. This is much different than in the US where signs are set out on a pole and expected to withstand the elements of rain, wind and snow. Signs for the US need to be designed to shed the water away from the the electronics with minimal holes to prevent water intrusion. Cabinet finishes are have to be  durable and long lasting to preventing rust and deterioration. Using a sign not designed for the correct environment will lead to sign failure, as has been found by many distributors (and customers) of China products.    

This is not to say that every LED sign they produce is bad but there can be issues, and most of the time, there are. Sure, there are excellent China-made components that are used on US-made LED signs and there is no denying that they are truly world-class but when these world class components are used in a wholly China-made LED sign that has poor design overall, you get yourself a bad deal.

To really drive the point home, one LED sign is not the same as another LED sign especially when comparing US-made and China-made LED signs. If you want quality, ease of use, and excellent support, choose US-made LED signage.  

Go Green and Save Some Green with LED Signage

One of the major buzzwords of this age is “green” in the sense that everyone is thinking energy conservation and reducing their carbon footprint. New products are being developed to reduce energy consumption and costs. It really is a great movement that is bound to produce the best results for people and the environment in the long run. When it comes to going green, every little bit counts. Even the sign industry is going green.

Greening Your Signs

As the world veers closer and closer to an energy crises, a big concern for business owners is how they can save money by cutting down on energy consumption with the use of more efficient equipment. Experts are hard at work in coming up with newer and better technology that are more energy-efficient. LED diodes are one of the technologies that is having a major impact in reducing energy consumption.

Most people will agree that when it comes to any electric equipment they buy, it all goes down to how much power they consume at the end of the day. Any equipment that consumes massive amounts of power will hurt the business budget and add to overall operating costs—no frugal business owner wants this. When it comes to selecting a business sign and going Green, LEDs makes good sense for the ratio of power input to light output.

LED Lights and Reduced Power Usage

Modern day LED diodes are true winners because they consume a lot less energy as compared to incandescent light bulbs. This is why LED diodes are utilized in LED boards that are gaining widespread use across all industries. Normal signage solutions are known to consume up to 3x more power as compared to LED signs that are of a similar size. With the world going crazy for the “Go Green” slogan, it just makes economic sense why LED signs are quickly gaining a following and slowly but surely taking the place of traditional reader boards.

Using Digital LED Billboards

It is clear that LED displays cut down on power consumption and offer major savings to businesses that use them, but just how effective are they when viewed from a marketing perspective? It is a given that they are marvelous when it comes to displaying messages from the company but it is also important to note that in marketing, the medium is the message and using LED signs can send your customers the message that you took great pains to use power-saving options to deliver your business message to them.

Another thing that adds to the points in favor of LED signs is that they are sturdy and LED diodes take a good long while to die as opposed to more traditional bulbs used for signs. Granted, you may pay more for an LED sign at the very beginning but once you see how much money you save in your electric bill, and how your sales increase to the reliable advertising, you will see that the initial investment is well worth it. In fact, the return on investment for LED signs is very quick so you will emerge a winner in more ways than one with this green signage option.  

How to Avoid a One Night Stand

A man and a woman who met online are having their first phone conversation.  Here's how it goes: 

Lady: "Hi, I'm getting married this summer.  There are five other potential suitors coming out this week and I need to set time for you to come out so you can tell me why I should marry you."

Gentleman: "Wow, okay.  I thought maybe we could just grab dinner...."

Lady: "Oh no. No time for that.  I have to get this done.  I just need you to come out because I'll be choosing a spouse by next week.  This wedding has to happen this summer!"

Gentleman: "Being this is such a big decision, don't you think you should maybe learn a little about me before I come out?"

Lady: "Look, I really just want to set as many of these appointments as possible.  I have Wed and Thursday open right now.  Which is best for you?"  

Does this seem absolutely insane to you?  Maybe because it is!  But this is exactly how many sign shoppers approach their LED Sign project.  

So What's The Problem?

The problem is that whether you want it or not, you will have a significant relationship with your sign dealer, and it's not all that different from a marriage.  You will live with this sign till death or relocation do you part, right?  

The Sign Buyer who is only interested in getting quotes, without investing the time to become educated, is setting themselves up for a one night stand.

Tons Of Companies Are Up For A One-Night Stand

Don't get me wrong.  There's no shortage of companies who are happy scribble down a number, slap the sign in, then disappear into the abyss....just like in the dating world.  But is that what you really want?  Many people don't realize that's exactly what they're attracting when they make these two fundamental mistakes.

The Two Biggest Mistakes of LED Sign Shoppers

Mistake #1: They Don't Take Time To Educate Themselves

Information is power.  This is just as true with LED Signs as with anything else.  Time and time again we've seen that the educated consumer is the happiest client on earth for the following reasons: 

1.  They are typically delighted with their sign and options

2.  They plan more thoroughly

3.  They invest every dollar of their project wisely

Mistake #2:  They Make Decisions Based Solely On Price

Price is a huge factor, but basing your decision based on price alone is like walking down the isle with the most "attractive" person regardless of their character.  So if price isn't everything, what else is there?  

Ironically, its seems that the same qualities that make for a great spouse also make for a great sign dealer. 

4 Qualities Of Great Sign Dealers...and Spouses

1.  They Put You First

2.  They Are Only Interested in A Long Term Relationship

3.  They Work to Constantly Improve Themselves

4.  They Keep No Secrets 

This begs the question, how can you tell the good from the bad?...or more likely the differences between good, better, and best?

There are several ways.  First, check references.  Second, check the BBB and other public forums.  Third, follow your gut...sometimes you get that feeling and personally, I've always done better to follow it. 

So, you might be wondering, 'What is the right way to go about getting a quote?'.  Great question, here's what we suggest:

5 Stages of Sign Courtship

Step One: Determine what sign is right for you

Step Two: Study the options and accessories

Step Three: Vet the sign dealer

Step Four: Request a quote

Step Five:  Sure up the Numbers

Well, hopefully you've found this helpful.  If you are considering installing a LED Sign this year, we wish you the best in finding the sign dealer equivalent of Mr. or Mrs. Right!

Please feel free to leave questions or comments below.