Banners
Posted on 02. Sep, 2009 by Steve Swisher in Marketing
Having a great looking banner is the center piece of curb appeal. Curb appeal is important because it is your best continual form of cheap advertising. If done right, your curb appeal can bring in 10-50 people a month so don’t go cheap and get a lot of input on what to do. Here’s some thoughts to get you started.
Information Visibility
A common mistake people make when creating a banner is that they make things too small and too complicated. It might look great on your computer, but when driving by it at 35mph people have no idea what it is or says. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. A simple 2 or 3 color banner with your logo, name, meeting time, website, and maybe a tag line is all you need. Any more than that and it’s so busy it’s invisible.
Drive around town and look at the signs out front of businesses. They are all very simple layouts with big letters. When people are driving by you want them to get three things: Your church meets there, what time it meets there, and they should have a positive impression about what they saw. That’s all someone can handle in the 2-3 seconds of visibility that you have as they speed past. If they really want to know more than that, they will slow down next time they pass to get your website address and look up more information about the church.
As I drive around town and look at the signs church plants put out, I ‘m not surprised they have a hard time growing or attracting new visitors. One sign in our area doesn’t even mention that it’s a church anywhere on the sign. If your name doesn’t have the word church in it or some other church indicating term like Worship Center or Fellowship, you might want to put it somewhere on the sign kind of like a subtitle or a tag line. While it may be trendy to not broadcast that you’re a church and use a lot of churchy imagery, people need to know that you’re a church. For instance if your church name was just ”Imago Dei”, somewhere else on the sign you might put something like ”a different kind of church!”
The other thing I see all over are signs that are way too plain. It’s like someone when down to FastSigns and said, “yeah I’d like a white sign with generic black lettering that says our church name and this info.” Remember, the design communicates as much as the text. The font choice, the layout, the colors, the logo, and so on all contribute to the impression people have when they see the sign.
Size
Check with your city to see what size sign you are allowed to put out. My city set a maximum of 32 sqft. per sign, which is the equivalent of the standard 4′x8′ banner. We opted to actually go with a smallersize for our signs. Our banners are all 4′x4′. We were going to do a 4′x8′ banner but couldn’t get the layout to look right. So we opted for better design layout over size. As long as your lettering is big enough for people to see that’s all that matters. Our church name is short and looks good stacked (Logo and then below it is “Essential” on the first line, “Church” on the second line). When we laid it out on a 4′x8′ all our info was on the left side of the banner. We couldn’t find anything to put on the other half so we just went with a 4′x4′. If you have a longer name or a horizontally laid out logo, then you will probably want a 4′x8′ design.
Portability
Keep in mind that you are going to have to put this sign up and take it down every weekend. I’ve seen and tried a lot of ways to put out a sign and some methods are far superior than others. The goal is to find the perfect balance between time, hassle and appearance. If you build a 4′x’8′ frame for your sign, you’re going to need something big to carry that sign frame around in. If you plan on assembling that big frame every week, it’s going to take you a lot of time to set it up and take it down. If that frame looks like crap because it’s all made out of 2×4′s or PVC pipe, then the impression your banner makes will suffer.
The three best ways I have found to display a banner are as follows.
- Location Mounted: Is there anything at the location that you can attach the banner to? Perhaps there’s a fence that you can put the banner on or even put it over an existing sign on the weekends. The sign can be attached with bungee cords or rope to most of these things. This can be the simplest way to put out a banner. Sometimes this might force you to put the banner in a less than prime place if it’s on a fence that’s not next to the main entrance. You can balance this out by putting some smaller signs or feather flags at the actual entrance. At some schools, the main entrance is on a side street, but the playground fencing is on the main street. This is a great place to put a banner.
- Aluminum Poles: (The next post after this one will explain how to do this in more detail. )Use left and right side poles with a removable tension bar. I use aluminum electrical conduit. It’s cheap, durable, comes in many sizes, and looks nice. It is very common for signs to be mounted on aluminum poles so when you use aluminum it doesn’t make your mounting stand out like using grey or white PCV or wood. Aluminum is also much thinner and lighter compared to PCV or wood for the same amount of strength. Since my signs are only 4′x4′ I use a 1/4 inch wooden dowel rod for the cross beam, tension bar. I’ll explain how to set this kind of sign up later on in another post. It’s quick, easy, cheap, portable, and looks nice. Everything you could ask for. The one limitation is that you need to have somewhere that you can dig our drive a stake in the ground.
- Factory Created Mounts: These can be pricy, but they generally look nice and are made with portability in mind. Most of the planters that use factory created mounts are putting signs on sidewalks or concrete where there aren’t any other good options.
Graphics & Cookie Cutter Designs
Years ago I bought a set of banners from Outreach.com. If all you’ve ever seen are white banners with red or black vinyl lettering, then Outreach.com’s stuff looks amazing. It also looks so generic and bland that your banner won’t be memorable or even noticeable to many people. Remember, think about the Buzz Marketing Principles that will make your banner stand out. Church plants are different than established, traditional churches. I’ve always said, “if people want to go to that kind of church, they’re not going to be looking for a church that meets in a school or theater.” So don’t go out and buy banners that make you look like all those other churches. For the same price as you will spend on buying a cookie cutter banner, you could hire an artist from the Church Marketing Lab or do a design contest www.CrowdSpring.com. You could then get your banner printed at Just4Banners.com. The design work would cost between $150-$250 and the banner would cost between $32-$128 depending on the size and number of sides. You’ll pay the same cost for a cookie cutter banner design by Outreach. Further, if you need more than one banner or your banner gets damaged or stolen, reprinting multiple copies of the the banner would be much cheaper if you did your own custom design.
Once again, when it comes to graphics, be very careful. It’s hard to find a graphic other than your logo that really communicates the proper message. Putting people on the banner forces you to lie or send the wrong message. Either you put a picture of one person/family on there and signal to the world that your a mono-cultural church. Or you put the “United Nations stock photo” on there and try to get everyone to believe that your all white or all black church is really the multicultural dream that Martin Luther King spoke about. And above all, please don’t put a picture of you and your wife on the church banner! You’re not a real estate or insurance agent, you’re a church planter for goodness sakes.
All of this is not to say that you can’t put a graphic or a background image on the banner, but you had better know what your doing before you attempt this. If you have hired an outside designer that comes up with something that looks good, then ok. But don’t let that guy in your church who has a graphics program on his computer go out and pull some graphics for your banner. Chances are it’s not going to work well in the end. Remember, stuff that looks good on your computer doesn’t look good blown up 4′x8′ and seen from a car that’s 30 yards away traveling at 40mph.
Here’s some banners I’ve seen:
Can you read anything else besides "We are 25 years old" Why even put the rest of the text on the banner. It's invisible.
This is another classic example of an existing church's banner. As a church plant, do everything you can to look different.
Ok, so this is a billboard and not a banner. But it is my all time favorite church sign.
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