I have still been receiving questions about specific markets so I am going to take an unlikely candidate, churches, and show you how the principles I have been talking about apply to churches.
First consider why a church would want an LED Sign. In order to keep its doors open a church needs members who pay tithes and offerings. Getting those members is a lot like an ordinary business getting new customers. They have to let the community know they are there, especially the people who live within a few miles of the church. Not only do they have to let them know they are there but they need to impress upon them that THIS church is where they should go.
A churchs LED Signs help with this through appearance and communication. If the sign looks nice, elegant, and clean or in other words gives a good impression of the church, a person is more likely to give them a try. On the other hand if the sign is old and run down people are will have a less than favorable impression of the church and will be less likely to attend.
A church also needs to ‘advertise’ its programs and events. The community needs to have a way of knowing about that special teen program, or the Wednesday night prayer meeting, or about the small group meetings. What about the special programs? The church needs a way to let the local community know about their new stop smoking workshop, or the single mothers retreat, or about the upcoming concert. If they do not have a means of getting this information out to their target market (the people who live close by) they will be missing a great opportunity to bring in new members.
LED Signs offer a fantastic way to do all of these things. They allow the church to get their ‘sales message’ out to their ‘target market’. Because they are targeting people who live nearby, these are probably people who pass by the church multiple times a day. That means they have multiple times every day to entice the same person to come in and check them out. The LED Sign on the street can become one of their biggest marketing tools.
Okay, that covers the sales messages but that is just one piece of the pie. There are at least two more ways churches can benefit from Progammable LED Signs. The first one is community messages (does this sound familiar?). One of the things people want from their church is to feel like they are somehow helping the community. The usual way people get this feeling is through the community outreach programs their church engages in. The individual may not actively participate in the programs but they feel like they are doing their part because they support the church doing the work. When the church provides free community message that benefit the community the church members will feel like they are helping the community because it is their church with the sign which is putting out the messages which help the community. You can think of this as a customer retention program. The other way community messages help is by (here is where the drum roll goes) making the LED Signs a community landmark! The non members driving by everyday will be reading those messages (sales and community) and the church will becoming etched in their brains so that when they are looking for a new church they will think of this one first.
The last way churches can benefit from LED Signs is in their fund raising and charity work. As people drive by and see the message on the LED Sign advertising a clothes drive, or the church raising money to help victims of a disaster, they might just pull in to make a donation!
I probably have not scratched the surface of how churches can benefit from LED Signs but that wasn’t my really purpose. My real purpose was to show how the basic principles behind the success of LED Signs can be applied to churches. Those basic principles are: put your message out to hundred or thousands of people every day, make your sign a community landmark so when people think **INSERT YOUR INDUSTRY HERE** they think of you, and do all of this at a low cost per view.
The key is to ask yourself what your business has to offer, why someone should pull in to your business (what is your USP), then give all those people on the street, right IN FRONT of your business, that message.
