Your Complete Guide to Seasonal Graphics
SEPTEMBER 27, 2021| SpeedProCategories
GraphicsMarketing your business for the holidays can present a fun challenge. The holiday season is one of retail’s most profitable times of the year, and your store’s decor can have a considerable impact on your company’s success. To combat the added expenses of the holidays, choosing compelling and cost-effective decorations for your store is essential.
Seasonal graphics are a great way to promote holiday sales and seasonal specials, and custom interior and exterior signage can also drive increased traffic to your store. Learn our tips for maximizing your sales with seasonal in-store graphics, displays and signage!
Benefits of Seasonal Graphics During the Holidays
If you want to freshen your company’s look without a complete overhaul of your store’s decor, seasonal retail graphics can take your holiday campaign to the next level. Customizing your graphics with your company’s logo and professional designs can help advertise your business and remind your customers of your sales offerings. Keeping your retail signage current and integrating colors and messages consistent with your brand also helps you engage personally with your clientele.
1. Engage Your Clients
Holidays present an excellent opportunity to reach your clients through attractive and creative signage that reflects your company’s unique branding. Updating your signage to remain current with the seasons reflects the environment around you and adds a welcoming warmth for passersby and potential customers. Choosing tasteful holiday designs suitable for your business can increase sales by inspiring a stronger connection between clients and your brand.
2. Increase Sales
As an extension of your regular branding, seasonal in-store graphics can help increase brand loyalty, express your brand’s values and extend promotional offers to your clientele positively and consistently. Livening up your stores with eye-catching custom seasonal in-store graphics can help you boost your sales during a peak holiday period. A dynamic appearance enables you to attract more traffic by piquing interest in your products and services and conduct more business in your physical stores.
Types of Seasonal Graphics
You can choose from several different kinds of seasonal retail graphics for your store’s advertising. From standing signs to window displays, interior signage is an incredibly marketable strategy to appeal to potential buyers, while outdoor graphics provide valuable visual cues to welcome customers into your store.
1. Seasonal Wall and Floor Graphics
Using wall murals and detailed floor graphics can help you draw the attention of customers navigating your store. You can apply huge, laminated floor graphics with bright colors to catch your customers’ eyes, take advantage of empty floor space and highlight your services. Custom point-of-sale wall murals help particular items stand out, and bold images make a strong statement about your seasonal promotions.
2. Hanging Holiday Graphics
Banners with beautiful graphics are optimal for filling larger spaces with advertising material or when you want flexibility in your design’s size. Banners most often consist of laminated vinyl, which makes them highly durable and versatile. Flags can also help you provide enhanced visibility for your seasonal products and direct your clients’ attention to specific areas of your store.
3. Seasonal Window Graphics
Decorative window art and graphics come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, designs and prints, and can add much-needed excitement throughout the holidays. You can easily apply custom vinyl graphics to decorate your business’s exterior or interior windows to showcase unique seasonal products.
Window graphics showcase the celebratory spirit of the season’s special events and draw attention to seasonal sales at any time of year. You may also want to take advantage of illuminated or digital window graphics displays to make your company stand out.
Seasonal Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Sales
Using the right kinds of holiday marketing displays can save you money and give you a significant boost to your store’s transactions and conversions. Whether you choose just a few decals or create an extensive seasonal display, holiday retail signs and displays can help you get the most out of your investment and promote your newest items with style.
If you’re considering seasonal in-store signage for your business, the following strategies can help you capture and maintain your customers’ attention to promote your products and services further.
1. Choose Colors Purposefully
Choosing seasonal graphics with intentional color combinations can help customers get into the holiday spirit. Black, purple, lime green and orange are especially popular colors for Halloween and can instantly indicate what new seasonal products you may be featuring. Valentine’s Day graphics usually take advantage of reds, whites and various shades of pink. Shades of green and gold are a given for St. Patrick’s Day, and the Fourth of July typically features a great deal of patriotic red, white and blue.
Red and green are two colors most associated with Christmas and the typical holiday season. Still, you may also choose a cooler color palette reminiscent of snow and colder weather for the winter season in general and to be inclusive of other winter holidays. For warmer weather, you may choose to use splashes of bright neon colors to promote new summer deals.
It can also be helpful to maintain some of your brand colors within your holiday graphics displays. Selecting colors that coordinate with both the particular holiday and your business is crucial for encouraging customers to choose your company for their purchases. When crafting seasonal displays, you can challenge the stereotypical red-green scheme for a truly unique color palette.
When considering colors for your displays and graphics, you may want to use lighter rather than darker colors to make your lettering and designs stand out and prevent your graphics from becoming flat or too blended. Bold white and lighter-colored text and graphics more easily catch the eyes of those passing by or browsing your store.
If you want to implement darker colors, you can highlight your design with a white outline or add lighter colors around the main focus of the display. This contrast increases readability and makes your design pop.
2. Increase Your Readability and Visibility
When creating your holiday retail signs, remember that different seasons have their own recognizable themes, fonts, images, colors and symbols. As your graphic designs can evoke some powerful emotions in your customers, they provide an amazing marketing opportunity. Holidays are often highly visual, so you’ll want to take advantage of seasonal messages and make them as visually compelling as possible.
A good rule of thumb for holiday graphics is to make them as easy as possible for people to understand when on the go. By increasing your signage’s readability, you can reach a far greater number of customers and passersby driving down the road or traveling by foot. Well-designed holiday retail signs both inside and outside your store should appeal to the eye, allow you to stand out against other stores and inspire interest in your business.
To maximize your holiday signage’s visual power, you can use text and highly differentiated images that pop against the background. Contrasting colors, shadows and bold outlining can help immensely with readability and creating striking and eye-catching displays. Incorporating styles, colors, ideas or images that evoke the season with accessible messaging encourages customer interaction.
3. Centralize Your Brand
In addition to taking advantage of the visual and emotional impact of well-designed holiday marketing, you want your seasonal graphics to put your brand first. From client retention to new conversions, there are numerous long-term benefits to reaching out to clients through holiday signage and messaging. Using seasonal marketing displays and signs that convey your essential brand personality reinforces your company’s style and helps you cultivate a far more successful approach to the holidays.
When planning various marketing displays for holidays, you should incorporate your brand wherever and whenever you can. Your brand and your identity, values and objectives as a business are synonymous. Combining your branding with your holiday graphics communicates a consistent message about your company and builds loyalty with your customer base even after the holiday season ends.
Seasonal retail signage and window graphics help your customers associate your brand with the authority of a particular holiday season. Promoting your brand in the short term can help you increase your sales and improve how quickly you can move your stock. However, your brand awareness and customer goodwill also provide a long-lasting, powerful impact.
4. Appeal to Emotion
Create eye-catching, high-quality designs and signage to make a lasting impression on your customers. Interactive signage can create a more personal experience for your customers outside of promoting items. You can use holiday signage and graphics to interact with and lead customers through the doors of your store. Graphics and signage with motion and directional arrows themed to the holidays are a simple way to improve your customers’ navigation while maintaining your theming.
Emotion is a significant factor in marketing to your customers. When you want to move people to act, you need to communicate on a deeper level. Create striking seasonal graphics that infuse communication with visually compelling text and imagery so they stick in your customers’ minds. Enlisting the help of an expert creative design team ensures that your holiday branding and in-store signage achieve seasonal marketing success.
How Should You Plan Your Seasonal Displays?
What are some of the best ways to situate and execute your seasonal retail signage? Planning your displays and determining what layout works best for your store is just as important as choosing your design.
Successful holiday retail signs share several key characteristics to capture your customers’ attention.
1. Be Direct
First, your displays and graphics must ask and address questions focused directly on your customers. Signs that ask questions are much more likely to catch the eye of those passing by and make them focus on your store. Using second-person language instantly shifts the viewer into a mindset engaged with your brand as they consider their response.
Second-person language helps viewers feel that your company is speaking directly to them, which can help them connect your store’s message to their own life. Addressing your audience directly and using active language in advertising are powerful tools for promoting sales and driving foot traffic. Talking to your audience also gives the impression that your business is marketing your products and services with a distinct customer in mind and can help you appeal to more people.
Seasonal retail signage has the unique opportunity to inspire customers to consider their plans for various holidays. Holiday graphics like window decals, graphics, point-of-purchase displays and other signage that ask your customers relevant questions prompt them to think about possible gifts, decorations, accessories and other merchandise in a new way. Your retail store can provide satisfactory answers that tie into the spirit of the specific holiday season.
2. Get to the Point
You want to be as concise as possible when considering your signage and the messages on your holiday graphics. While branded holiday graphics are a simple yet powerful way to draw traffic to your store, you want to ensure that they are succinct, free of clutter and communicate an understandable message. Busy or distracting displays can detract from your message.
Seasonal signage and graphics that are clear and easy to read and understand are far more successful in attracting and capturing your customers’ attention. Using short, concise sentences and pithy language helps you get your point across without too much extra wording.
In addition to maintaining a reader-friendly approach to your graphics and displays, narrow the focus on your displays’ and graphics’ messages. Relaying practical information and communicating a few significant takeaways help your customers engage more with your brand and products or services. Ensuring that your messages aren’t too long or detailed means customers passing by your store take in more information with just glances.
3. Connect the Physical and Digital Experience
When planning what graphics and signage to use in-store, it may be helpful to consider the kinds of digital advertising trends you have used before. It is essential to harmonize your online and in-person shopping experiences to ensure the same affordability, ease and availability of products across your various platforms.
When it comes to your retail signage, you want to reach as many people as possible. You may find that your online advertisements can influence and complement the design of whatever traditional print graphics you choose and increase the number of shoppers who choose to do business with your store. To keep your brand image cohesive, you may also consider matching your physical seasonal designs to your online presence and vice versa.
4. Focus on Organization
Be sure you track and plan your store’s various promotions. Creating a promotional calendar helps you plan for your seasonal graphics and displays and decide deals you plan to include for the holiday season. You will know exactly what you need and when you need it by planning ahead.
It can also help your business to become more involved in your community. In addition to playing off of universal seasons and holidays, your store may find it advantageous to build your seasonal retail signage based on popular local events centered around the holidays. You can encourage people taking part in these community activities to stop by your store before or after the event, and you can achieve an even bigger impact on your sales.
5. Choose Your Location Carefully
The most effective holiday marketing displays have strategic locations in your store to stir curiosity and capture viewers’ interest. Whether you want to display banners and hanging graphics high above the aisles of your store, create elaborate seasonal window displays or secure promotional signs to your walls or floors, you want to consider your placement with care.
To entice customers to navigate your store and explore your special holiday items and deals, you can place seasonal in-store graphics in high-traffic areas of your store. Shoppers naturally follow these markers and engage more deeply with your brand. Maintain symmetry in your signage and have them situated in a similar location to the seasonal products they promote.
6. Use Size to Your Advantage
When deciding what graphics you want to include in your store, you should consider going as big as possible. Large, bold seasonal signage and banners can attract customers to your retail store. Compared to a minimalistic approach, prominent retail graphics and displays are far more effective in drawing shoppers’ attention to different sections of your store.
Varying your visual layout and adding depth and space to your signage increases your display’s energy. Use double-sided signs to take advantage of as much surface area as possible in your holiday signage and displays. These provide an easy way to get twice as much room for your design and seasonal product promotions. Combined with bright colors, easy-to-read text and concise writing that is easy to understand, a larger display allows you to influence more purchasers.
7. Boost Your Creativity
Customize your holiday signage to your brand aesthetics and business goals to make the most of your holiday retail signs and in-store graphics. When you want to capture your customers’ attention, plan innovative and exciting designs for your storefront banners and displays. Using various textures, colors and fonts to create bold designs can affect your consumer base more strongly.
You may even consider incorporating humor into your seasonal graphics and displays to surprise your customers, make them laugh and break through the excessive commercialization of the holidays. Pop culture references and jokes can even help you increase brand recall in your customers and inspire repeat sales for future holidays and even the regular shopping season.
Perhaps you could add lights to your displays to create a warm, approachable and charming atmosphere both inside and outside of your retail space. Lights can also ensure visibility for all of your messages and signs regardless of whether your store is open or closed and what the weather conditions may be. You can even work lights into a more extensive decorative seasonal setup for different holidays and use spotlights to draw eyes to specific parts of signs or seasonal materials you want to emphasize to your audience.
8. Remember to Rotate Your Displays
Remaining seasonally minded and rotating your retail signage is crucial for keeping your customers up-to-date on all of your store’s promotions and deals. It also helps to keep your store fresh in the minds of your customers rather than allowing it to become stale or dull over time. Revamping your store by highlighting seasonal products can substantially improve your customers’ in-store shopping experiences.
If customers and passersby walk past or through your store and your displays fail to catch their eye, you may lose potential sales. When your seasonal signage speaks for your store, you want to ensure that you put your best design and newest, most exciting products and promotions forward.
Get Eye-Catching Seasonal Graphics From SpeedPro
High-quality, customizable seasonal graphics can help you impress your clientele and make the most of your seasonal promotions. As North America’s only network of studios focusing on large-format graphics, SpeedPro is your one-stop solution for all of your printing and visual communication needs.
Our professional design team will help you maximize space throughout your store and impress your customers. In addition to swift delivery, reliable communication and a wide range of services, SpeedPro also offers state-of-the-art graphic display solutions, including digital and UV printing. When you need to revamp your store’s signage for the holidays, you can trust SpeedPro to provide dependable customer support and bring your store to life.
Contact us to find a studio near you and request a consultation or quote today!