Standing in a yard or along the street, yard signs are a natural attention-getter. They may tap into a current need as in “Hey—I need to talk to someone about my roof…” or go into memory for when a need arises.

And they are a terrific advertising value for clients like service businesses. They place the sign on a site where they are working then leave it to continue advertising.

David Showalter, DavidDesign, Bryan, OH [www.daviddesign.biz], knows how effective they can be, and helps his clients take advantage of their low cost and round-the-clock advertising.

“The initial cost is pretty low,” says David, “yet they can be very powerful little billboards.”

Design is really important on these little signs. A generic, plain text version won’t deliver readers like an appealing design will. As always, simplicity is the key for legibility

“You’ll catch readers with some nice contrast, good use of color and maybe an image or graphic,” says David. “As always something nice and clean draws their eye, and is quick to read.“

Most of the ones David does are corrugated plastic panels on wire stakes. Short runs are done in-house; medium to large runs are outsourced to wholesale suppliers. He gets the wire stakes from his local sign supplier to save on shipping costs.

“I often have them printed by Signs365.com. In lots of 10 or more and they’re really reasonable. I mark them up about three times my cost, and it works out to be a great value for the client and a decent markup for me. You can do them in full color because they are a full digital print on corrugated plastic.”

When David gets a larger order, he has them screen printed by a supplier like North Metro Signs or SignRocket.com. The price per sign gets surprisingly low as the quantities go up.