In a high street filled with stores, restaurants, cafes and offices, what is it that makes one specific location stand out amongst all of the others? If you operate any type of business, the lifeblood of your survival are clients, and attracting them into your business is key to this.

When it comes to retail stores in particular, they are competing with dozens of other stores that are selling similar items. Pulling the customers away from the competition is very important, and one of the ways that this can be achieved is through unique and effective signage.

The importance of store signs

Store Signs

Having signs outside of stores and offices is very important. It is how people in the street will know what the business is about. Whereas most people will be able to tell that an establishment is a restaurant or café bar, usually by the tables and chairs outside, it’s not easy to distinguish what a store sells simply by taking a quick glance at its façade.

Signage plays a very important role in promoting and attracting people into your place of business. You will want a sign that is unique, concise and one that is going to immediately grab people’s attention. One type of sign that is perfect for this are LED neon lights, similar to the type that you can find over at Neon Mama, who have an excellent range of products.

Neon lights

Neon lights

The use of neon lights goes back more than a hundred years to Paris in 1912, when a Parisian barbershop commissioned a neon sign from George Claude for their shop. Claude developed the first neon lights a decade earlier using various gases such as neon, krypton and helium. He discovered that the colours of the gases changed when an electrical current was passed through them.

It was actually a few years earlier in 1898 that William Ramsey and Morris Travers, two British Chemists, first discovered neon gas which they derived from a sample of argon. They were the first to notice the colour changing properties of neon gas when they it was exposed to a high voltage.

The peak and subsequent decline

During the decades leading to the 1960s, neon lights were being used all around the world for advertising, marketing and signage of stores and places of business. The famous casino city of Las Vegas was famous for their neon lights, as were other cities across the United States such as New York.

Gradually, as technology advanced, the demand of neon lights started to decrease, while the rise of LED light technology started growing all over the world. LED lights were a cheaper alternative, better for the environment and also lasted a lot longer.

LED Neon lights

LED Neon lights

Nowaday, when it comes to neon lights, they are all using LED technology. LED neon lights are an extremely popular form of lighting for signage and marketing, and there are a number of benefits of this new neon technology over the original form of neon lights that used gases and glass tubes.

They are much more durable than their predecessors, which make them ideal for outdoor signs. Most LED neon lights are waterproofed, so they can survive outside in the natural elements for a long period of time. They are very strong and durable and don’t break easily.

Another benefit is that they are very easy to clean, so if you do happen to notice that your signage is a little dirty, you can get it cleaned very easily and quickly – something you couldn’t do with the glass tube format of neon lights.

Longer lasting

LED neon lights have a very long lifespan, which makes them ideal for outdoor signs. You can simply get one installed and then forget about it. The maintenance it will need is going to be very little, and your sign could last you for at least a decade or two before you need to have it replaced.

It’s a great investment for your business, and one that has the potential to really make a big difference when it comes to attracting and enticing people into your place of business.

Using neon for other types of signs

Neon lights Signs

In addition to the main sign outside of your store or office, you can also use neon lights for other smaller signs and displays for your windows. LED neon lights are available in a wide selection of sizes and styles, and you can even have some custom made for your business featuring your own logo and colour scheme.

One great thing with neon lights is that they are available in a huge spectrum of colours, something that traditional LED lights can’t compete with. You can have neon signs made with your exact business colours, rather than simple generic colours, which may not have the same depth or shade of colours that you use.

Many retail shops have large front windows, and pay a lot of attention to their window displays. With some carefully thought out LED neon light displays, you can really create a stunning front window display that is designed to grab the attention of everyone passing by on the street.

Some final thoughts

Attracting new customers to your business is a very important factor in how successful you will be. Businesses such as retail stores and restaurants and eateries rely heavily on foot traffic, and you need to have things in place that are going to be a magnet for people on the street.

Though there are many businesses that are turning to the internet to help them expand and find new clients, some smaller businesses are still relying simply on their bricks and mortar business, and in some cases, they wouldn’t benefit too highly from a strong online presence.

Their target audience are the people who are on the high street at any particular moment in time, not someone sitting at home in front of their laptop searching through Google.

Signage plays a very important role in how a business is perceived by people in their vicinity, and there is no better way of creating a striking and attention-grabbing sign than through the use of LED neon lights.