Designing a perfect roller banner is about understanding your brand, objectives and audience needs and matching the design to help tie them together.
But what does that mean? Follow our nine foolproof steps and you’ll end up with a great design.
1. Consider location and its impact on design
Before you even begin to consider your design, you’ll first need to think about where you’re going to use it. Do you need to use it in multiple locations or is it purely for events or exhibitions?
You’ll need to consider the ramifications of each location and what that means for your design.
For example, in busy exhibition halls it will be more important to keep text to a minimum and to put most important information at the top as people won’t stop and read your display.
If you’re designing for a museum instead of using a display board, then you’ll be able to use more text as the aim of your display will be to educate rather than to get more traffic.
2. Add a Call To Action
Adding a call to action (CTA) increases interest in your display and promotes positive actions. Although most people will understand the importance of adding a USP when designing a display, they aren’t yet taking the next step and evolving the USP into a CTA.
Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes.
If your USP is a ‘leading supplier’ consider how you’d process this information.
Now evolve it into a CTA by using verbs to subtly call for an action. In this example, you could use ‘Work with a leading supplier’.
Now you know exactly what you’re being asked to do. It’s a small change, but makes a big difference.
You may be surprised to learn that over 80% of exhibition banner designs aren’t using call to actions (CTAs) yet, so you can be ahead of the game if you introduce them before your competitors!
3. Do you need contact details?
If the aim of your banner stand is just to get more people to visit your stand, then do you want people to note down your website address or phone number? Probably not.
Think about whether you really need to add your contact details or whether you could hand them a flyer or business card with your details for a more personal touch.
4. Social icons
As there are so many social media channels, visitors won’t necessarily know which channels you are active on.
Make their life easier to follow you by adding the social icons for the channels that are important to your brand to your display. If you’re easy to find by your brand name then you won’t even need to add your username.
5. Keep it short
Although it’s tempting to put on everything you know onto a banner, it’s not often the best solution and can lead to a confusing looking display.
Through our research, we found that 30% of banners currently have too much information on them and it could be turning potential customers away.
Edit your text down to simple bulleted sentences and key messages. Think about what is the most important message to share with people via this display – and stick to that single ‘take home’ message.
Remember, the job of your display is to get visitors onto your exhibition stand, not to do the talking for you.
6. Images
Pictures speak louder than words when time is of the essence. Choose big, high quality images that reflect what you want people to feel when they look at your brand.
7. High quality is a must
Did you know that 60% of images, including logos that are sent to us to add to displays are too low quality to print?
Using high quality images makes sure that your printed graphics don’t include granulated, blurry or pixelated images, which won’t reflect well on your brand.
Of course, all good suppliers will hand check your graphics before print to make sure that they are high enough quality. If you’re unsure of the quality, ask your print company if they offer artwork design services to help recreate logos, or can source high quality print images.
8. Colour me pretty
You may expect, with the world being your oyster, that people choose a variety of background colours to match their brand as a background.
But they don’t. Over 70% of banners use neutral tones as a background colour –white, grey and black.
These monotone colours help to create a stark contrast, making sure that important information – such as their branding, images and text stand out.
9. Most importantly…
When looking at your banner stand, the most important information should be in the top fifth of your display. Whether this is your logo to increase brand awareness, or a key message to ‘visit us for…’ is up to you.
Make sure that any information you add matches with your exhibiting goals to help drive relevant traffic on-stand.