Harvesting More Leads from Social Media

This article appears in the May issue of Sign Builder Illustrated. 

By Jim Hingst

 

One of the biggest challenges that a small business faces is generating enough leads from all of its marketing activities to reach your sales goals.  If you are investing time and money on social media, your efforts need to produce a return on your investment. 

 

It should be no surprise that social media is the most effective marketing tool.  With nearly half of the 7.9 billion people in the world using these platforms, social media not only can deliver a message to a broader audience at a lower cost. Above all, it can produce a greater volume of sales leads than traditional advertising and communication channels.

 

Establishing Social Media Goals and Strategies.

 

One of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was to “begin with the end in mind” adjuring the necessity of setting goals. In establishing specific goals for a highly effective social media strategy first answer these questions:

● Audience: What are your target markets?

● Platforms: Which social media platforms do your customers and prospects use?

● Content: What type content does you audience prefer? How frequently will you post content?

● Measure: What metrics will you track to gauge success for each social media platform?

 

Answering these questions will help in selecting the best platform for your social media marketing strategy. As you make your selections, you should also develop specific goals for your program. These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Moreover, you should craft goals which are particularly suited for your business.  

 

Branding. Improving the visibility of your shop among your target audience is integral to success in the sales process. Multiple contacts with prospects improve your odds in selling new graphics programs. Here are examples of goals for your social media marketing plan:

● Increase the number of engagements on Twitter by 25% versus the number for the previous year.

● Add 500 LinkedIn contacts during the 2023 calendar year.

● Generate 50 links each month from Facebook to your website landing page.

 

Public Relations. Your business interacts with the general public as well as with your target market.  If your shop is involved in a charity event or supports an athletic team, social media can bolster your branding within your community.  Tracking the number of social media mentions helps in understanding how the public views your products and services, your standing within the community and your reputation as an employer. Good PR not only improves your shop’s relationships with customers and business associates but also helps you attract the top-quality candidates for future employment.

 

To enhance your image within your community, activities in your social media marketing plan could include:

● Photos and stories about employees;

● Postings about your shop’s participation in local events; or

● Articles about customers’ new graphics programs. 

 

Lead Generation. Setting a goal for leads produced is a practical target, because you can easily track your results. An increase in brand awareness, on the other hand, is not so easily measured nor is gauging improvements in attitudes about your business. Using likes or shares or numbers of followers also has little practical application that affects revenue or profit. Leads, on the other hand, are important because you can turn those into cash.

 

Developing a Social Media Marketing Plan.

Once you settle on your social media goals, determine the platforms you will use, action steps needed, people responsible for activities, costs and target dates for completion of tasks.

 

Generating More Impressions and Engagement. If you include Twitter and Facebook in the Digital Section of your overall Marketing Strategy, you need to develop a written plan of action. That plan should not be an exhaustive dissertation. Rather it should provide an outline to include:

 

• Specific Marketing Activities

• Person(s) Responsible

• Costs

• Calendar of Events

• Action Steps

• Measurables

 

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms. Another major marketing challenge facing small business is choosing the best social media platforms. Many experts feel that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter (in that order) generate the highest volume of sales leads.

 

Providing useful content on social media is time-consuming. You can’t afford to spend time on every platform or you will spread yourself too thin. Because small businesses have limited resources, limit your social media choices to no more than three platforms.

 

The best way to ascertain which social media platform is best to promote your business is for you and your salespeople to survey your customer base. Which platforms do they use for their companies? In providing content to your business base, how would your customers prefer to receive information about your shop and your products and services?

 

In deciding which platform is best suited to realizing your marketing goals, you also need to decide which social media platform best complements your content and the business culture of your clientele. For most sign shops, printers and wide-format graphics providers, social media platforms which are more visually oriented, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are good choices for the visual communication marketplace.

 

On the other hand, LinkedIn might be a more suitable channel to communicate with CEOs, Marketing and Advertising executives and purchasing managers, especially if your content consists of long articles.

 

Finally, you need to consider the demographics of those using the social media platforms. Some platforms are geared more for a younger audience, such as Instagram. Other platforms, such as LinkedIn are better suited for business professionals and the B2B marketplace. In fact, more than 80% of B2B businesses rate LinkedIn as their primary social media platform.

 

Using Facebook for Marketing Research. Facebook is certainly a viable platform for businesses because it reaches 2 billion users, 75% of whom are active on a daily basis. Half of its users visit Facebook several times a day. What’s more, Facebook has broad appeal across the full range of age groups. As effective as this platform is for all companies, 90% of B2C marketers regard Facebook as their primary social media channel.

 

Since nearly everyone is on Facebook, you can use it in building a comprehensive profile on a prospect. A prospect’s Facebook page is generally more personal than his business presence on LinkedIn.

 

As a sales tool a prospect’s Facebook page generally reveals his personal interests, such as family, hobbies, political affiliations and religious beliefs. You won’t find this type of information on LinkedIn.

 

In face-to-face selling, you can use this information to break the ice on an initial sales call as well as to avoid touchy subjects. In researching a prospect on Facebook, pay attention to which Facebook groups he belongs. 

 

Twitter. What makes Twitter valuable as a marketing tool is that its reach extends to more than 200 million daily users. Albeit the vast majority of its users are rarely a focused target audience for most consumer or business advertisers, Twitter’s vibrant activity makes it worthy of serious consideration as a viable marketing tool. Whether this tool harmonizes with your other marketing plans depends on:

 

• Whether your prospects and customers use this platform; and

 

• Accumulating a base of followers who could use your products and services and who have the money and authority to make buying decisions or influence purchases.

 

Using Twitter to Promote Your Content. Repetition reinforces your brand identity and boosts your credibility. To ensure that you sustain the frequency of your postings, you should develop a posting calendar to schedule your tweets.

 

LinkedIn. Facebook has the largest user base with more than 2.7 billion active users. Twitter has approximately 330 million monthly active users. While LinkedIn does not have the broad user base of Twitter or Facebook, it uniquely well-suited for B2B marketing and sales.

                                          

For B2B sales LinkedIn is potentially your most viable social media marketing tool. Consistently used you can build a community of prospects, customers, industry associates and influencers to generate leads that you can convert into sales. 

 

Regularly posting on LinkedIn or other social media platforms improves your odds that your connections or followers will notice you and establishes you as an authority in the graphics market. That helps in lead generation. 

 

Whether you are on LinkedIn or another platform, you may also find other opportunities to harvest sales leads by joining groups devoted to the signage and graphics markets as well as joining groups associated with your target markets.

 

Using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator you can target professional people, such as mid-level managers, executives and business owners and generate leads that you can convert into sales. 

 

When prospects use LinkedIn, they are looking for products or content related to their business. This audience is more likely to have an interest in the products and services that a sign shop offers, such as corporate graphics, signage or large format digital printing. What’s more, LinkedIn users include those who are decision makers or who can influence buying decisions.

 

Posting relevant content lends credence to your company’s stature as a competent and trustworthy graphics provider.

 

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. Regularly posting on your social media platforms and waiting for prospects to call you is not the only way nor is it the best way to use these platforms. A more proactive approach to using social media will likely produce better results.

 

LinkedIn, for example, features their Sales Navigator which can help you expeditiously identify and engage with key decision makers within your target market.

 

Sales Navigator employs a number of filters, which excludes sales suspects which are less likely to become paying customers. It not only finds companies with the money for graphics, but uncovers key contacts with the authority to spend that money.

 

Using the Sales Navigator feature requires you to proactively contact the sales lead either through phone prospecting, direct mail, email marketing or a combination of approaches.

 

By searching their database for your ideal sales prospects, you save time in prospecting for opportunities and building relationships. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator feature, however, is not free. The least expensive plan is $79.99 per month. To see if the LinkedIn plan is a good fit with your sales and marketing strategy, you can try it for free for a month.

 

Tips for LinkedIn Posts and Articles.

 

● Begin your posts with a benefit statement which answers the visitor’s question: what’s in it for me?

● While “brevity is the soul of wit,” LinkedIn posts with at least five lines generally garner more attention than shorter posts.

● Skillfully use line spacing to aid readability.

 

● Sparingly use emojis to attract attention and direct the viewer to your CTA. For example: To read more, click here 👉 

 

● Research which hashtags on LinkedIn are most popular for your topic and industry. For a posting on commercial graphics, you might use these hashtags: #visualdesign #graphicdesign or #branding.
 

● Limit the number of hashtags to no more than three. The LinkedIn algorithm will flag excessive use of hashtags as spam and penalize your posts in searches.

 

YouTube. Arguably YouTube has the potential as the best platform for B2B communication. It is the second most used social media platform next to Facebook. What’s more its search engine is the second most used next to Google.  Each day more than one billion hours of its videos are watched which is more viewing time than Netflix garners.

 

The challenge for many businesses is that producing YouTube content can take considerable time and expense to produce content. Postings on YouTube, however, don’t necessarily require an elaborate studio and production and sophisticated film-editing equipment. For next to nothing some shops produce attention-getting and highly-effective videos showcasing their graphics programs just using their iPhones. Other options include hiring a local videographer or using the talents of your employees.

 

Best Practices in Social Media Marketing.

 

In many respects, marketing to other businesses in which you must take a rifle shot at a specific audience in a defined geography is much more challenging than broadcasting to the general public. Nonetheless social media can be fruitful for B2B marketing if you employ the following best practices: 

 

Social Media Posting Schedule. While posting too frequently is inadvisable, so is posting infrequently. What’s most important in growing your social media presence is consistency.

 

You should actively post relevant content on each of your social media platforms. The frequency for posting can vary depending on the platform. While posting weekly on LinkedIn may be sufficient, using Twitter may require one or more daily tweets.

 

In addition to consistency, regularly posting on a specific day at a specific time is recommended. This conditions your followers to expect your posts on a consistent basis. That’s why including a calendar for postings is critical to the success of your social media marketing plan.

 

Optimizing Your Social Media Profile. For generating B2B sales leads from social media the prospect must first find you. To improve your chances of being found, you must optimize your profile. That means that you must use the right words and the right hashtags so your shop easily comes up in searches.

 

Review your profile for each of your social media platforms. It should include your contact information including phone number, email and links to your website, blog and other social media platforms.

 

Your profile should also include keywords that prospects will likely use when searching for products and services that you offer. A sign shop might use keywords, such as wide-format digital prints, fleet graphics, banners, decals, signage and window graphics.

 

Among the major social media platforms, LinkedIn is most effective in producing leads. If you are on LinkedIn make sure that you are visible to anyone and that you list your services.

 

The first and often the most lasting impression of your shop is your social media profile. How you present your company information and your visual identity across your channels should be memorable and consistent as it appears on various devices, such as laptops and cell phones. Remember to include links to your website and other platforms and test those links ensuring that they function.

 

In your profile headline succinctly describe what your business does. Use the keywords and hashtags which would best attract the leads from companies in your target market.

 

As a graphics professional make sure that the imagery in your profile looks professional. People make an immediate judgment about you and your business in an instant. If you include a photograph of your business always incorporate your company logo in the picture. Not only should your imagery attract the attention of your target audience, it also should be unique enough to differentiate you from your competition.

 

You should also maintain visual consistency across all of your social media channels, website and other forms of business communication. In fact, as part of your marketing strategy, you should create guidelines or a stylebook for all aspects of your visual communication.

 

Lead Follow Up. Collecting leads is only worthwhile if you and your associates follow up in a timely fashion. In today’s world, timely means following up the same day that you receive the lead.

 

That’s where email marketing is important for small business. It provides immediate follow up of social media leads until you have the time to phone and schedule a face-to-face meeting. Email marketing is also highly effective on its own in lead generation.

 

For each lead, you need to record who responded, when they responded and what were the results. Did the lead result in a quote? Was the value of the quote? Did you get the order? If not, why not?

 

If you are sales oriented, you should track your interactions with prospects through the sales funnel from initial contact to closing the sale. You should also collect key information in your customer relationship management (CRM) program.

 

The information entered into your database should include the nature of the prospects business, key contacts, size of their fleet, locations of their store outlets, as well as phone numbers and email addresses.

 

Initiating Engagement. Responding to comments, direct messages (DM) and inquiries is key in engaging with customers and prospects. You can also initiate the process in the following ways:

● By commenting on a prospect’s posts;

● Messaging a prospect after they follow you or accept your invitation to connect; and

● Sharing a prospect’s content. If you use a link shortener such as Sniply, you can add your comments to their content along with a link to your website. 

 

Make Social Media a Team Effort. In a small business you can’t do everything alone. To improve your content and results on social media encourage others in your shop to contribute to the creative process. Solicit their suggestions and their stories. When anyone is in the field, remind them to take pictures and video clips of the installation process and the finished graphics.

 

By involving your associates in different aspects of your business you will make them feel as part of a team. In addition to their contributions in your marketing strategy, your team members will be more motivated to perform better at whatever task they are engaged in.

 

The more involved that your employees become, the more likely it is that you will attain your business goals, whether it is to generate more leads or to improve the quality of your products or to provide better customer service.

 

Conduct a Poll.  Opinions are like noses. Everyone has one. Most people can’t resist adding their “two cents worth” to any question. That’s what makes a social media poll an easy, efficient and cost-effective way to take the pulse of your target audience.

 

When your followers respond to your questions, you gain a greater understanding of their needs as well as the likes and dislikes. With this insight, you should have a better understanding of the type of content you that you should provide your audience.

 

Business also use social media polls to determine which platforms their followers prefer. That way you can decide which platforms are best suited for your market.

 

In addition to gaining critical market information, polls are a great way to stimulate engagement with your audience that results in sales leads and ultimately in sales.

 

Crafting Your Posts.  Write your social media posts using an economy of well-chosen words. The copy should contain a key benefit that would appeal to your target audience. Photography should be attention-getting, sharp and memorable. Finally, your post should have a call to action. Give the prospect a reason to contact you.

 

When you deliver value in your content, you stimulate interest in your product offerings. That influences those in your target audience to respond to your calls to action and can ultimately sway attitudes that impact buying decisions.

 

Ideally, social media posts should include a link to a landing page on your website or to a blog post. A landing page is not the same as your home page. Instead, the page includes a form designed to collect leads. Tracking leads from your landing page is a good key performance indictor used to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing activities.

 

Social Media Content. When you post on your social media platforms, your content should be relevant to your business. More importantly, it should relate to the interests and unmet needs of your target market.

 

Useful information on your social media platforms helps form those positive first impressions which become lasting impressions. Those good impressions set the stage for your sales meetings. It also reinforces your messaging and branding.

 

Remember that quality of content trumps quantity. You don’t want to annoy your followers with spam. Nothing is more obnoxious that shameless, chest-pounding self-promotion. Prospects don’t want to read advertising. They don’t want to be sold. Instead, they want you to help them buy. They want information that they can use in their businesses.

 

Posting examples of your best work or providing news that prospects can use helps increase visibility, builds a following and generates more leads.

 

A great way to deliver your message is to tell a story. One effective type of storyline is based on the problem-solution format. For example, in a social media posting you could report how a retailer revamped the appearance of his store interior with new wall graphics. That change in décor resulted in a higher volume of traffic and higher sales. The post could link to landing page where the prospect could fill out a form and download the definitive white paper on store identity programs.

 

Conduct a Contest. To generate more sales leads, you could run a social media contest in which participants complete a simple form. You could also base a contest around a discount. The goal of the contest might be to build your database of contacts for your email campaigns and sales efforts.

 

One popular way to generate leads is to run a Twitter contest. It’s also a great way to build your company’s brand. The goal of your contest could be to drive traffic to a landing page on your website, where prospects could enter the contest by filling out a form.

 

So that you don’t discourage people from filling out a form, keep it simple. All you need for a lead is the contact’s name, company name, location, phone and email. With that information, you have everything you need for to measure the success of your campaign.

 

Of course, a contest always needs a prize. The contest does not necessarily need to be expensive. It does need to be relevant to the prospect and have some value. For example, in prospecting for fleet graphics or store graphics, you could offer a copy of an authoritative and comprehensive book on the subject. 

 

The type of contest suitable for the corporate graphics field could be a photo contest in which prospects would submit a picture of their company vehicle, store sign or window display.

 

When you try a tactic, such as a contest, measure your results to determine what worked and what didn’t. This will provide you with an insight when planning future social media strategies and tactics.

 

Build Your Base of Followers. You can have the best content in the world, but if you don’t have followers, your message will have little or no impact.

 

If you want people to follow you and engage with you, try following and engaging with them first. Be selective on those who you follow. Don’t expect that following those who share your political philosophy will also share your interest in business topics. Instead, only follow those who in your target audience or industry.

 

Community PR. If your shop is active in your community, post the events that you participate in. For example, if you sponsor a children’s baseball team or are involved in a charity, post photographs of the games or affair.

 

Crafting Your Message.

 

Platforms such as Twitter restrict the configuration of your message. To ensure the greatest impact of your tweet, keep your message short and sweet (about 100 characters). That message should include a key benefit and a call to action to encourage your target audience to respond. In addition, include an attention-getting image, and a couple of hashtags. Most importantly, incorporate a link to drive sales leads to the landing page on your website.

 

How your tweets and posts are formatted affects how well you connect with your target audience. Some of the key elements to a post are:

 

• Benefit Statement

• Hashtags

• Visuals

• Links

• Call-To-Action (CTA)

 

Benefit Statement. Whether you are writing a Tweet, article or ad copy you need to lead with a benefit statement that succinctly tells the reader how he will profit from reading further or doing business with you. In business key benefits include helping customers increase their sales to make more money, bolster their egos or improve the safety of their vehicles.

 

Hashtags.  Hashtags are keywords or keyword phrases preceded by the pound symbol (#) used to help your target audience easily search for and find your content. Include them in your profile and your posts. When you create a hashtag that is specific to your industry or niche within that industry, it also helps to promote your shop and your products and services.

 

Twitter is not the only social media platform that support the use of hashtags. Other platforms that support its use include Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Facebook, however, does not support hashtags although you may notice that some of its users include them in their posts.

 

Always use at least one hashtag for each post. Incorporate your hashtag within the body of your post.  Each hashtag should be relevant to the post and should relate to your target audience, with the objective of attracting new followers and boosting engagement with them.

 

Avoid Spamming. Using too many hashtags is not only obnoxious and can hamper readability.  Some platforms, such as YouTube, will penalize you. In fact, these platforms may remove your posts. What’s more, a social media platform may disable your links in the case of spamming.

 

 

Using a hashtag analysis service such as Hashtagify, Hashtracking or Talkwalker, can help you discover the most relevant hashtags for your business and your target markets. For example, if your primary business is wrapping cars and trucks, you might use the following hashtags: #vehiclewraps, #vehiclegraphics or #truckgraphics.

 

You can also do your own informal hashtag research by checking the results produced when you enter a hashtag in the search bar for a social media platform. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Which topics would most interest them? What words would they use in their searches?

 

Links. If a primary goal of your social media strategy is to increase website or blog traffic, always include a link. Long URLs are unattractive and can incumber your click-through rate. To condense long URLs you need to use a link shortener, such as Bitly, Sniply and Hopp.co.

 

Shortened links also look more professional and reflect more positively on your shop. Some link shorteners also provide analytic tools which allow you to track clicks, page visits, conversions and time on your site. Many of these services are free.

Visuals.  As people cursorily peruse social media you need a hook to grab the viewer’s attention. While a strong benefit statement, works for conventional marketing, social media is more visually oriented. Posts containing a video clip garner the most attention and engagement. Photos and infographics are also effective in generating interest and responses than posts without images.

 

 

An infographic is a visual representation often used to convert statistical information into an easily understood and appealing image such as a chart or graph.

 

 

One of the biggest challenges for writers whether it is composing a magazine article, ad or social media posting is not the written word. Instead, it is selecting an attention getting photograph. Without a show-stopper, all of your pearls of content wisdom are for naught. Professional-looking photography is the window to gaining visibility and thereby social media engagement.

 

One of the first lessons you learn when writing an ad or a direct marketing piece is to thumbnail sketch the layout first, then write to fit the layout. This lesson should not be forgotten when composing a social media post.

 

As sign makers and wide format printers, social media platforms are ideal for the visual communication industry. In selecting visual content, you need to answer the following questions:

 

● Which platforms do your prospects and clients use? What type of visuals will attract their attention resulting in engagement?

 

● Will you tailor the visual content to the various social media platforms or will you select visuals that will have broad appeal across all platforms?

 

Call To Action (CTA). Make sure that when you write a post that you include a “call to action.”  Just as when writing a traditional ad, the call to action tells the reader what you want them to do. Do you want them to retweet, share, comment on or like the post? If social media strategy is to drive traffic to your website or blog, tell them to tap on the link to that site or blog post.

 

Without a call-to-action link in your post readers generally continue scrolling to another post and you have missed another opportunity to connect with a potential customer.

 

Measuring Social Media Effectiveness.

 

Once you execute your social media marketing plan, you need to measure your results on a monthly basis. Tracking your outcomes can help you identify what works and what doesn’t in your strategy. That can help you determine if the platforms which you have chosen are contributing the achievement of your sales and marketing objectives. Based on your results, you can tweak your plans until you find a winning formula.

 

The metrics you use, such as increases in the number of followers, impressions, likes or links to your website landing page, should be compatible with your marketing goals. Some criteria are more relevant to your sales objectives, while than others are too tenuous for pragmatic marketing. Correlating “likes” with topline growth, for example, is difficult if not impossible.

 

The best gauge for determining whether your marketing strategy and activities work is the number of leads generated. Leads, in the form of comments or phone calls or completed forms on your landing page, are the types of interactions that you can respond to and convert into cash.  

 

YouTube Channel Analytics. Perhaps the best B2B channel for engaging an audience is YouTube. With nearly 2 billion active users, this platform has broad appeal across the spectrum of age groups. Because most men are visually-oriented, it is especially effective in delivering your message to the male audience – especially to a more affluent male audience who occupy decision-making roles in businesses.

 

What makes YouTube even more effective is YouTube Analytics.  This tool equips you with extensive analytics which allow you to monitor actual results for a specific period against your marketing objectives. Some of the key metrics that you can track include:

● Channel views – how many visitors visit your channel

● Watch Time – how many hours visitors watch your videos

● Average View Duration

● Average Percentage Viewed

● Increases in your subscriber base

 

By tracking these metrics, you can evaluate what works and what doesn’t so you can alter your tactics. As with any social media platform, your success depends on consistently posting new content relevant to your target markets.

 

Impressions and Engagement. Two important metrics you should monitor when using a platform such as Twitter are impressions and engagement. Impressions measure how many times your content is delivered to your audience. Put another way, it measures how many times a posted message is seen.  The value of generating impressions is that each one helps in improving brand awareness.

 

 

While impressions are an important gauge of measurement and a good general goal for a social media strategy, what’s more important are engagements. Engagements quantify how many times viewers respond to your content by either liking, sharing, profile visits, new followers, comments or reposting. Better yet, a platform such as Twitter tracks the number of links to your website or blog.

 

Are Paid Social Media Promotions Worth It? Most small shops have a limited budget to spend on a paid promotion on a social media platform. Be forewarned, this type of advertising on some platforms can be a little pricey. Advertising on LinkedIn, for example, may cost you more than Twitter, but you will likely reach a higher quality B2B prospect.

If you have budgeted for social media ads, your money is best spent on a conversion campaign.  A conversion is defined as a specific action, such as a lead generated. If your goal is to generate sales, you want leads, not brand awareness.

 

A platform, such as LinkedIn, uses filtering tools so you can target a specific audience. That way, you are not wasting your money communicating with prospects in a geography that you couldn’t possibly serve.

 

To track the effectiveness of your paid social media promotions you should measure your results against your marketing goals and the outcomes of previous campaigns.

 

Conclusion.

 

No one has developed a surefire formula for what produces the best results on social media. The best advice is to do what marketers did 50 years ago in direct mail marketing: Test, Don’t Guess. 

In other words, experiment by testing one headline versus another; one type of content versus another; one set of hashtags versus another; one call to action versus another. By continually testing you will develop an idea of what works and what doesn’t for your company.

 

Good Luck Selling!

About Jim Hingst: Sign business authority on vehicle wraps, vinyl graphics, screen printing, marketing, sales, gold leaf, woodcarving and painting. 

After fourteen years as Business Development Manager at RTape, Jim Hingst retired. He was involved in many facets of the company’s business, including marketing, sales, product development and technical service.

Hingst began his career 42 years ago in the graphic arts field creating and producing advertising and promotional materials for a large test equipment manufacturer.  Working for offset printers, large format screen printers, vinyl film manufacturers, and application tape companies, his experience included estimating, production planning, purchasing and production art, as well as sales and marketing. In his capacity as a salesman, Hingst was recognized with numerous sales achievement awards.

Drawing on his experience in production and as graphics installation subcontractor, Hingst provided the industry with practical advice, publishing more than 190 articles for  publications, such as  Signs Canada, SignCraft,  Signs of the Times, Screen Printing, Sign and Digital Graphics and  Sign Builder Illustrated. He also posted more than 500 stories on his blog (hingstssignpost.blogspot.com). In 2007 Hingst’s book, Vinyl Sign Techniques, was published.  Vinyl Sign Techniques is available at sign supply distributors and at Amazon. 

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