A building’s facade and frontage sets the first impression of the place. If it’s beautifully decorated and designed, inviting and cozy it brings in paying customers as a result. Conversely, if it’s dark, dilapidated, and dreary, it can produce the opposite effect on would-be customers. Commercial spaces, including onsite sales centers, need to focus on outdoor lighting.
As such, if you’re operating a commercial space, it’s in your best interest to incorporate some aesthetic touches to your property, particularly the exterior. These additions can add a touch of vibrancy to your space. That said, you shouldn’t only incorporate landscaping as an appealing feature to your space—you should also consider the lighting.
Lighting isn’t only an aesthetic addition, it’s also a practical one. Having ample lighting helps promote security and safety in a place, deterring unscrupulous individuals from loitering near your grounds and helping people navigate the parking lot more easily at night.
If you’re on the lookout for ways to optimize your commercial property’s outdoor lighting, you’ve come to the right place. Here are seven ways you can enhance your property’s visual appeal through outdoor lighting.
Illuminate All Walking Paths
Before thinking of aesthetic improvements in your lighting setup, ensure that there’s enough light for people to walk around the walking paths leading up and surrounding your commercial property.
Putting up streetlights is a good way to ensure that pedestrians can walk in a lit-up area. This improves their overall experience with your business and also keeps them safe and secure. If you want to keep things sustainable, install LED streetlights for that added green (but still functional) touch.
Having enough light helps prevent the public from stumbling and falling on random obstacles that happen to block the path. It also helps deter wildlife from entering your grounds.
That’s not all. Streetlights also help illuminate the areas that you want your customers to go to, which can lead them closer to your commercial space and ultimately help you generate money.
Use Lights to Highlight Navigational Road Signs
When it gets dark outside, street signs can be impossible to spot without adequate lighting. For commercial spaces, this can have dire consequences—drivers could accidentally drive opposite of one-way roads, cars could miss the backside parking area, and so on.
To keep your customers safe and informed, it’s a good idea to use light to help guide them through the dark. Spotlights or LED directional lights that focus on street signs can help provide direction to your customers, improving the overall safety of your place and avoiding confusion.
By improving your place’s navigability, you’re improving the customer experience. This, in turn, can help them feel more likely to engage with your services and product offerings, which can mean a neat little sales conversion.
Attract Customers With Neon Lighting
If you’re a business that wants to catch some eyeballs at night, there’s no bolder and better way to do that than by installing neon lighting. Attention-grabbing, colorful and vibrant, neon lighting gives your building an instant identity that’s distinct from all the surrounding elements. You can put any text or image as you desire.
What businesses commonly put in these neon signs are appealing deals that can get customers to act, such as limited-time discounts or buy-one-take-one promotional deals. Businesses may also put catchy slogans that simply help get their brand noticed by people passing by.
Of course, you have to ensure that neon lighting is something that matches the flavor of your business. If you are operating a B2B company, a neon light may be less of a must-have, but it can still be a viable option depending on the industry and nature of your business.
Save Electricity With Motion-Detection Lights
Have a large front lawn space or driveway leading up to your business that doesn’t get as much traffic during the night? Another way to optimize your property lighting is by putting up outdoor lighting with motion detection features. This is an excellent way to get the best of both worlds: ample lighting when needed and a less expensive monthly utility bill because the lights only activate when movement is detected. It also reduces your carbon footprint.
If you don’t expect to continuously need lights up during the night near your building, then investing in motion-detector lights is a no-brainer. It activates only when people walk near them, giving the full benefits of light on an as-needed basis.
Use Lighting to Show Your Brand Sign
If you’re not sold on the neon sign, then you can do it the old-fashioned way: use a spotlight to illuminate your shop’s name. Using a focused beam of light to illuminate your brand is a classic yet effective way to draw attention to your commercial space. If you want to keep things energy efficient, opt for LED lights as the main light source. Ensure that the light captures your store name and accentuates it appropriately for the best effect.
This method enhances visibility and readability from a distance, allowing people to notice your store even when it’s dark outside. For people who pass by your area frequently, it can also be a landmark that they’ll recognize more easily, which can be a good thing for your business.
Opt For Open Shade Structures Instead of Covered Outdoor Buildings
If you’re debating whether to construct a new outdoor venue on your property, ask yourself if installing a shade structure and creating a shaded al fresco area can achieve the same thing. If it does, great. You can use your existing light source outside to help illuminate the area below the shaded structure. This helps keep the number of lights in your place low, which can make your space more energy-efficient while still being able to serve the same purpose. It also cuts costs down in general, since you no longer need construction materials like wood, doors and windows to build that area.
Looking to find a trusted shade structure provider? Consider fabric structure installation with Greenline.
Showcase Foliage or Decorations with Outdoor Lighting
Sometimes, we want to flex what we have, day and night. And for commercial space owners, that’s a totally valid desire, especially considering that you aim to draw in customers. Thoughtful placement of outdoor lighting can turn an otherwise empty-looking space into a beautiful outdoor attraction. This is especially true if, by the day, you have a garden and facade that looks well-kempt and marvelous in its own right.
Showing your foliage and other nice elements of your commercial space makes customers take a second glance at your space. If they like what they see, they may wander in and enter your shop, which can lead to a sale if everything turns out well.