One of the best ways to tell people about your driving school is to have your logo and contact details printed on your vehicle. When you are out teaching and a potential customer spots you giving a lesson to a happy and confident pupil it sends a positive message out about your lessons. Today I’m blogging about vehicle signage for driving instructors and why its a good idea to carefully plan out your own vehicle advertising.

I’m going to discuss wraps and stickers, what you should expect to pay, how to save money and some other things to consider when getting your car graphics designed and applied. We’ve had experience just within the last couple of months of this as we gave the LPL Mini a makeover, see our video – click here: YouTube. Also, we’ve been helping instructors with free graphics design for flyers, logos and vehicles since we launched LowPriceLessons.com in February.

Let us know about your experiences with vehicle livery by posting in the comments section below.

Things to consider first

Some people prefer to not have vehicle signage at all. Being able to remove all your advertising by just popping the rooftop sign and L-plates in the boot means that you can use your car without people knowing that you’re a driving instructor. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to wish to do.

If you are a part time driving instructor or you share your vehicle with others then you may not wish to have personalised graphics.

There are costs involved in applying the graphics to the car, printing and designing them, so this means that you have to seriously think about the investment if you lease your instructor vehicle.

Indeed stickers and wraps are semi-permanent so you can not just take them or leave them, so once you have applied the graphics you can not just take them off at night or on the weekends.

Plan your graphics wisely – will you be keeping the phone number you use, for instance, or planning on changing your email address?

If you run a school you should try to save money with a discount from the signage company who apply the graphics and make sure you get a design appropriate for all your vehicles. The size of the panels and shape of each car may not allow you to use the same designs across different vehicles.

Do you want to go for a full body wrap, partial wrap or stickers?

Rooftop Sign versus Vehicle Vinyls

Rooftop signs do not provide anywhere near the same amount of exposure to new customers as a big advert about your school printed all over your car. So if you choose not to go with a graphic and rely simply on the rooftop sign to bring in new business then think about the cost of this. If you think that spending money on your car when you are already cutting your cash flow pretty fine then you have to consider the impact that advertising your driving school on your driving school’s car will have over and above the benefits provided by a rooftop sign alone. At 30 mph it is going to be nearly impossible for a potential customer to get a good look at your schools’ name and contact info.

The information on your sign should match the information on your car – consider the current design of your rooftop sign when getting new graphics for your car. Making sure that your brand image is consistent on both the sign and vehicle graphics lends a more professional feel to your branding.  If you are changing vehicles as part of your lease agreement then carefully consider the costs, for instance, within a year then a full body wrap does not represent good value.

Wrap v Stickers

A full body wrap is distinct from stickers in that a wrap completely covers your entire vehicle, or a partial wrap can cover large areas – whilst stickers cover less space and involve less design. There is more to it than that, of course.

When you get a wrap you do not need to take the colour of your car into account when designing your vehicle graphics as the wrap will cover all of your current paint work. This is great if you have mint condition paintwork as it will be protected under the wrap. If the paint work is damaged or an inappropriate colour this is also a good option as you can simply cover it up with the wrap.

On the other hand, if you have nice paint work and you like the colour and it goes well with your design then why not take advantage of it and you’ll save money overall. We chose this with the Mini and Daphne Haskins, a member of Low Price Lessons whom we’ve helped with graphics design for her car, has also chosen this route.

You have more flexibility with your design if you go for a full wrap. You can even go over the windows with a full wrap but it is not what you should do with your instructors vehicle.

A great benefit of wraps for schools is that each car can be made to look the same colour and design with a wrap whereas with stickers you have to rely on the paint work all being the same colour.

Costimates

Roughly speaking if you get a full wrap on a small car, like a Corsa, then you will be looking at around £800 or more. For stickers on the front, back and sides of a car you could expect to pay around £250. These prices are just estimates and it is best to shop around. Some companies will help you with graphics design or give you a discount if you use your own designer. If you run a school you should expect to get a discount for bringing multiple vehicles and only requiring one set of designs.

Will it damage the car / Be difficult to maintain?

There is a lot of advice about how to wash your car out there and it is recommended by car garages to wash manually with a power washer. The automatic drive through car washes can damage your paint work at the best of times so if you have graphics applied then make sure you are careful about where you go to wash your car. A wrap is, technically, easier to wash as you wont be at risk of getting in under the sticker with the soapy water but in general the stickers and wraps on cars are pretty sturdy and as long as you are not right up next to it with the power washer then you will be ok.

Removing the graphics is also easy and as I said above you don’t have to worry about your paint work as the stickers and wraps you get now on cars, when professionally applied, actually help protect the paintwork.

Saving Money

Try designing your own graphics for your car if you have access to a good graphics programme on your PC or Mac. If you don’t have one and would like a free alternative to the Adobe suite you can try GIMP. Learning how to do the basic tasks on graphics software can take a little while but it is a very satisfying process once you’ve made your own designs. That’s easy for us to say as we’ve been designing things on PCs for years, however, even just sketching out how you would like the car to look can help save you money with your designer as they will appreciate you saving them some time and having a clear plan to work from.

If you are bringing your own designs with you then you know in advance what the vehicle will look like – this means that you will be able to make a more confident decision on who to go with for printing and application.

It is not a great idea to apply your own graphics as a mistake here can cost you more in the end if you need to print out your stickers or wrap again. With a good eye then it is certainly possible, but inadvisable.

Recent experiences

We had the LPL Mini made-over to advertise Low Price Lessons, we thought it would be good to show you what its like getting vinyl applied and here is a video. I helped Daphne Haskins (click her name to view her LPL profile) with vehicle signage this month. She wanted a design that would match her rooftop sign. The logo she uses is great; she designed the logo with her daughter, even cutting the ‘e’ out of vinyl to look like the ’10 to 2′ angle to grip the steering wheel. I wanted to maintain that look and help save her money by not having to get a new rooftop sign. I’ll show you what the final designs look like when I’ve finished and Daphne is happy with them.

What I’ve learned from the two experiences is that white writing on a darker background looks good and is easily visible to people as you drive past. Its a good idea to space your lettering out well and include as many contact details as possible. Having an L-plate as part of the design is a great way of letting people know what you do, as so many people advertise on their vehicles these days.  Incorporating the LPL logo into your design is also a great way of letting people know that you are a good price and can increase your exposure, whilst our logo is interlocked l-plates and looks great on driving instructor vehicles.

Relying on your paint work to be the background of your design can be difficult, you may need to change the colours in your logo to make them stand out. It can also be a great way to save money and a strong colour in the background is a good way of getting attention. Silver coloured vehicles are probably the hardest to make good designs for as it is difficult to get lettering to stand out.

Get in touch, leave us comments below and tell people about your experiences getting vehicle graphics. Add to what I’ve said and help other driving instructors who are trying to get their vehicle livery organised but don’t know where to start.

Take advantage of our 3 month free trial over at our Sign Up Page and send us an email to feedback@lowpricelessons.com if you would like us to help you out in any aspect of running your driving instructor business. From graphics to marketing, from accounts to setting up a Ltd company – we’re here to help.

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