Truck Lettering, Yard Signs, or Shirts: Cheapest Advertising Per Impression
You've got about a thousand dollars to spend on getting noticed, and three quotes on the desk: lettering for the truck, a box of yard signs, and shirts for the crew.
Every salesman tells you theirs is the best value. So let's just work it out.
- The only fair way to compare them
- The actual numbers
- Why the cheapest one isn't the answer
- What to buy first with $1,000
The short answer
Truck lettering is by far the cheapest advertising per impression — roughly a tenth of a cent — and shirts are the most expensive. But impressions aren't equal. The shirt's impressions happen at the moment someone is deciding whether to trust you, which is why cost per impression is the wrong number to buy on.
The only fair way to compare them
Different price tags, different lifespans, different amounts of exposure. The one number that makes them comparable is cost per impression: what you pay for one person to see your name once.
Advertising sells this as CPM — cost per thousand. Every number below is built from first principles with the assumptions written down, so you can swap in your own. They're estimates, not measurements, and the point is the ratio between the three, which holds even if you disagree with my inputs.
Assumptions used throughout: a two-man residential crew, 200 working days a year, suburban routes.
The actual numbers
Truck lettering
Vinyl lettering on both doors and the tailgate: call it $500, lasting five years. That's $100 a year.
Exposure comes in two forms. Driving — roughly 1.5 hours a day through traffic, with a few hundred vehicles passing. Parked — five hours a day on a residential street where cars, walkers and neighbors go by. Conservatively:
- Driving: ~300 vehicles/hour × 1.5 hours = 450/day
- Parked: ~40 people/hour × 5 hours = 200/day
- Total: ~650/day × 200 days = 130,000 impressions a year
≈ $0.0008 per impression. Under a tenth of a cent.
Yard signs
Ten signs at $6 each. Each one gets planted at a job, left for a few days, and reused maybe twenty times before it's bent or lost — about $0.30 per placement.
Sitting on a front lawn for three days on a residential street, it's seen by neighbors, walkers and passing cars: call it 90 impressions per placement.
≈ $0.003 per impression. Four times the truck, still almost nothing.
Crew shirts
Ten shirts for two men: $293.58 after the automatic 16% discount, replaced yearly.
Exposure is the honest weak point. The crew is seen by the customer, the neighbors either side, a few people walking past — and both men are seen by mostly the same people, so it doesn't double. Call it 25 people a day across 200 days = 5,000 impressions a year.
≈ $0.059 per impression. Roughly seventy times the truck.
| Channel | Yearly cost | Impressions/yr | Cost per impression |
|---|---|---|---|
| Truck lettering | $100 | ~130,000 | $0.0008 |
| Yard signs (10) | ~$60 | ~18,000 | $0.003 |
| Crew shirts (10) | $294 | ~5,000 | $0.059 |
We sell shirts, and shirts come last on this table by a wide margin. Anyone telling you otherwise is doing arithmetic that suits them.
Why the cheapest one isn't the answer
Because an impression from a car doing 45 mph and an impression from someone standing four feet away deciding whether to let you in her house are not the same event, and averaging them hides the entire point.
| Distance | Attention | Where in the decision | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Truck at speed | 50–100 ft | A second, none of it deliberate | Nowhere — pure name recognition |
| Yard sign | 30–60 ft | A few seconds, mildly curious | Early — "that's who did the Petersons'" |
| Crew shirt | 4–30 ft | Sustained, actively evaluating | At the decision |
The truck buys you familiarity — cheaply, at enormous volume, over years. The shirt buys you the decision — expensively, in small numbers, at the exact moment it's being made.
A homeowner who has never heard of you but opens the door to two men in matching shirts with a company name on them is running a completely different assessment than one who opens it to two guys in whatever was clean. That's a conversion event, not an impression. It doesn't belong in the same column, and it's worth understanding what she's actually deciding.
Here's the way to hold both facts at once: the truck fills the top of the funnel, the shirt closes the bottom. Buying only the cheap one gets you known by people who then meet two guys in cutoffs.
What to buy first with $1,000
It depends on which part is broken, and you can usually tell:
The phone doesn't ring → buy reach
Truck lettering first ($500). Nobody knows you exist. Nothing else matters until they do. Cheapest impressions available anywhere, and it runs for five years with no ongoing cost.
You quote plenty and lose them → buy credibility
Shirts first ($294). People are finding you and deciding against you, and the decision is happening at the door and in the driveway. That's the shirt's job, and no amount of extra reach fixes it.
You just want the cheapest thing that works this week → yard signs
Signs first ($60). Lowest possible entry, and the highest-intent placement in this article: a sign on the lawn of a house you're actively improving, in front of neighbors who can see the result. Pair it with knocking the six nearest houses while the machine is running and it stops being advertising and becomes a sales call with proof attached.
The order most crews should actually use
- Yard signs — $60. Immediate, trivial cost, works this week.
- Crew shirts — $294. Fixes the moment where jobs are won or lost.
- Truck lettering — $500. The long compounding one. Buy it once, forget it for five years.
- ~$150 left. Hats, and a second set of signs.
All three, in that order, inside a thousand dollars. Note what isn't on the list: a month of paid leads, which costs about the same and stops the day you stop paying.
Four ways people waste this money
Phone number too small. Applies to all three. Sign shops default to a big company name and a small number, because it looks balanced. The number is the only element anyone can act on — it needs to survive a photo taken from a moving car. Same 30-foot rule as the shirt back: about an inch of letter height per ten feet of viewing distance.
Magnets instead of lettering. They fall off on the highway, they trap water and mark the paint, and they come off between jobs — which means the truck advertises only when you remember. Lettering costs more once and works always.
Signs left too long. A sign that sits on a lawn for three weeks stops being "somebody just had work done" and becomes litter. Three to five days, then collect it. You need it for the next job anyway.
Different name treatments on each. Truck says one thing, shirt says another, sign says a third. Three impressions that don't add up to anything. One name, one color pair, everywhere — write the hex codes down so next year's order still matches.
Common questions
What is the cheapest advertising for a small trades business?
Truck lettering, by a wide margin — roughly $0.0008 per impression once spread over a five-year life. Yard signs are next at about $0.003. Both beat any paid channel, and neither has an ongoing cost after purchase.
Is a truck wrap worth it for a small crew?
A full wrap usually isn't for a two-man crew — plain lettering on the doors and tailgate gets most of the visibility for a fraction of the cost. Spend the difference on shirts and signs, which cover parts of the funnel lettering can't reach.
Do yard signs actually get pressure washing customers?
They work best placed at a job while the result is visible, then collected after three to five days. The value isn't the sign alone — it's the sign plus a half-clean driveway the neighbors can see, which is proof no advertisement can buy.
Should I buy uniforms or truck lettering first?
Buy lettering first if the phone isn't ringing, since nothing else matters until people know you exist. Buy shirts first if you're quoting plenty and losing them, because that's a credibility problem happening at the door, not a reach problem.
How much should a small crew spend on advertising?
Yard signs, shirts and truck lettering together run about $850 and cover all three parts of the funnel — reach, intent and credibility. That's roughly one month of a lead subscription, except it doesn't expire and you own it.
See crew work shirts → — ten styles, S–6XL, no minimum order, nothing prints until you approve the mockup.