The sign in front of your business promotes your brand and helps customers find you, but sadly, it can also look inviting to vandals or thieves. If you want to deter vandals and thieves from your business sign, there are few things you can do. Take a look at these tips and ideas:

1. Avoid using valuable metals in your sign.

If your sign is made of metal, it is worth money to anyone who steals it and sells it to a scrap yard. As a result, owning a metal sign can be slightly risky. To make your business sign relatively unappealing to thieves, use a ferrous metal such as iron or steel. Both of these metals are much less valuable than their non-ferrous counterparts such as copper, aluminum and brass.

If you have a sign with letters that can be moved around to create different messages, keep in mind that vandals may try to steal the letters. Also, make these less appealing by choosing the least valuable metal possible, or opt for vinyl letters with a metallic finish.

2. Choose shatter resistant glass.

Even if vandals don't steal your letters, they may reword the message on your sign into something rude or crass. That is not the image you want your business to promote, and ideally, you want to make vandalizing your letters impossible.

Keep vandals away from your letters by having a sign that locks, and make sure that your sign has smash-resistant glass so that vandals cannot break into it.

3. Light your sign.

Regardless of the type of sign you have, shedding a bit of light on it can help to keep thieves and vandals away. In order to avoid detection, most thieves and vandals prefer to work under the cloak of darkness and shadows. If your sign is in a dark spot, a vandal may feel as if they can attack it without getting caught.

To disrupt that confidence, you should light your sign. You can invest in landscaping spotlights and train them on your sign, or you can buy lights that you attach to the side of your business's wall and shine down on your sign. If you like, you can also bolster this effect with a security camera pointed at your sign.

4. Spray your sign with an anti-graffiti coating.

When you order your sign, talk with the sign salesperson about adding an anti-graffiti coating. Anti-graffiti coatings are not completely foolproof yet, but they are improving every day.

Currently, these products create an invisible barrier over surfaces that repels water, oil and most other liquids. As a result, if a vandal spray paints your sign, the paint beads up on the coating and refuses to adhere to the sign.

5. Schedule regular repairs to your sign.

If your sign is in a state of disrepair, it can be easier to vandalize. For example, imagine you have a sign with changeable letters that has a glass front. If the glass breaks, it makes it easier for vandals to move the letters or steal them. However, if you replace the broken glass quickly, vandalism isn't as likely or as possible.

Similarly, imagine your sign is loose on one side. That instantly makes it easier to rip free and steal, but if you schedule a sign repair service to reattach the sign, you reduce that risk.

If you want to learn more about how to avoid vandalism and theft on your business sign, contact a sign repair specialist from a company like Apogee Signs. These professionals work with business owners every day to mitigate the damage caused by vandalism, and they may have more unique ideas on how to stop or avoid it.