Rumors of the death of the business card have been greatly exaggerated.
At the dawn of the information boom the business card was one of the things we heard would soon go away. That has proven to be about as true as the paperless office they promised us!
Business cards are alive and well and still an integral part of business marketing and economic etiquette.
For many small business owners the business card is the only form of advertising they may have during their early start-up. Since they are still such an integral part of business relationships, it is important to carefully think through the design of your business card. So here are a few tips that should assure that your business card will have its intended impact on potential customers:
– Never cut corners. Although it is part of any bootstrapper’s arsenal of marketing tools, and a relatively inexpensive tool at that, don’t try to be cheap. Think about its design and how it represents your business. How you present yourself and how your business card looks and what it communicates about your business are the first impressions that any potential customer or client will take away from a meeting.
– Pay attention to the little things. In addition to design, the quality of paper, the color you use , and even extra touches like embossing can make a big difference. For example, I do not recommend printing your own cards. The paper will never be quite as good and the print will never look quite as professional as you can get from a printer. It is worth the extra few dollars to do it right.
– Include all critical data, but none that is useless. A business card should make it easy for the customer to contact you. If the best way is e-mail, highlight that. If it is your cell phone, put that in a clear and prominent place. If you are doing business out of your home, you may or may not need to include your address. If all business is conducted electronically and they will not be coming to your home, no need to include a mailing address.
– Include description, logo, and/or slogan. This can help make your card stand out and improve the odds it will be kept.
– Remember, it has two sides. You can use the back of the card to give them pricing information, a map to your location, a photo of the product, your logo, or to include catchy stuff such as useful trivia or clever quotes.
Dr Jeff Cornwall
Co-founder of The Entrepreneurial Mind, serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship.
I was just thinking about business cards yesterday as I was going through a stack to find a phone number I needed. I ran across an “untraditional” business card in that it was a square shape and larger then a traditional business card. I have mixed feelings about these types of cards. Sure they are catchy, but they aren’t really convenient. I think they have the potential to be thrown away a little easier. You give some great pointers and I think home printing should be avoided at all cost!
The reverse is also a useful area to put a translation of the card into a relevant foreign language, as I have seen done before.
A dear friend of mine–one of the most brilliant high school drop-outs I’ve ever known–always had a business card, even when when he was “couch-surfing” in his early twenties. He was employed intermittantly in print shops in those days, but was always creating new and elaborate business cards for himself. The most clever had an angle cut out of the edge, just as an aesthetic design feature.
I think it is important to understand that the business card is an important tool no matter your industry.
I can remember going to industry shows and, despite the title “new business” on my name tag, as soon as I handed them my business card along with a hand shake, I was taken more seriously than other new businesses.
Keep your cards close and never forget the power that simply, will thought out, little piece of cardboard holds.
..be bold
Another thing to consider with business cards is to have them translated if you do international business. We needed 4 sets of business cards translated and printed for our trip to China. I found a site online that does business card translation and printing and we had great results with them. The site was called Luna Concepts, and their link is http://www.lunaconcepts.com/e/biz/index.html
No, I don’t work for them, but since it’s such a specialized market, I wanted to pass along our positive experience with them. We went with English on one side and Chinese on the other, and the results were perfect.