Marketing with a Professional Business Card

If you are a business person chances are you hand out business cards to people who know you, but more frequently to people who don’t know you and are unfamiliar with your business.

When they look at your card does it leave them wondering what you do? Do they look at the thin paper and rough edges and wonder how professional you are if it's not a very professional business card?

 

If they can’t figure out what you do, how will they know if you can do something for them? What do you think is going to happen to that card when they get home or to their place of business? Even if they file it in their card file, how likely are they to ever look at it again?

Your business card is a great marketing tool if it clearly communicates who you are and what you do.

Do you make excuses about your card, or go into long explanations about what it communicates?

 

 If you have to tell people what it means, they didn’t miss the point, you did!

 

Your professional business card design should start with a simple, clean and powerful logo. The world moves too fast and people are too busy and time starved looking after their own stuff to spend a lot of time figuring out what you are about, especially if it seems too complicated or worse yet, boring.

A well designed logo provides a mental trigger or link between you, your business name and the product or service you provide.

The rule of 3 works well in professional business card design; grouping the information in 3 areas of the card and no more. Remember to include all of the information required on the business card. I have seen cards where the address of a store was left off, the phone number of a business was missing or wrong. Take a day or two to look over your card design before you sign off for printing. Once you approve it any changes will cost you more money.

The hiring of a graphic designer to guide your though the process doesn't have to be enormously expensive. Graphic designers work by the hour so the clearer you are in stating your goal and expectations, the less time the designer will spend making changes to produce a simple, effective design.