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Making Your Business Card Indispensable
If you've ever given out your business card to a prospective customer, you have to be wondering whether your business card will be kept and stored, or simply thrown into a pile and eventually thrown away. Chances are your high value prospective customers and partners receive thousands of business cards every year, and if want to acquire new business from them, than you need to be able to get their attention, long after the first meeting. Of course, if you naturally offer a product, or service that's of keen interest to them, they will likely file your card away. However, as time goes by, there will be several companies offering products and services of interest to them, and while your card may have been stored away for future contact, others will follow and the business card pile will grow! The challenge then becomes to not only make a solid first, or lasting impression as a prospective business person, but leave them with a product that will be indispensable, or least make the rolodex, or stand out in a pile, but certainly avoid the trash can.
In previous articles, we covered ways to maximize your business card design with color and font selection, imagery and logo inclusion. However, if price and turnaround is not a huge concern and you want to carefully plan the production and marketing strategy behind an effective business card, printing output can produce extremely positive results. Metal business cards, for example, are highly unique and in a pile of business cards where all cards are printed on thick cardstock, metal will certainly standout in look and feel. If it's not the shiny appeal of metal, it's the weight of the card which will standout. Since metal business cards are the same size as a standard business card, it can be put into a wallet, or dropped into a rolodex, but is less likely to be thrown away because it carries a unique factor. The same goes for plastic cards. Since they are printed on material that is non-standard in the marketing world, they will less likely to be thrown away. Incidentally, we've met with companies that have attended a business meeting with a prospective partner and tell us a story of how they handed out plastic cards (printed with one color on white plastic) as the meeting began. Immediately, the first 3 minutes of the meeting were spent on the discussion of the business card and how the card reminded the prospective client of a hotel room key. Months later, the companies met up again and the first response in that meeting was, "oh, you were the guys with the hotel key as a business card." Bottom line, the material your business card is printed on can make you and your business memorable, and hopefully make your business card indispensable.
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