better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

3 Essential Business Card Tips

21 October 2018

How many business cards do you have in your wallet? In your car? Tucked into your briefcase?

As long as the answer is ‘some’ then that’s good enough, we don’t need to worry about actual numbers.

An essential business tool, business cards go through fashions and fads, in the same way briefcases were surpassed by messenger bags, which were then replaced by rucksacks.

There was also a vogue for Twitter cards, a few years ago, that featured their bird logo. Twitter was new and interesting and so why not promote our new status as top tweeters?

Then there was the time that plastic cards were all the rage. Durable and easy-wipe, they certainly looked smart, but had the downside you couldn’t write on them. Frustrating when you wanted to note down any extra details about the person handing it over.

What I really like about business cards is that we still have them. They’ve not been killed off by smartphone apps, or turned into online data dumps. The business card, in it’s many iterations, continues to survive in our high-tech world.

However, despite investing time and effort into producing them I’d estimate that 80% of all business people I’ve met have made at least one of the following three mistakes:

1. Nothing useful on the reverse side.

2. None in their pocket.

3. Not handed over.

If we turn these mistakes around they each become essential top tips. Let’s do that:

1. Putting a big logo on one side and our contact details on the other is a wasted opportunity. One that I’ve been guilty of, I will admit. Instead we can have our contact detials on one side and then bullet points of our products and services on the other. Bullet points get read and that sparks conversations we wouldn’t otherwise have had …which can lead to new sales.

2. Business cards are no use in a box in our desk drawer. They must (and I mean must) be moved to our pocket, briefcase and car. I have them in my wallet and my backpack and a few tucked into my diary. I consider it a busines sin to leave the house without any cards about my person. We don’t want to be sinners!

3. We need to be proactive and give people our card. We don’t need to wait to be asked, as that may never happen. There is no shame in handing over a card; we are in business and that entitles us to share our products, our skills and our cards with people we meet.

So, in summary …make both sides work harder, always carry a couple of cards and give them out. No excuses!

This week; we can make it our mission to hand out 10 business cards. Let’s get them working for us!

Next week: Surf The Big Strokes