I hear you – you’re thinking that you don’t need to purchase business cards and waste trees anymore. And that makes a lot of sense with all of this digital media floating around and with relationships forming between businesses and people completely over Facebook, email, websites, and Match.com. You’re thinking, “Does anyone I could possibly market to even USE these things anymore? Obviously they don’t have any roladexes hanging around so where do they even store them? Are they just going to recycle it when they go home? WHY AM I SPENDING MONEY ON THESE STUPID PIECES OF PAPER? Why do I need to buy business cards? Why do I need that extra expense?”
Listen, these are great questions, and definitely valid concerns. However, there are tried and true answers to these questions, and all of the answers point to the same conclusion: yes, of course you want business cards.
Face to Face Still Matters
Even with things like a thousand ways to contact someone, a whole slew of social medias, emails, Skype, and a splash of SEO, face to face marketing still has an incredible importance in the business world. Lots of potential clients want to talk to a real person, exchange handshakes, and then won’t remember your name at all – even if they do remember your impression and wanted to work with you. So how do you cure that? A business card.
The truth is that a potential client can’t really get to know each and every person they meet personally, or even each and every person they want to work with, but they CAN collect each and every person’s business cards and associate a certain personality or face with the card. When they go through them later, maybe yours will pop out because they remember the firm handshake you gave or the great deal you said you’d give them.
Who knows, really – but if they don’t have your business card at all, and can’t remember if your business is “Carrot Farms Inc.” or “TechSolutionsIDK”, then without a business card…even a friendly face is out of luck. Now if you had just had the frame of mind to buy business cards…but you didn’t, and you lost a potential client.
When You Own Your Business, You Don’t Ever Want to Be Unprepared
You always want to be ready to make a first impression when you need to, and the easiest way to do that is to always have something on your person that identifies your brand as awesome.
Sure, you could send them an email, show them something on your phone, or tell the name of your company. But what if you don’t have your phone on you, your business name is complicated and not easy to remember, or they don’t even have an email? Well, you say, I can write my name on a piece of paper!
This is true, of course, but in this day in age, nothing says “cheap” or “unprepared” like “here, have this piece of scrap paper from my lunch with my number on it”. And no one is going to want to deal with someone whose company, in their mind, is now associated with the word “cheap” or “unorganized”. I certainly wouldn’t give a company like that my business.
So what do you do? Make sure you have high quality, beautiful business cards in your pocket. And how do you guarantee they’ll be in your pocket? You buy business cards. It’s as simple as that – an easy fail safe for almost any situation. Buy a nice little card holder, put ’em in your jacket pocket, and be professionally prepared for anything to happen.
The point really comes down to being professional, looking professional, and acting professional when you’re representing your business.
This is where investing just a few bucks in business cards is really going to matter. Maybe it’ll only matter once a month, but if you’re like a lot of businesses, an extra client a month means more profit for you. Business cards are an incredibly affordable way to ensure your brand actually makes an impact when it matters – and their batteries don’t die.
