Major Business Card Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make
There are many mistakes you can make with a business card, but some are worse than others. For example, letting the edge of your logo go off the business card and get cut off isn’t serious, while forgetting your contact information renders the business card useless. Here are several major business card mistakes you don’t want to make.
Not Proofreading Before Printing
Transposing digits in your phone number sends people somewhere else. A wrong area code, whether accidentally put on the business card or made obsolete by an area code change, does the same thing. Typos can hurt you in other ways, too. For example, a prospective client will figure out you meant “-com” instead of “-cm”, but a mistake like this causes them to wonder what other mistakes you’ll make. You must make certain that all information on the business card is correct before you print.
Failing to Review Your Business Cards Periodically
You need to review your business cards periodically to ensure that you’re sending prospective clients to your active email address and current cell phone number. Social networking sites come and go. Make sure you’re sending people to your well-maintained and polished social profiles instead of the one you haven’t updated in two years. Or, worse, sending them to a profile link that’s dead, whether you closed the account or the platform itself shut down
Vague Personal Branding
What do you do? That should be obvious from a glance at the business card. Your branding should be obvious and reinforced by your logo, your business name, and your tagline or social media handles on the business card. This should be true whether you’re a wedding photographer, portrait artist or real estate agent. Ensure that your personal logo and personal brand are consistent on the business cards you hand out. For example, a business card that promotes wedding photography shouldn’t have a tagline advertising your landscape photography. You can offer several types of photography on the same business card and website, but the business card should simply promote you as a photographer instead of simultaneously promoting several niche services. You can get business card design ideas from successful rivals and services that help you create business cards. Then you can come up with your own, unique business card.
Ignoring Readability
Creative types often spend hours creating their logo or selecting the perfect photo collage to put on the business card. Then also tend make that logo too big for the business card or think the photos of them and their subjects sell their service. The problem is that you can’t make the graphics so large that the text is too small to read. If people have to break out a magnifying glass to read the name, address, phone number and email address on the business card, they will throw out the business card instead. If the text is too close to the graphics or too close together to be easily read, the card will be tossed, too, because you’re obviously not paying attention to the details that matter to your clients. They’ll put you in the same category as the interior decorator who rearranges houses based on their tastes instead of those of the client.
A business card is often the first impression people have of your business, so it is important to get it right! MOO makes the process easy with our simple online tools and templates.
