The design of your business cards could be enough to make or break your business’s popularity. Combine a catchy name with a great tagline, and you will be remembered. Create an over-complicated design that doesn’t adequately reflect what you do for a living, and you risk fading into obscurity.
Your business card says everything about your brand, which engages your client. This might mean contact details, a description of services, and a memorable image. If you can combine the correct elements of design, you can create a business card which stands out and gets you noticed at networking events.
Interested? You should be. Here are our top tips on building a brilliant business card design and thus drawing in those clients.
Designing Your Business Card: Where to Start
Firstly, you must include certain elements within your business card’s design to ensure you convey all the necessary information in one place. These elements include the following.
1 – Including your Logo
A good business card design always includes your corporate logo. Why? It’s that old rule of marketing again. A customer needs to see your logo or business name a set number of times before they commit it to memory. After it is in the memory banks, you must ensure that people have positive associations with your brand. This is why we advertise, knowing that it will increase the footfall we see through our doors.
Putting your logo on your new business card is a thorough way to make sure the client sees your logo at least during the time when you hand them the card and the time they go to either use it or throw it away. If your goal is for clients to see your brand seven times, then that’s two down already.
If you need help designing your logo, you can refer to our previous article regarding the best software for logo design, here.
2 – Including your Tag Line
You can include either a description of your services or your tagline. If you choose your tagline, you should ensure that it adequately reflects your business services.
For example, a mechanic might use the tagline “We fix every car,” in which case service lists might not be necessary.
For a garage which also does MOT testing and tyre changes, they may want to list it on the business card too. They could say, “We fix every car”, and underneath, write MOTs – Exhausts – Tyres for clarification purposes.
The tagline is astute, ideally sums up what your business does, and is a catchy, memorable phrase.
3 – Including your Contact Details
The most important thing to put on a business card is your contact details. Usually, this is a phone number, at the least. We recommend you include an email address and your physical address, too.
4 – Including a Description of Services
Again, if you don’t go with a tagline, use a few concise words describing your business. This is best done using a few choice words, perhaps five at most. You do not need to make these a legible sentence, or simply a string of words which describe what you do.
Famous brands with great taglines include Nike – Just do It, Mastercard – for everything else, there’s Mastercard, and Burger King, who encourage customers to have it your way. When combined, the title of the business plus the tagline gives customers an accurate insight into the nature of the business. You are aiming for this with your tagline or your descriptions of services.
Here are some other examples of tag lines to get you thinking.
Designing Your Business Card: Colours and Images
The images you use on your business card should also reflect what you do. A set of skis is acceptable for an indoor skiing range, but not for an office providing translation services. Match your imagery to your business description and tag line.
After this, the only task left to you is to make your business card both professional and eye-catching. The more you stand out, the better. Aim for recognizable, unique content and your business should flourish.
Lastly, let’s not neglect the impact of colour in branding. A light orange suggests a discounted brand, while purple suggests luxury. You can read more about colour’s impact on branding here courtesy of HubSpot.
The Perfect Business Card Reflects Your Trade
When all is said and done, the best business cards allow clients to know what you do and where you do it at a glance. They are compact, capable of fitting into the wallet’s credit card slot, and tell each potential client how to find you should they need you. Beyond this, the colour and image choice is entirely up to you.
Be bold, bright, and eye-catching, or be minimalist with sleek lines and no frills. The choice is yours. The only requirement is that people look at the card and know what it is that you do.
