Logo, website and business cards. As soon as people start a business, there are 3 priorities on their lists.
In fact, I remember being asked if I had business cards made up as soon as I registered my business name. Nobody asked if I had any customers, a business strategy or a marketing budget. It’s like my business wasn’t legitimate until I had some pieces of paper with my name and a bullshit job title.
So here’s the skinny. I’ve spent well over £2000 on business cards over the past 3 years. With changes like logo edits, copy rewrites and design changes, I’ve been through plenty of cards.
Ultimately, I’m spending money on advertising. That’s what business cards boil down to. Frankly, I never saw a higher return on investment
Check it out. Foodgineer. Like an engineer but for food
The big problem with business cards? They’re expensive and in no way guarantee a lead conversion or a sale. I suppose most people assume that people at networking events will ask “do you have a card?” and you’ll heroicly reply with a “yes!” and hand over a well-designed card.
They’ll look over the card and think “this person is obviously a creative genius. This card is so professional and well designed and made that I obviously should work with them.”
Even if people say this to your face, that feeling will last about 8 seconds. If you want to increase the trust that people have in you and your business, as well as getting them to call you/hand over a lead to you, then try these methods instead.
Let’s say you’re spending £150 ~ $250 on business cards. You’ll get maybe 500 cards. That’s 500 people that you need to hand cards out to. Even if you handed out 50 cards per event, that’s 10 events that you need to drive to, pay for, sign into and network at.
Fuck that. Let’s look at what you could spend money on that will a) increase the trust that leads and customer have in your business and you, b) generate leads and email subscribers and c) add to your marketing automation funnels.
Promoted posts
Promoted posts or promoted content, is where you pay a social media platform like Facebook or LinkedIn to push your updates and posts to new members.
For example, whenever I publish a new blog post, I’ll post it to Facebook to share it with my current audience. I’ll usually spend £14 over 2 weeks to help the blog post reach a new audience.
You can get traffic and more leads with this simple, cheap traffic method.
Landing pages
Don’t spend £150 on a bunch of cards. Get a designer to whip up an awesome, easy to use and high converting landing page for your website. Then drive traffic to it.
Generate some leads and email subscribers with this.
Social traffic
Similar to promoted posts. With your new landing page, pay for some traffic from Facebook or LinkedIn to your landing pages to build a subscriber and lead list.
Facebook can cost as little as 25p per click. Just £10 will get you 40 clicks.
SEO
Check out Envato Studio and buy yourself some easy and cheap SEO. The boring stuff like checking tags and alt text? Get someone else to do it. Even look for some offers that can speed up your site too.
Admin
Taxes, paperwork, account filling. There are tons of things that I have no interest in doing. Fiverr provides a host of people that will work as a V.A. for a few bucks an hour. Get them to do data filling or the boring stuff that you don’t need to do.
Content
A tad more expensive, but pay someone to write some copy and content for you. Even better, offer to pay £50 for guest posts. You could even go full marketing mode and promote a post offering to pay for guest writers.
Business plans
There are hundreds of courses out there (not only Sell Your Service!) that’ll teach you how to put together a business model. Sure there are free business plans all over the place, but getting some serious consultation and training from an expert could well pay for itself.
Email marketing
Seriously, if you haven’t got email marketing already – GET IT. Mailchimp is incredibly affordable and is a fantastic way to start emailing your customer and subscribers with regular content.
Marketing automation
On that note, pay a little more and build out a marketing automation funnel. When subscribers sign up to an email list, automate the emails to send them content that they’ll find useful. Easy as pie.
Other things to avoid – print advertising, traditional advertising, networking events, hit traffic.
So there we go. Lots of other, smarter ways to spend money rather than on bits of card. Besides, if you’ve really impressed someone, they’ll offer their card and get you to call them.
So what do you think? Are business cards worth the paper they’re written on? What have you found that works MORE than business cards? Or, am I mental and I’m talking bollocks? Let me know in the comments below!
Remember, you can also download my $100 000k marketing funnel plan below, for free.
