Sage Marketing Academy – Business Card Analysis

And… we’re back for more! Day Three of the Sage Marketing Academy kicked off with a great exercise to review business cards.

We broke up in groups of three and reviewed our team’s cards and came up with two good points and two bad points about each card. I was paired with Elaine Koyama of Interlinx Associates and Elizabeth Berlin of Perryman & Associates.

Below is our critique of each card – hopefully you can take something away from the notes. I know I did!

Interlinx Associates

Pros: Good use of the back of the card.
Clear indication of products supported.
Great tagline on the card that drives interest.

Cons: Too busy – too many font sizes and style, too many words

Recommendations:
Shrink the watermark and make it a graphic image.
Select a single font and stick with it.

Perryman & Associates

Note: The Perryman & Associates card is about a 1/4″ shorter than a standard card. The thought behind this is that it will be placed first in a stack of cards when people sort their cards. I’m not convinced but I do see how that would be a natural instinct.

Pros: Nice overall style – crisp, clean font choices and good use of white space.
Good use of the back of the card.

Cons: Might be a bit too busy on the front.
Elaine and I questioned putting the Sage Authorized Business Partner stamp on the card.

Recommendations:
Nothing specific here except maybe remove the Sage logo.
We also thought it would be good to put the Talking Logo value message on the card – possibly on the back – but there is already a lot there.

BTW – my opinion is that the marketing materials done by Perryman are overall pretty top-notch – crisp, clean and great calls to action. Check them out here.

Azamba Consulting Group

Pros: The QR code on the back is interesting and unique.
Good use of white space and fonts.

Cons: Too busy – too much going on on the front.
“The Leading SageCRM Solution Provider” is generic and doesn’t speak to value.
Typo on the back of the card – ugh [Thanks to Elizabeth for spotting it!].

Recommendations:
Kill the Blog, Twitter and LinkedIn information on the front.
Change the tagline to our Talking Logo.
Change the QR code to point to a page with all the links.

A general recommendation to the class was to use the back of the card well. The three of us seemed to be in the minority on that issue as we all had done so while the rest of the class did not.

I hope the above was useful. Grab your business card and take a look. What can you improve?

And … to be even more effective, find a business associate and swap cards and share thoughts.

Huge thanks to Elizabeth for providing the photos of the business cards!