What does your business card say about your business? It doesn’t matter whether you are part of a big company or if you are entrepreneur working from a home office there is no excuse for a “cheap” or ineffective business card. While you are the first impression for your business, your card may be the first example of something you deliver to prospect. Is your card congruent with the level/quality service you offer?

What do I mean by a cheap card? First, is it professionally printed. Just because the office supply store sells perforated business card paper doesn’t mean that you should be printing your business cards on your office printer! And speaking of paper, there is no reason to be using a flimsy card stock that is barely thicker than regular paper. Scratch outs? Time to get new cards. Yes, it is frustrating to throw away hundreds of cards, but scratch outs aren’t professional. (If your business information is not rock solid, order smaller quantities of cards. Catch Fire Marketing will print as few as 250 cards.)

Is your card effective? By that I mean is the information prioritized correctly. Think for a second why you give someone your business card? Is it so they can write you a letter? Send you a Fax? No, probably not…it is so that they can contact you. So your card’s design needs to be laid out so that the most important information is going to be the easiest for the person to find. Your business logo, being a graphic, is naturally going to be the first thing that will be seen. Is your name the next most prominent thing? How about your phone number or email address? These are the two most likely ways a person is going to reach you (exception retail businesses). Tertiary information like address and fax should have the lowest priority for most businesses (yes there are exceptions to this rule).

For Catch Fire Marketing, our standard business cards are full color, printed on 14 pt card stock (this is one or two paper upgrades from the common stock used by most printers). We also offer free UV coating on our cards as an extra value to our clients.  Design is important, so we value priced the initial custom business card designs at $25 in almost all cases. Printing cards shouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg. And you don’t need to settle for dealing with a faceless website and stock templates! We have had clients come to us who used spend in excess of $150 for 1,000 business cards.  We gave them a better designed, and often better quality card saving them 50% or more. At Catch Fire Marketing printing on 14 pt stock cards run $29.95/$39.95/$59.95 for 250, 500, and 1,000 business cards respectively. So in short, there’s no excuse for not having great looking business cards.