A Business Card as Creative Content Marketing Tool
Web Content Strategist from Capetown Makes a Memorable Front and Back Impression
A business card is quite literally a small thing. But here’s one that made a big impression on me as a surprising example of content marketing.
The card’s owner/creator, Kerry-Anne Gilowey, participated in a workshop with me at the 2010 Content Strategy Forum. She impressed me as being memorably smart, creative, and witty. Quite separately, I found her card positively memorable, too. And, I would have done even if I had never met her in person.
Here’s why:
On the front—very nice but not the killer side
- She leads off with her content marketing/social media credentials. I see those even before I see her phone number
- She asks us to take action, e.g., find me…follow me…call me.
- She doesn’t bother with an address that would have taken up communications space–and these days, who cares?
- Her sunshine graphic reflects her company name nicely but not obtrusively.
On the back—here’s the especially memorable creative side of the card
- She provides a category cloud that shows us at a glance what she does and the relative weight she gives to each element
- We can grasp almost instantly what she does that can help us.
- She doesn’t have to say that she does these things. We just know.
- It’s a creative approach so we spot her creativity.
- It’s web-related so we also figure that she intuitively gets the whole web thing.
I’m sure that there are plenty of wonderfully effective business cards out in the world. But of the dozen+, I collected at the Forum, only Kerry-Anne’s communicated so much, so memorably. In fact, it’s the only one I could have described from memory.
When it comes to your content marketing strategy, even your business cards can make a difference.
Trackbacks [0]
There are no trackbacks.
Post Comment
Fields marked with * are required.
Comments [4]
I had no idea Kerrie-Anne had such cards. Very nice, both her cards and your coverage of them, Newt.
It reminds me of another person who had some nice cards at CS Forum 10 (a set of eight cards, in fact). There is a strong communication-through-creativity aspect to them, which might be a little different than what you’re getting at in this article, but I do like them a lot and which I had the whole set…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yumester_pics/sets/72157623778140973/
I love that ‘content’ is now stretching to include the smallest transactional experience. It would be interesting to hear what the folks in the ‘I don’t carry business cards’ camp have to say about this.
I definitely think more work could be done with business cards. If we consider them a gift to be shared a la “The Gift” and “Linchpin”then the lowly business card can evolve into quite a useful and hopefully novel piece of conversation.
The tag-cloud keywords at the back is nice but i think the front design and layout cam still be improved. Not a big fan of the sun-design on the lower left side of the business card.
Jeniffer,
I’m not a design expert. I just loved the unique and memorable approach.
BTW, speaking of design, on your site, the owners/company is a complete mystery. Web visitors really like to know who’s behind a site or a company.