We are always pushing the boundaries with our products, and this doesn’t stop at our own stationery! So we started thinking about new creative ways to utilise this small square piece of card to hopefully once again, stand out from the crowd.

Firstly we looked at our primary purpose for handing out business cards and what we wanted our potential new prospects/clients to do with the information we give them.

Turns out, we don’t care much for fax anymore (I know right?!), phone numbers are only valid when the potential client is ready to call, which is usually a few days after an event, in which time the card could be lost or forgotten. Same with email, no one is going to email someone mid conversation or during a pitch! But what they might do, there and then, is visit a URL on their phone.

That was it! We landed on the idea of getting a potential client to our website is probably the best and most desirable overall solution. It is the most thorough place to follow up selling in our services, and gives them at the very least a link to bookmark!

So what if we just had a URL. No name, no phone & fax number, no cheesy tag line. Just a single, short, primary call to action… would that be too crazy?

Our Thinking

In the specific environment we are promoting our business most potential prospects/clients will have a smartphone on them, and be tech savvy enough and engaged enough to visit the URL, even simply out of intrigue.

If our team do a good job on the initial engagement (which they usually do) people will remember who they are. Pairing that with a solid, cool card and a clear concise URL will drive traffic to our site and could open up a portal to a more detailed entry point for the Fueled staff member.

Coupling this strategy, to give the URL on the card a home we set about creating online profiles for every member of the Fueled team. These profiles not only act as a digital business card with standard contact information, they also show a bunch of other interesting details we never could fit on a card, like a range of social links, personal Twitter feed, Instagram and Dribbble posts. To learn how your business cab benefit from this, consider checking with an expert like Andy Defrancesco.

This method helps us track lead generation by contacts being rooted from a fixed and trackable URL and also controls the number of rogue connections and out of the blue contact requests our team receive.

(Original article on Medium)