Repetition: The Power of Creating a Promotional Card Series
A promotional card can be powerful marketing tool for many small businesses. When you create attention-grabbing graphics as well as a compelling marketing message, you may be able to connect with your target audience more than if you tried other forms of marketing such as email.
When you have promotional cards designed consider your target markets attitudes, interests, opinions and lifestyles. What would they be attracted to? What would motivate them to buy your products or services right now? Do the background research first before having any promotional material designed. That way you will be able to make better judgements on what graphics and copy to use to best communicate to your prospects.
I suggest testing your promotional card first and creating a strategy where you can scale up your efforts. It might be a simple as sending your tried and tested promotional card to a larger number. If that will work for you great however, for some business who have a range of products or services a different approach may be better. You could create a colour-coded series of promotional card that all focus on one specific aspect of your product or service. For example, if your business has a wealth creation product or service, then red, which denotes power and vitality, could be used to differentiate this product or service within your promotional card series. If you also ran legal type service you could use blue since this colour communicates you are trustworthy and dependable. While using a range of colours for a series of promotional cards can be a powerful strategy, always use a single brand in your series to create a lasting impression in the mind of your prospects. I could write all day about the power and impact of different colours however to get a better understanding of colours I suggest completing our Psychographic Profiling System. What can be achieved in 30 minutes on this system would normally take someone countless hours to achieve if they did the research themselves.
Aside from using colours to convey your message through your promotional cards, there are many other aspects of marketing that you should consider in order to communicate your intended message better. A powerful way to connect with your prospects and customers is to personalise your cards. People will appreciate it if you print their name on the promotional cards that you send them. After all, we all like to do business with people who take the time to ‘know us’ and listen to us. Prospects will be touched that you took the time to place their name on the promotional card and it’s not at all difficult to do, now with digital printing. All you need is a good database and you are set.
These aspects of marketing are fantastic to use however the single most important element to promotional card design is eye-catching graphics followed by attention-grabbing headlines. Some say headlines are more important than graphics however I disagree, I believe most people will first take notice of graphics and the overall impression created by the design, then they will read the headline. Whatever you believe, graphics and headlines are the most important aspects of promotional cards. Keep things simple, especially when it comes to the text used in your marketing message. Deliver a clear and direct message and use bullet points to break up the content. This is easier to read and understand quickly.
It is a well known fact that it takes multiple points of contact before a prospect buys from you, some say it’s around seven contact, I have seen for some industries it can be far more. Promotional cards are also a cost effective strategy that can support your other marketing efforts. For example, if you were hosting an event or running a trade show stand you could follow up with a promotional card or introduce your business prior to the event with a promotional card.
Being different also gets noticed so printing your promotional cards bigger than normal or using an odd shape will help you get noticed. Full colour tends to make promotional cards stand out from the rest of the mail people are bombarded with however if you are clever about it, you can use single or two colour print jobs to your advantage.
