Atlantic Linux Blog

Marketing 102 – Your business card

So, your business card. Should you bother? I mean, we’re all on the internet now, right? Yes, we mostly are and depending on your audience – the venerable business card may not be as important as it once was but I think it’s still important. At the very least, it’s all your contact details on a small, easy to carry piece of paper. At best, it’s a distinctive piece of marketing material which conveys to customers and potential customers that you are the right person to fix their problem (or prevent their problem from ever happening).

If you’re going to traditional networking events – if you’re not passing out business cards you’re wasting your time – unless you have a really impressive pitch, amazing presence and a really easy to remember web address, no one is going to remember how to contact you the following day, never mind in a few weeks or months (I know I’ve certainly dug through my collection of business cards on a few occasions, knowing I met someone that provided a useful service in the past but whose contact details escaped me).

So we’ve established that you need a business card. Now, what to put on it? At a minimum, you want your name, title, address, email and phone. After that, space permitting, the sky is the limit – most people will include their company logo (although traditional businesses like solicitors and doctors usually don’t), their website address, maybe their blog address, their skype username, maybe their twitter address and depending on their audience – maybe one or more of the social networking site address (linkedin, facebook, and so on). For a business audience, linkedin is probably the most useful – but certainly if you’re audience is web 2.0 then you may want to consider one or more of the others. Remember, there is a fine line between too much info and too little. Personally I like a minimalist, uncluttered business card but each to their own.

Once you’ve figured out what to put on your card – the next step is to design your card. If you have the budget, of course you can get someone to design your card. Assuming you’re an SME startup, I’m not sure it’s the best use of your marketing budget. It’s hard to make a mess of designing a business card. For inspiration, take a look at some business cards you’ve received from others. There are a few standard patterns. If you don’t have any (cmon, get out there and get networking!) – Wikipedia’s page on business cards will give you some examples. Depending on who you use to print your card, they may also provide some basic design tools and templates which you can use. As with all things marketing, you can tweak this over time so don’t agonise over it too much.

The last question relating to design is what to put on the back of your card. Some people choose to leave this blank and there is nothing wrong with this. Others put an image (maybe a bigger version of their logo) and either their company tagline or the website url again. Of course the sky is the limit here and you can do all sorts of unique and visually striking things with your card. The problem with some of these is that they will dramatically increase your costs. So if you’re in the business of graphic design, it may make sense to spend here, otherwise something less expensive is probably the right choice. For Atlantic Linux, I decided to put a QR Code (a type of two-dimensional bar code that some mobile phones can read) including the company website URL on the back – it’s a little bit different and compliments our overall technology theme.

As an company that works extensively with open source software – where it makes business sense I prefer to use open source tools. Designing our business cards was no exception. We use the Scribus Open Source Desktop Publishing tool to create our cards. It is extremely powerful and allows fine-grained layout of our cards. It also allows us to export the final business card in a wide range of different formats suitable for consumption by whatever company you decide to use to print your cards. As with any software tool, there is a learning curve but overall I found Scribus to be reasonably intuitive and very powerful. A new release (1.3.5) is available now so it is a good time to check it out. You can of course use a graphics package or a word processor (such as OpenOffice) and they will work fine – but subsequently editing the design or moving items around may prove more difficult (word processors aren’t really designed for fine-grained layout of various elements).

So you have your card designed and developed and you’re ready to print it. In Ireland at least, this is more expensive than it should be especially for low volumes of cards. You can go to a traditional printers but they’re normally geared up to printing a few hundred or thousand cards in a run and price accordingly. If you have a need for that many cards and shop around for a few quotes you’ll get an ok price. The problem is, for a small business, unless you’re doing lots and lots of networking, you probably won’t use a few thousand cards in a year or two. In practice, you’ll want to change your card before then – either because you’re business has changed in some way (maybe moved to bigger offices!) or because you want to modify your design in some way.

I took to the Internet to see if there were any alternatives. I was looking for a company that would be willing to produce lower volumes of cards, accepting that the costs per card would be higher (we’re not talking hundreds of euros here but if you’re a startup, you should be aggressively focusing on all costs). I found two suitable companies, Smileprint and Moo.com. After looking at both sites, I eventually decided to go with Moo.com – they provide more options for the kind of card and layout you want and work out cheaper on smaller volumes of cards (I decided to only go with a very small amount of cards so I have the option of changing them more frequently).

The end result –

business card (front)

and

business card (back)

One other thing to note – for printing purposes, make sure you use a large DPI when you are creating your business card files, DTP packages usually offer better control of this than word processors (whose output is normally intended for screens, not printers). Also, printers usually prefer documents that use a CMYK colour model rather than RGB.  I might revisit these in a future posting if there is interest (although Google should turn up lots of info on these and your chosen printer will probably provide specific guidelines also).

Tags: marketing

Marketing 101 – Your business website

I’m probably the last guy in the world who should be blogging about sales and marketing, I’m a techie after all (and like most techies, for a long time, I thought if you did good technology the customers would follow without any persuasion required). But maybe some of what I say will resonate with other techies out there more than if it comes from a sales and marketing guy. This blog started out as Marketing 102 – Business cards but as I wrote the introductory paragraph I started talking a little about the preceeding step of preparing your business website and, well, here we are.

I’ll get back to the business cards in a later post including some recommendations for who to use to print a small volume of nicely finished cards and what you should put on the cards.

I guess for a technology company (large or small), I figure your first step in marketing should be putting together a website for your business, possibly accompanied by a blog (if you have the time and energy to write regularly and you have something useful to say). At a minimum, your website should answer the following questions,

• Who
• What
• Why

The who involves telling the customer a little about you, your background as well as providing the obvious such as contact details (email, phone and physical address) and maybe some details on what your company’s mission is.

The what involves telling the customer what you actually do. When you start on this, if you’re a techie, you’ll enter a brief fugue state where you start spewing technical terms and concepts that only other level 7 nerds will understand (hey it’s ok, I’m one too, I understand). Once you get over this, step back, and translate these terms into plain english that a (non-technical) customer can understand (so, while Atlantic Linux can deploy a large-scale event management framework utilising SNMP, IPMI and active and passive agents to quantify the availability of your enterprise infrastructure – in plain english we do remote system monitoring or even Linux systems support).

The why is the little bit about why customers should be talking to you instead of the company down the road for the services they require. This is similar to what you do but more about the customer than you. It can be summed up in three words,

Benefits, not features

So, rather than telling the customer about your 20 years of experience with Linux, tell them about how that 20 years of experience means that you’ve seen all the things that can go wrong in their systems and you know how to fix them. Rather than talking about how you’ve used 15 different Linux distributions on 10 different types of computer, tell the customer about how you have enough knowledge of Linux distributions to know which one will suit their needs (obviously, if you’re a software developer or a Windows consultant then you might want to talk about software development or Windows rather than Linux but you get the idea).

Putting a good website together is a long, painstaking process and will involve frequent rewrites and pruning (I reckon it’s a good sign if you find yourself taking stuff out rather than putting stuff in). We’re still working on our one but I think we’re getting close now (for the last year or so :).

Tags: business, marketing, sales

No power? No problem!

Came across this nice story of someone living off of the grid in Scotland while still running a pretty well serviced network. I’d love to see what an equivalent Windows Server based environment would cost in terms of power.

The author makes a good point that what some people chose to view as a disadvantage of open source based systems – that you can choose many different components for an open source system and that you can configure them in a myriad of ways – is, for at least some environments, very much an advantage. I tend to agree. While I like to create homogenous, documented environments for my customers – I do tailor each of those environments to my customers’ requirements – rather than trying to change their processes and workflows to suit the software (an all too common problem which occurs when deploying entirely proprietary systems).

Tags: linux, low power, off grid