| HN Mirror

> trade shows, conferences, introduction meetings, business mixers or meet snd greets

Alright, sure. I will admit that this is the "obvious"-at-first-glance use for business cards. I thought this way myself, until the rubber hit the road.

I'm a weird entrepreneur/founder person. And I do attend industry conferences myself. And the first time I went to one, I did get business cards printed, expecting to need to use them.

At that first conference, when it was just me and my cofounder, no employees yet — my company didn't bother to get a booth at that conference. Instead, since we were in a B2B positioning, and the people with the booths at the conference were our potential customers, we just walked around talking to them, trying to hook them as customers in between their (non-applicable) attempts to hook us as customers.

But you know what? Despite the high levels of engagement and "huh, that's a great idea, I bet we could use that" — there was zero measurable impact from the "handshake outreach marketing" we did at that conference. Nobody ever funneled in having mentioned meeting us at that conference (despite us handing out at least 500 cards between the two of us); nor did anyone sign up mentioning that one of their employees told them about us due to them hearing about us from the conference.

Why? If I had to guess, it's because the people we were talking to at these trade shows fell into one of two buckets:

• early-stage businesses / one-man shops like us — where we were talking directly to the founders at the booth, but where the founders weren't yet at the stage where they had money to spend on services like ours, instead having to do everything that they could themselves to scrape by.

• salespeople sent to these conferences by larger companies: people who had selling dealflow authority within their company; but who had no buying dealflow authority — or even buying proposal authority — within their companies. (And I do understand that; I've found over the years that our own salespeople have been sometimes a bit too easily swayed by good rhetoric, "crying wolf" with breathless excitement over potential partnerships that are on flimsy ground business/product/engineering-wise. Salespeople are people with an ear for a good pitch — which is what lets them create a good pitch themselves; but it also means that a pitch with good structure can excite them, even without something meaningful behind it. Like an artist being excited by post-modern art with no underlying message.)

Which together add up to the conclusion that, at least for us... trade-shows just weren't a good fit for selling our product. After a few more attempts, we just stopped bothering.

(We do market at trade-shows now that we have the money for it. Booths, sure, but more importantly, ads in nearby airports during the days of the conference, sponsoring talks or conference-room names, etc. That's all just to build brand recognition, not for brand value education. And that does have a measurable impact. It turns out that the people we want to reach aren't manning the booths; they're the ones who drop into the city on the day of the conference with an eye toward making big handshake deals with specific vendors. And you can only reach them passively/ambiently.)

> It is also very convenient in situations where I have performed a service for a client and I can give them a card and say keep this, if you have any problems reach out, or I can put a card in with the hardware I ship them.

I guess that's fair... but I would say that you're actually limiting yourself by using a business card in that situation.

Business cards are the way they are because — at the time of their inception — you might be meeting someone on the street where the two of you won't have any other way to carry small pieces of paper than slipping them into your wallets; so a stiff card, made of relatively-cheap card-stock, that fits well into a wallet, is an ideal form-factor.

But if you're already providing the customer a service, and want to get repeat business, and/or want to cross-sell them on your other services? Think bigger. Think brand-value education. Think brochures. (In fact, for a concrete example, think about a restaurant: until very recently, most restaurants that did a lot of phone-in orders would drop a paper menu in with every order. That's effectively a brochure; they're doing an exhaustive cross-selling on all their other offerings!)

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One final piece of evidence that supports neither side of the argument: artists/makers at craft fairs.

These are people who normally only get to do one transaction with you, and don't have time to build any brand recognition — you're probably looking at the product, not at the ad copy. They don't expect you to write down their handle, even if you buy something from them. And for a lot of product categories (e.g. soap, handbags, ceramic figures, etc) there's no good place on the product itself to place any marketing info.

The smart artists/makers at these fairs, will slip a business card (or something very much like one — I reiterate that the business-card form factor isn't necessary here) into anything you purchase from them.

The funny thing, though, is that the only thing these artist/maker business cards have on them, are the artist's/makers's social-media handles (i.e. the same ones that are printed on the banner of the booth.)

As such, interestingly enough, the artists/makers will often turn their "business card" into a good of its own — something people would want to display for its own sake — but which is given out for free with purchase of any other item. E.g. someone at an art fair who makes vinyl stickers, will make a vinyl sticker of a stylized version of their brand logo / brand mascot, with the social-media handle snuck in somewhere on it, and that will be their "card." Some people see these on the table and try to buy them!