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Make a killer first impression with a QR code-enabled business card.
If you’re like most successful sales professionals, when you meet a new prospect, you offer them a business card. It’s the first gift you give them as a professional – a small, rectangular piece of paper that succinctly provides your contact information. But it’s more than that – it’s the first tangible item most prospects receive that represents your professional identity.
Business cards are a time-honored tradition, and the rise of digital communications doesn’t mean you should stop using them, because they do have real value. But new digital tools should prompt you to rethink the professional identity contained on the card beyond simply adding an email address or website link.
These days, with about half of all Google searches originating from a mobile device, you need to think about building a bridge from your offline to your mobile identity, and your business card can help you do just that. By printing a QR code on your business card, you can leverage new mobile technology to share your online identity in a format optimized for mobile viewing – and take advantage of tools to track and update your online information.
QR codes are small, two-dimensional barcodes that contain digital data to direct people who scan it with a smartphone or tablet device to online information. Here’s how QR codes can work for you:
- Enable wireless contact information exchange – the prospect scans your QR code with a smartphone or tablet, gaining instant access to a vCard you can easily set up.
- Provide access to hand-picked online data – you can direct prospects to curated bios, links, professional portfolios, videos, customer testimonials and more online.
- Showcase common connections – you can highlight common connections on LinkedIn and Facebook to quickly build rapport and credibility.
- Deliver geo-tracking capabilities and automatic text/email alerts – you can find out when prospects scan your business card’s QR code in real time to measure impact.
A business card with a QR code also offers a unique branding opportunity. By working with a printer who specializes in QR codes on business cards, you can ensure a consistent brand identity across offline and online materials. QR codes also offer a personal branding opportunity: A QR code printed on a business card is still a relative novelty, and it brands the user as tech-savvy. In this way, it can serve as a shot of virtual Botox for older sales professionals in a world that increasingly values technology expertise across all business sectors.
The right QR code strategy can enable sales professionals to easily create, administer, track and update their online identities on mobile platforms and access support across multiple users and accounts. It’s also important to work with a reputable printer to generate new QR code-enabled business cards quickly and accurately.
Business cards are a great way to make a killer first impression, but today, most prospects will go online to find out more about you, and chances are good that they’ll use a smartphone or a tablet to do a search. A business card with a QR code gives them a fast and easy way to find relevant professional information – and gives you new control of your online identity.
By establishing a mobile-optimized online identity and directing prospects to your hand-picked information via a QR code printed on a business card, you can build relationships – and close deals – more quickly while making a great first impression.
If you’d like to speak with us about how you or your sales team can get started with your mobile business cards, feel free to call us at 1-866-380-3400 x110. Of course you can just scan the QR code on my business card:
About the Author
James Alexander is founder and CEO of Vizibility Inc., the world’s first mobile business card platform for small, medium and large organizations. A serial technology entrepreneur, James was involved in two other successful startups and served as a product management executive at Adobe Systems prior to founding Vizibility. Google James at viz.me/james. Learn more about the company and its online identity management solutions at www.vizibility.com.
