For some reason, I tend to be fascinated with other people’s business cards. I love seeing how creative people can be in such a small amount of space with such a specific purpose. I never seem to be happy enough with the business cards I design for myself and am considering a redo sometime soon. I thought I’d share one of the websites I came across that gives some amazing examples of simple, stunning, and memorable business card designs that should give anyone a creative kick in the pants.
36 Cool Business Cards You Should’ve Seen
This is the first post in a multi-part series on low-cost, high-return methods of hyper-local advertising.
Call it targeted advertising. Call it audience demographics. I call it hyper-local. One of the nice side-effects of this rush to create (and join) a myriad of social networks is all the user meta information that is being collected. The very premise behind most social (and even professional) online networks is connecting you with others like you. This, inherently, requires the user give up some key information about themselves. Seemingly innocent bits of descriptive data that marketers big and small drool over such as where you live, what college you went to, what professional industry you’re in, or even what kinds of things do you look for online. Increasingly, these bits of info are being used to sell hyper-local advertising opportunities to… anyone.
Sure, demographics-based marketing has been around forever. The key trend happening today is the combination of companies amassing this data in large quantities and then turning around and selling targeted advertising opportunities a la carte. Let my first example show you what I’m talking about.
Example 1: Facebook
With 39 million active users, Facebook has the potential to provide a wide range of options when it comes to advertising. If you visit their advertising section take a look at “Flyers.” Flyers are small ads that appear on the side of the page for users of Facebook. Facebook refers to them as self-serve advertising because you can put together a highly targeted ad in relatively short order. You can isolate your campaign by network (such as a specific city or university), and also by demographic data such as gender, age, undergraduate, graduate, etc.
What makes this advertising method so useful is the price point and the low barrier of entry. In a matter of minutes, I can put together a highly targeted ad and pay as little as $5.00 to distribute my electronic flyer to 2,500 Facebook users. Or, you can go much bigger and pay $200 for 100,000 flyer impressions per day. Facebook now offers a pay-per-click model that lets you set a daily budget and a top amount you’re willing to pay per click.
Example 2: StumbleUpon
Even at 1/10th the size of Facebook, StumbleUpon has a similar targeting scheme that allows you to really zoom in on the types of users that you want to advertise to. Their advertisers page gives you access to all the categories of pages that their users “stumble” through. They also tell you how many thousands of users are active in each category, which is helpful in trying to decide where to focus your campaign. Once you select a category, you can then further drill down and select users by country, state, and even a limited list of major cities. You can go one step further by specifying a gender.
You simply fund your account with as little as $5 and you can begin your campaign. StumbleUpon will automatically insert your specified URL into their user’s stumbles in the category you selected. An additional feature of StumbleUpon is access to how users have rated your site (thumbs up or thumbs down). This is great for a couple reasons. First, it allows you to better judge how effective your landing page is. Also, if your site gets enough thumb’s up, it can potentially make it into heavy rotation in the normal StumbleUpon system (for free).
Next time, we’ll look at a couple other hyper-local advertising methods and review some tips on maximizing the effectiveness of your campaign.
This post started out as a comment on Douglas Karr’s post about Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku. After 3 paragraphs in his comment box, I decided I’d just make a blog post out of it. So, go read his post and then read mine. 
I’ll give you three reasons why marketers aren’t all over Twitter and Jaiku (yet).
- Too busy to experiment with a new service
- The rules keep changing
- What the heck is a Twitter?
Too busy doing their jobs
I’m sure you’re already saying, “but, that is their job!” Sure it is, but so is everything else. I don’t work for an “internet” company, but we do have a rather large web presence, pull millions of pageviews per month, and have both marketing and web staff. We even sell things online (more and more each year). But while our marketing manager has probably heard of Twitter, she probably hasn’t thought about using it to promote our products or services.
Why? Because she’s too busy with all the other traditional and non-traditional marketing work that has to get done (including, but not limited to: meeting ridiculous deadlines imposed by people with no true sense of the work that goes into marketing with a budget that is almost non-existent). There is already a long list of other things that need to be done in the off chance she has a little extra time. Woot seems like a company that should already be exploring this. However, a major airline company? I bet they are under enormous pressure to perform and while micro-blogging could possibly be a huge success, they probably have a limited amount of time they can spend on exploratory projects.
The rules keep changing
Another major conflict is marketers trying to keep up with all the rules that keep changing when it comes to online marketing. There are probably lots of marketers that are just now coming into fully realizing the potential of RSS feeds and blogging, and likely feel their content should be served from their website. In fact, they probably have pressure from their superiors to increase traffic to their site. The idea of pushing that feed-like content off to some new service that probably seems redundant to what they are already capable of likely doesn’t make sense.
I can hear the IT department now: “Why? We already provide hundreds of feeds for that stuff that anyone can access.”
What the heck is a Twitter?
Twitter and Jaiku are not what I would consider mainstream. Most marketers have probably never heard of it (or have, but don’t fully understand what it is). In a larger sense, I’m not convinced people that use Twitter know exactly what it is, or what it could be. And that isn’t a bad thing, it’s actually a very good, interesting, and even exciting thing. But while that can be a source of creativity and innovation for those on the bleeding edge, it can also be a source of confusion and obscurity for others.
Parting thoughts
In case you missed it, I agree that these two services could be a goldmine for a savvy marketer. I just believe that most marketers (savvy or not) are too busy doing their jobs to do their jobs (if that makes sense). Marketers in smaller, more web-based companies are in a much better position to recognize the potential of such emerging web trends and take advantage.
I feel like marketing departments should start hiring for a new position called “Exploratory Marketing Specialist.” This person would ignore traditional marketing techniques (and leave it to other staff) and focus on finding new avenues such as Twitter/Jaiku to market their products (and it wouldn’t have to be limited to online marketing). This might be hit-or-miss, but I bet the “hits” would more than justify the extra position in the long run.
I’m not sure how they manage to afford sending such cool direct mail marketing pieces to small time operations such as myself, but Veer always seems to send me stuff I don’t want to pitch in the trash. I realize that’s the point–it’s just an expensive one.
Yesterday, I received a puzzle in the mail from Veer. Of course, like most, I get excited when I see a box in my mailbox. Even though it still wasn’t my Snap t-shirts, I was still happy to have received such a unique marketing piece. As you can see below, the box has a fun and interesting design–enough to grab and keep my attention.
They added a nice hook to the whole deal. There is a discount code visible once you put the puzzle together. I happen to have a great interest in creative marketing techniques and, while not everyone’s cup of tea, I find this one to be rather compelling. I’ve yet to actually buy anything from Veer. They have some t-shirts and other swag in their online store that I wouldn’t mind having (they tend to be expensive). So, a discount code might be what gets me to purchase something.
I don’t exactly have lots of free time to put a puzzle together, but I’m sure Veer knows this, so perhaps the discount is a decent one given the time commitment of putting together a 500 piece puzzle. I’m sure curiosity will get the best of me and I’ll dump this thing out on my desk and work at it while I’m on the phone. I’ll update this post if I ever put it together and let you know what kind of discount they gave.
