Business cards play an important role in growing a business and every tutoring business owner should make the necessary investment to print their own cards. A well-crafted business card can do wonders for a business whereas a poorly designed tutoring business card can have little impact or can actually hurt your business. This article will focus on what can go wrong when your tutoring business card is not well designed and discusses five pitfalls to avoid.
How a poorly designed card can hurt more than help
Despite its small size, a business card can speak volumes about your business. It can communicate information such as your attention to detail, focus on quality, how to contact you and what your business does. At the same time, it can communicate your lack of attention to detail, it can project an image of poor quality or and it can provide recipients with incorrect contact information. Because recipients of your tutoring business card have little other knowledge of your tutoring business it's important that your card makes a good first impression and makes it easy for them to move to the next step of contacting you for more information.
Pitfalls to Avoid:
1. Spelling and Grammatical Errors
Not making spelling and grammatical mistakes is especially important for tutoring companies since education is the focus of your business and most parents won't entrust their child's supplemental education to a company or tutor that can't even spell correctly on its business cards. So remember to always double-check for spelling and grammar before sending your card design away to be printed. If you've already printed your cards and noticed an error, it's probably a good idea to reprint your cards since giving out cards with an error can do more to harm your business than to help it.
2. Unprofessional design
You don't need to hire a professional designer, but you do need to know how to create a professional-looking card. If you have design experience, you can likely do this yourself, but if you have very limited or no design experience, you might still be able to create a professional-looking design if you keep it simple. Otherwise, you should hire a professional to design your card. An unprofessional-looking card can cause the recipient of your tutoring business card to think that your tutoring company is also unprofessional. This may not be the case, but so far the person who has received your card has very little else to go on except your business card at this point. Having a professional-looking card will help them go to the next step and contact you for more information.
3. Out-of-date contact information
The whole purpose of a business card is to provide people with an easy way to contact you for more information. If the phone number, email address or address listed on your card isn't up-to-date, you might as well hand them a blank piece of paper. Even if only one method of contact is incorrect, you should print new cards. If the recipient of your business card tries to contact you with the out-of-date information and can't reach you, you shouldn't expect them to try the other methods. Keep all of the information on your card up-to-date to maximise the number of card recipients that can reach you on the first try.
4. Missing your contact information
This should be obvious, but some people create business cards without any contact details - or maybe only a website. While some people might visit your website where they can find more information for contacting you, you should make it easy for people to contact you without going online to track down your contact information.
5. Not clearly communicating what your business does
If your business name communicates what type of service your business offers, this shouldn't be much of an issue. However, if your business name does not explicitly state that you are providing tutoring services or a particular type of tutoring services, then you should include a line about it.
By avoiding these five pitfalls above, you will drastically increase the effectiveness of your business cards. More people who receive your tutoring business card will have a favourable impression of your business and will be able to contact you for more information on the first try. This, in turn, will help you grow your business and begin building a strong tutoring brand.
Christie Van Arragon is a tutor and education enthusiast that enjoys writing about interesting topics related to tutoring and education. If you are a tutor or own a tutoring company, Christie invites you to evaluate this tutoring business software for your tutoring company.