[Photo Sparks] Marketing tips for startups: 30 cool business cards!

In the earlier 25 posts, we brought you creative photographs from an art fair, music festival, telecom expo, art museum, mobile showcase, math museum, social hackathon, bookstore, co-working space, sensorium, lantern festival, outdoor ads, startup roadshow, computer museum, startup T-shirts, Diwali rangoli and ecopreneurs. In this photo essay, we showcase examples of effective marketing for startups through cool business cards! Make YourStory’s PhotoSparks your regular source of photographs that celebrate creativity and innovation!

Your product is your best marketing tool, of course, and your employees are the best brand ambassadors. But to get discovered, you also need to stand out from the crowd when you pitch to investors, customers, partners and media – using channels such as outdoor ads, T-shirts and even your business card.

There are tons of useful online resources about what contact information to include in a business card, the kinds of fonts to use, the importance of using original artwork instead of generic clip art images, how to effectively use borders and fonts, and so on. In fact, there is even a book on best practices in designing business cards, called It's in the Cards! A good business card is memorable, attention-grabbing and informative – and can start a conversation and even seal a deal.

Affiliate names are a useful addition, and names of industry standard bodies in which you are a member. Splashy colours and funky designs make a card stand out – but plain black-and-white ‘retro’ designs can also be effective. The size and shape of the card lend themselves to lots of improvisation as well.

With a bigger budget, you can make your cards out of plastic or include holograms and embossed characters. Photographs can give the card a more personal touch, as well as social media IDs. You can even make a double-card, foldable like a mini-brochure.

From our vast and growing collection at YourStory, here are some 30 outstanding business cards of startups! (For cards with personal names and phone numbers, we contacted the owners for permission to include the card images.) For startups, every square inch of marketing space helps – some effectively use the back of their cards as well for QR codes and product features (or translated content in another language), as these examples below indicate.

So what does your business card look like?    :-)

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