As much as what we know is important, who we know in business can be far more important. Business networking is an essential tool in the toolkit of every successful solopreneur or salesperson for any business, providing the ultimate leverage to meet the right people and grow your network.
Every minute you participate in a business networking activity, you are in a competition. You may compete with a direct competitor or even with a business totally unrelated to your business. The competition you face is for the time and attention of a prospective client or referral partner.
If you can win their time, their attention and their interest, you now have a chance to earn trust and build a potential business relationship. But the minute their interest and attention fades, you will no longer get a moment of their time.
How do you win the competition with each person you meet? It starts by having an edge - something that differentiates you from the crowd of “buy from me” networkers. One great way to gain that edge is with a digital business card.
Let’s examine 7 ways digital business cards can power up your business networking:
1. Instant Sharing
Think about the experience of exchanging a paper business card. Your new connection’s paper business card ends up in your pocket. Hopefully you follow up quickly when you get back to your home of office.
But what happened with your business card? Yes, it found its way to your prospect’s pocket too. But far too often, it found its’ way to the trash when they emptied their pockets, as 88% of business cards do within a week of being exchanged.
Speed of Modern Networking
Business networking today moves today at ludicrous speed. Attend a tradeshow or networking event and you’ll quickly see the focus on quantity rather than quality. Attend a recurring networking event and you will be lucky to get in your 30-second elevator speech before you are asked to pass the microphone.
You can’t fight the need for speed in business networking. The best strategy is to embrace it with an attention getting first impression. A digital business card is your best opportunity to instantly break your prospect’s preoccupation and separate yourself from your competition. With no paper business card to toss in the trash, you lock yourself in for follow-up on their smartphone. How’s that for fast?
QR Codes: The Bridge Between Physical and Digital
Although some digital business cards provide multiple ways to connect with prospects in your business networking, digital business cards like mTap provide QR codes on physical digital business cards as well as a scannable image your phone.
QR codes provide powerful links to your digital profile and can be shared in your email signature on social media and even on printed literature. mTap even provides for sharing your digital profile when you have no connection to the internet with their offline QR codes. Now you can even connect with your fellow travelers at 37,000 feet!
Overcoming Geographical Barriers
Although we often think about business networking as a high-touch, face-to-face activity, we have all learned through the pandemic to network online. Although are no geographic barriers to meeting new connections online, you are still competing for their time, interest and attention.
Once again, you want to make a great first impression while engaging at the accelerated speed of an online event. Your digital business card is the missing link to connect you and your business with other business professionals either across town or around the world.
2. Increased Engagement
You have met someone new and made a favorable first impression. How will you quickly seize the opportunity and deepen your connection without scaring them away?
Your digital business card is the key to drive engagement with your new connections. You aren’t limited to sharing only your name, logo, email address and phone number with your paper business card. Now you can connect and share your best high impact digital assets.
Multimedia Elements: Beyond Text
The days of sending a long letter describing the features and benefits of your products and services are long gone. Even a beautiful 4-color brochure often fails to engage prospects.
What does work? Although marketers have many weapons in their arsenal, the easy answer is video. Video engages all of your prospects’s sense and when done well can attract their attention, interest, desire and action.
What’s the role of your digital business card? Delivering your powerful video message to your prospect directly on their phone to watch instantly.
Interactive Features to Capture Interest
There is much more you can do with digital business cards and it is as simple as choosing the most vital links to share. You can easily share links to your website, social media and other multimedia presentation.
But wait, there’s more. You can share links to schedule time with you on your calendar and even share payment links and much, much more with your digital business card.
Tailored Content for Targeted Audiences
Once you have added all of your digital assets to your digital business card, now you can share specific assets with different prospects. With a digital business card, you don’t need to be a one truck pony who only serves your best content one way. Because now you can share the right content with the right person at the right time!
3. Real-time Tracking
There is an old saying that is very relevant in business networking - what gets measured gets done. Knowing your score is as important in business networking as it can be in sports.
You should demand your digital business card platform keeps score of your most important business networking activities, counting your contacts, leads and conversions over various periods of time, as well as other key statistics on your effectiveness.
Analytics as a Networking Tool
Analytics is simply information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. You will start by capturing relevant business networking data. But the value will be analyzing that data, gaining insights and taking action to improve your scores.
Predicting Client Interests
An interesting aspect of digital business cards is the power they give you to predict your client interests. How do you do that? You examine the digital assets that engage their interests and the digital assets that fail to engage their interests. Use what works and discard the rest.
Measuring Networking ROI
Every business networking event and activity has a cost associated with it - your time. You want to examine the results you achieve from each event and measure the return on investment of your very valuable time. Again, do what works and stop burning time on business networking activities that fail to produce results.
4. Organized Database Management
With paper business cards, it is very easy to lose control of your data. How often have you dug through a shoebox of business cards to find someone you need to connect with, but can’t quite remember their contact information?
With a digital business card, you can easily organize and manage all of your prospect contact information. Throw those shoeboxes in the trash, but make sure you capture all of the information on those old business cards first!
Instant Sync with CRMs
If you are utilizing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System, your digital business card platform should instantly synchronize all the information you collect. This saves you time in data entry and accelerates your opportunity to convert contacts to leads and leads to customers.
Categorization and Contact Segmentation
Invest time categorizing and segmenting your contact information. You won’t be able to measure your return on investment of specific business networking activities unless you properly define and label them in your digital business card platform.
Streamlining Follow-up Strategies
One of the most powerful aspects of a digital business card platform is how they help you follow-up. With mTap digital business cards, you can instantly send a customized follow-up email and text message as soon as you capture prospect information.
5. Always Updated
Does your information change over time? Of course it does! With a digital business card platform, all of your information can be updated instantly on your digital profile.
The Dynamic Nature of Digital Profiles
One of the most powerful aspects of a digital business card platform is not only keeping your information up to date, but how you can change the digital assets you share. All of your new contacts will have access to your most current information, but so will all of your old contacts.
Avoiding Outdated Information Pitfalls
In addition, any old and outdated information can be removed in an instant. You don’t need to worry about anyone accessing inaccurate information on your digital profile. It is gone forever by removing your links from your digital profile.
Building Trust with Accurate Details
Every connection you make in business networking is a journey to build trust. The last thing you want to do is share inaccurate information while you are working to create a relationship. With a digital business card, your information can always be accurate and upo to date.
6. Immediate Follow-ups
As mentioned above, your digital business card platform should provide for streamlined follow-up with immediate email and SMS capabilities. This enables you to lean in to the need for speed in business networking by ensuring you immediately follow-up with every contact.
Speeding Up Business Collaboration
Business people are busy and their attention can quickly drift away from you and to other areas of interest. Your ability to immediately follow-up with your contacts through your
digital business card platform increases your chances of keeping their attention and collaborating with them on business opportunities.
The Digital Nudge: Encouraging Prompt Responses
Not everyone is going to respond to your first follow-up. In fact, some studies suggest you need eight touchpoints to move a first contact closer to you in building a relationship. It may take more or less than eight digital nudges to move your contacts to a deeper relationship, but it will surely be more than one follow-up.
Reducing Time-to-Action in Business Interactions
Your time is very important in your business networking efforts. But your prospect’s time is very important too. You want to make it easy for them to interact with you quickly. A digital business card platform can do just that for you and your prospects.
7. Cost Savings
Your investment in a digital business card platform is typically less than $100 USD annually. You could spend that on a single box of business cards for a single tradeshow or large networking event.
The Hidden Costs of Traditional Networking
The biggest hidden cost in business networking is the waste of time. Every connection you make is an opportunity for your business. Every connection that you fail to follow-up with and build a relationship is a loss of time that you can never recover.
Investing in Digital Tools for Better ROI
As you begin to use your digital business card, you will quickly see opportunities to improve your digital assets. Instead of sharing a link to your website, you may create landing pages with more relevant and powerful information. As we discussed previously, you will want to use video to drive even greater returns on your investment.
Reallocating Budgets for Enhanced Business Growth
You are spending money today on paper business cards and business networking events. A digital business card is simply a better and smarter way to grow your business. Best of all, you will spend less with even greater results.
Which digital business card should you choose?
There are many choices for digital business cards. You will want to ensure your digital business card platform is designed to support all of these functions:
● Data & Access Security
● Network Online and Offline
● Centralized Control of Your Brand
● One Dashboard with Full Prospecting Analytics
● Monitor Your Team’s Prospecting Performance
● Fast, Simple, Easy Team Member Digital Profile Setup
● Instant, Accurate Prospect Data Capture to Your CRM
Digital business cards can immediately power up your business networking. Get started reaping the benefits of instant sharing, increased engagement, real time tracking, organized data management, staging always up to date, immediate follow-up and costs savings today.
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