Business Cards: Part 1

Let’s take a quick look at the most common way that magicians promote themselves. The business card.

I’ve taken an examples from the magic business card museum. I strongly recommend that you take a look at this site for more concepts.

The average business card looks like the one above. There are some points that I feel could be improved:

• “A show for every budget” This is terrible. It sounds desperate and makes you look amateur and inexperienced. We’ll get into this more in a later issue. But for now, I’ll just pose the following scenario to you.
  
  Let’s suppose there are 2 identical used car companies. One has the slogan “We stand behind the reliability of our cars”, and the other’s slogan is “Lowest price, no matter what we have to do”. Asan average consumer, where would you rather shop?
  
  


• “A legend in his own mind” Alright, I understand what’s going on here. The card is too formal for this sort of approach. This would be better with a card that establishes the magician’s character. But right now, there are too many confusing messages. Here’s an example of a card that works in this style.
  
• The card fan logo. Every magician in the world uses either a top-hat, or a fan of cards as a logo. If you put this card in a stack of other magic business cards, you couldn’t tell it apart. It would just get lost in the generic clutter.
  
  Although this is a custom logo, I suspect it’s homemade. For just $99, he could’ve hired an online company to redesign his logo and put together something that really expresses his individual style. This investment would pay for itself in just one show.
  
  


• The address and phone number line. This is ok too confusing. The address comes before the phone number. In my entire career, I’ve NEVER had a customer send me mail when they already had access to my e-mail and phone number. Get rid of the address line. There’s simply no reason for it to be there.
  
  Now that we have some empty space, I would replace it with a call-to-action. Tell them exactly what to do. Odds are, your customers have never hired a magician before. They’re really confused. They don’t know how to buy, or what questions to ask. Part of your job is to guide them through this process. Try something along the lines of “For customer testimonials, call 555-555-5555 or email ppp@pppp.com” or “To book your event, call 555-555-5555 or email ppp@pppp.com”
  
  


• Magician MICHAEL WINTERS. In any area of life, a specialist will always beat a generalist. Let’s assume you had a heart problem. Would you rather see a heart surgeon or a general practitioner? Your customers are the same way. They’ll take your business card because they have a birthday party coming up. Then, they’ll shop around for performers until they find one that specializes in children’s birthday parties. (And this specialist will usually be more expensive)
  
  Now I'm being controversial. Yes, I know it sounds counter-intuitive. I’ll explain this in more detail in another post. You’ll just have to trust me for now.
  
  


• Assuming this guy mainly does birthday parties, I would change “Tailored to your group needs” to “A fun birthday party they’ll remember forever”. And I would change “Magician Michael Winters” to “Birthday Magician Michael Winters”

So in summary, here are the changes I’d recommend for this card:

• Change “Tailored to your group needs” to “A fun birthday party they’ll remember forever”


• Get rid of “A show for every budget”


• Change the logo and slogan to something more congruent, differentiated and reflective of the performer’s individual style.


• Replace the address line with a call to action.


• “Magician Michael Winters” to “Birthday Magician Michael Winters”

This is a really deep subject, and I could elaborate for days on each of these points. For now, let’s just cut the lesson short and let you absorb some of these broad concepts. In the next lesson, we’ll look at some business cards that got it right.

Link: Magicians Links Directory