Promote your business with conversion charts

How to easily promote your business with conversion charts

In the last century, recipe cards were a popular and creative form of promotion. Today though, people are more likely to be referring to recipes on their iPads, Kindles or iPhones when they cook.

But that doesn't mean that you can't provide a useful - and promotional - service to your clients using the same principle.

Providing a service

We all know that business cards get lost, or even thrown away. But by using charts, you can present your clients with a useful piece of information that they will keep, that promotes your business, that is inexpensive to produce and easy to create yourself.

What sort of information?

Well, today the world is divided into those who use the metric system of weights and measurements and those who don't. This means that shoe sizes, temperatures and host of other things simply don't travel well.

For the purposes of this demo, I'm using weight measurements that people would use in cooking - perfect for a catering company.

For other businesses

Many different types of business can use this idea. Consider:

• Anyone that is involved in homes & décor. When I came to live in the USA I was accustomed to measuring in centimetres and metres. Yards? Feet?
• A business in the travel industry. Shoe sizes, clothes sizes, just-about-everything sizes are different in Europe. I wear size six shoes in the UK but not in the USA
• Businesses such as auto insurers. If your clients are driving in places that use the metric system they will need to know the conversions of miles / kilometers, gallons / litres and pounds / kilos
• Any business that deals with food preparation. Have you ever seen a great recipe online but it's from an English chef who uses metric measurements?

Instructions:

1. You'll easily be able to find the conversion information you need online.

Here, I have pasted the copy directly into a drawing program.

The rectangle I have drawn is the size of a regular credit card - just the right size for your clients to keep the information handy in their wallets.

Alternatively, especially for cooking info, create a postcard size that can be attached to the fridge with a magnet.

2. Now that we have the information, it's time to tidy up the text.

One issue that invariably screams 'amateur' is when fractions are shown like this 1/2.

It's simple to change this and in the program I use, I turn to the GLYPHS pane. There you see all the characters available in that font.

I have chosen Myriad Pro here because it's very easy to read, even when small. In other programs, this facility might be called the character map.

3. There's an immediate problem however.

This font - like most - has three basic fractions but not one-third, which I need.

To overcome this I can build the fraction by hand by using the superscript 1, the slash and the subscript 3.

You can see those characters in the image on the right.

4. The next thing I'm going to do is create tables to create the uniform text.

I need two columns,one for the American weights and one for the metric weights. Including the header,I will need ten rows.

You can see in the image how I have created these. (Note that columns and rows can be added later - there's no problem if I make an error here).

5. Ah, I see another problem.

The quarter symbol used is different to the third that I created from its component parts.

Therefore, because I want a uniform look, I decided to hand-build the other fractions too.

You can see in the image below how by doing this, the fractions are uniform and neat.

Now, I cut and paste the copy into the cells of the table that I have created.

Note that I have added = symbols and that the text for the American weights are right-aligned and the metric are left aligned.

6. Now it's time to make it look good.

I used Garmond for the title and decreased the font size of the word 'conversions' to be the same length as 'weight'.

The photograph you see at the top of the page was added but note that I flipped it and cropped it to fit.

The company name and phone number was added in its own text box, again using Garmond. Note too the jiggery-pokery with the cell to create a space between 'Imperial' and 'Metric'.

This right-aligns 'Imperial' with the end of the word, rather than the = sign. Notice that the spacing to the left of the = differs - that was corrected.

7. Here is the finished product.

Jill and Jeff smile out from the card,making them seem approachable and friendly.

Anyone using this card on a regular basis would feel perfectly at ease giving Jill a call because they feel that they 'know' her - she is a familiar face.

As a refinement, these cards could be laminated or even printed on plastic to emulate a credit card.

If you imagine that they would be attached to a fridge, or other metallic object, the cards can be created on magnetic material.

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My program of choice is InDesign. The current version is pretty expensive (I use the cloud pay-by-the-month version) but previous editions are still excellent and available at low, low price. There's very little difference. See below.