If you read the Black Friday ads or ventured out shopping this weekend it was hard to miss something new this year, QR codes. Everywhere ads and online shelf tags featured a QR code to “see the toy in action” or to learn more. It’s our firm belief that QR codes are just beginning to scratch the surface of their use here in the U.S.
So as you plan your 2011 advertising materials, make sure to consider how to tie your offline marketing to your website, Facebook page or YouTube testimonial video with QR codes.
For those of you who are not sure what these are or why you would use them, QR codes, also known as “quick response” codes are 2D tags that can be scanned easily from a mobile phone to call up supporting web content. Think of them as interactive barcodes. In addition to ringing up the price of an item, QR codes can open a web page, send a text message with contact information, and more. The application of QR codes is growing: EventBrite offers QR codes on tickets to facilitate easy, paperless event registration, while apps like PortaPayments open new doors for small donations.
With QR codes, the tie in to your calls to action is instantaneous. All a user has to do is point their mobile phone at the QR code; marketers can hope the user will take the suggested action. It’s also a great way to begin tracking the effectiveness of your offline campaigns.
And for why healthcare marketers should use them, here a few ideas:
- Print Magazine: Do you create and distribute a print magazine to your target audience? If so add a QR tag to each article to take the reader directly to your website to learn more about a condition or doctor.
- New Mover Campaign: If you send out new mover information, add a QR tag to their information that takes them to a personalized webpage to begin the process of selecting a doctor or learning more about you.
- Billboards: Do you purchase boards at airports, malls, bus stations or any other place people are waiting? If so, it’s a perfect spot to add a QR tag to begin an interactive exchange.
Last, but not least, the best thing about QR tags is that they are FREE and easy to implement. The cost will be for those who wait and end up having to reprint all those materials to add the QR tags. So plan ahead and begin engaging with your patients and future employees in a whole new way.
We have been testing the use of QR codes to help people connect to online information resources we make available. What is really cool is that you can append “query strings” to the end of the URL that identify where the QR code was posted, and then the target website can log that information in a database. Then you can really see which QR codes are the most successful in bringing traffic to the target pages. Few methods of marketing have that level of trackability. So for example, you could tell how many people used the QR code published in a magazine ad, verses on business cards, verses on a sign, verses on lobby TV, etc. To the extent that you put QR codes on something like business cards, you could tell who’s business card each visitor used. It truly offers some exciting opportunities.
Thank you for the post. I found it quite informative.