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QR Codes: Your 1” Marketing Opportunity You meet people at an event and you hand them your business card – will they remember you and what you do ? How much can you say about yourself on a business card ? Is there a better way to use this small space ?
Today it is about being remembered and making sure you are in people’s systems so they can easily contact you. One incorrect digit and their call to you gets lost….one wrong character and the e-mail they send you bounces back. Now there’s a way to get noticed and to make sure your data is captured correctly. Many of you already use V-cards. These virtual business cards are set to attach to your outgoing e-mail and include all of your pertinent contact information. People who accept your V-card and automatically import their content, will create a record for you automatically in their contact management system. Today we have another way to get our information across, and it doesn’t take an e-mail to do it. The latest invention is called QR codes. You may have seen them in retail environments or other locations. As pictured below, they are 1” graphics that when scanned by a smart phone or other device will automatically import the data that is embedded in them. What can you embed ? Almost anything you want. You can add a QR code that includes your name, address, e-mail, website and much more., and you can put it on the back of a business card, bottom of an e-mail, or the face of your website. You can add a QR code on your phone so when folks meet you they can scan your contact info rather than typing it in while chatting at some event. Some photographically challenged individuals are even starting to use these images in place of their social media photos ! All users need to do is scan the image and their smart phones or scanners will convert the image to text. Once in your phone the code image can synch to your computer and vice versa. This is a simple way to get your data into a prospective client’s database. How do you get or make a QR code ? It’s actually quite simple. There are a number of services on the web that will create QR codes for you. A few of these are listed below:
As we said last month, there are +/- 302 million cell phones in this country today and of that number, 28% are classified as smartphones (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, etc). That means that with a free reader app over 100 million phones out there can be configured to read QR codes. Doesn’t that make it worth your getting a QR code and using it ? How do you get a QR code reader ? There are plenty of them available for free. Here are a few for you: iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/app/socialwayne-wayne-sutton-qr/id431666415?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/redlaser-barcode-scanner-qr/id312720263?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2 Android https://market.android.com/details?id=la.droid.qr http://www.appbrain.com/app/quickmark-qr-code-reader/tw.com.quickmark Once you’ve downloaded one of these readers to your phone, scan the QR code posted in this article. Once you’ve done that you’ll have us in your contact list ! If you’re not making it easy for people to reach you quickly and without errors, then you’re wasting every marketing dollar that you’re spending. If people have trouble finding you, they’re going to move on to the next name on their list. QR codes are one way to ensure that people can reach you easily … and a way that will cost you nothing but about 15 minutes of your time. So take that 15 minutes and grab some more contacts in your database ! Coming next month – Your Marketing Checklist…Tuning Up Your Marketing for Fall
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