I must send a shout-out to the Webchutney Agency in India for putting together the video of this QR Code effort.
The video demonstrates how the Turquoise Cottage bar and night-club used QR Codes in place of the typical stamp that might be placed on their customer’s hands.
Upon scanning the QR Code, people were directed to mobile websites with information that was specific to the time that they scanned the code!
- Earlier in the night, people accessed Bar Specials
- At the end of the night, people were directed to Call-A-Taxi services
- And early the next morning, people were presented with information to help them, uhm, recover from all of the fun that they had the night before.
I think this is great example of how there is plenty of room for innovation when it comes to QR Code efforts!
I plan on trying to convince my local favorite establishment to give this a try soon 
Print industry legend Kevin Keane has been promoting the mantra “Print tells, but video sells” a lot lately on his Facebook page.
And I think the video below does a great job of “selling” the power of QR Codes.
This video demonstrates how Heineken used QR Codes at a music festival to integrate multiple channels and medias — including print, social networks, mobile, and more.
If you have a minute, take a moment to enjoy the video. I’d love to know if it inspires you to use QR Codes on your printed materials… or even if it simply makes you wish that you were drinking a beer at a rock show.
Did you think that QR Codes were everywhere in 2011? If so, you should expect to see more of the same in 2012. Sure, there are absolutely going to be other mobile technologies (such as NFC, perhaps) that will push their way a bit further into the mainstream.
But with QR Codes, the momentum of creating awareness has been in full swing for quite a while now. What does this mean? Well, even my grandmother knows how to scan a QR Code! Thus, advertisers, marketers, educators, etc. should find ways to incorporate QR Codes into their printed materials to reach the growing mobile audience. Here are a few tips to help them incorporate QR Codes that their audience will scan.
5 Tips for Increasing Your QR Code Scans
- Provide instructions near the QR Code: Yes, awareness of QR Codes has increased dramatically over the past few months. But there are still plenty of people out there that don’t know what they are or how to use them. To assist those folks, provide instructions near the QR Code on your printed materials. This could be done by simply including text (i.e. “Scan the QR Code with your smartphone”) or by incorporating an image that displays a smartphone pointing to the QR Code, or an image that depicts how the QR Code could point to a smartphone that is displaying a website.
- Give people an incentive: As marketers first become familiar with QR Codes, they often rush too quickly to incorporate them. Thus, they’ll skip over fundamentals such as “Why would my audience want to scan this?”. Rather than just slapping a QR Code on your printed materials, develop a reason why you should have one. Will it make it easier for your audience to access a map or directions? Will it make easier for people to contact your company or to make a purchase? Include that reason somewhere on your printed materials to let people know what benefits they’ll receive by scanning the code.
- Allow your designer to have input: In some cases, graphic designers have developed well-crafted print advertisements or direct mail pieces that they are very proud of. But at the last-minute, someone may request that a QR Code is included. This may not only cause some grief for the designer (because they are being asked to make a last-minute change, one that does not necessarily fit it into their vision), but it could also negatively impact your audience. If a QR Code appears to have been carelessly slapped onto printed material, the chances of it being scanned may be reduced. Thus, try to allow your designers to offer creative input during the development process. They may be able to utilize the error-correction rate that is built into QR Codes, or to simply find a creative way to include it that will tempt your audience to scan it.
- Educate your audience ahead of time: Yes, QR Codes exist primarily to make print interactive. But you can use other medias to increase awareness about them. Create blog posts on your website that talk about them. Produce a video that demonstrates how someone could successfully use their smartphone to scan them. Put on one your social media pages or in your email signature for a little while. Talk about them in your eNewsletter. By taking those steps, you may not only create curiosity, but you may increase the chances that your audience will know what to do with them when they see one in on your printed pieces.
- Shorten the destination URL: This one is very important! Yes, QR Codes can hold a lot of data. But the more data that you have in a QR Code, the harder it may be for someone to scan it quickly. Make sure to use a service that shortens your URLs before generating the QR Code.
I hope that you find these tips helpful! If you have any questions, just let me know in the Comments.
With more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter, Bill Simmons has certainly made quite the name for himself over the past few years. Of course, he’s had other accomplishments in that time period. Here are a few:
- His columns on ESPN.com are always extremely popular
- He topped the New York Times Best-Seller List
- He came up with the idea for the “30 for 30″ film series
- He launched the Grantland website.
Pardon my gushing, but the Grantland website is pretty awesome. Every day there are new columns that entertain and educate.
However, the problem with online content is that its shelf-life may be limited. People have unlimited options while they are online — thus, it’s possible that a social network or another blog might steal their attention from the Grantland website.
The Case For Print
To help give Grantland’s online content further reach and a longer life, Bill Simmons and his team have created a print version, The Grantland Quarterly.
But even though Bill Simmons has millions of fans and followers, he recognized that selling print vs. simply putting stuff online may not be an easy sale to his audience.
Thus, he recently published an article where he laid out the case for offering a printed version. Here were some of the reasons and benefits that he listed:
- The quality of the hard-copy book is superb.
- Say this quote in Bill Simmons legendary tongue-in-cheek tone: “If terrorists ever destroy the Internet, I’m screwed — just about everything I ever wrote will vanish into thin air.” Yes, we all are very willing to store our data in the Cloud. And for the most part, we probably have never been let down by that. But for anyone that has ever lost a document that was stored electronically and not properly backed-up, you probably understand his point here.
- Seeing one’s content in a book format is exciting. “It’s different than seeing your stuff on the Internet”.
- He wanted to find a way to enable his content to live forever in someone’s bookcase.
- Reading a story in a book months after the event it discusses has occurred brings benefits to the reader. As opposed to just reading it online the day it’s posted, they will have gained more knowledge and a better perspective about the content that was written.
- By devoting time to creating a great layout in the book, they were able to “bring boring Internet columns to life”
- The Grantland team has devoted a lot of time and energy to maintain a great website… A book version of their content is a way to help people take stock of all that they’ve accomplished.
Does Print Have a Place with You?
There is no doubt that marketing channels such as the web, social networks, and mobile will continue to cause shifts in the way that people consume information.
But while each of those channels may bring benefits, there are also areas where they may be lacking.
Thus, if we are responsible for creating or distributing content for our organization, we must never forget how print can help.
Bill Simmons listed a number of reasons for the Grantland Quarterly… and perhaps you can add to that list as well.
eBay has brought some excitement to the QR Code/mobile world this week with the launch of a new store in London.
The physical storefront carries 350 items. But what makes the store unique is that people will scan the item’s QR Code to place an order for it. Upon scanning the QR Code, people are directed to the item’s page on eBay where they can complete their purchase in a couple of easy steps.
Here is a great video on the setup of their store:
I’m happy to announce the release of interlinkONE’s latest White Paper, “Mobile Marketing: Grabbing Consumers on the Go!“
If you are looking for ways to incorporate mobile into your marketing efforts, please download your free copy today.
How It Helps
We live in a mobile culture. Whether your customers are businesses or consumers, devices such as smartphones and tablets are changing when, why, and how they are searching, finding, and consuming information.
In this White Paper, we provide an overview of technologies that you can use to market effectively to the ever-growing mobile audience. The White Paper covers items such as:
- QR Codes
- Mobile Websites
- SMS/Text-Messaging
- Mobile Social Media
- Mobile SEO
- And more…
How Can You Get It? And How Much Does it Cost?
Those questions are easy to answer.
First of all, it’s free! Simply head over to our registration page to receive your copy.
One of my favorite parts of attending the DMA 2011 conference in Boston this week was having the chance to listen to some very successful marketing agencies present case studies of their campaigns.
Some of the case studies involved big brands that were looking to capitalize on their expensive sponsorships; others involved companies that were trying to take make the best of a natural disaster; and others involved helping people in less-fortunate lands.
What Made Them Succeed
There were a number of reasons why the campaigns that were discussed at DMA succeeded. Yes, most of them had impressive creative. There was clearly a helpful and compelling message on the media. But certainly, the creative and messaging differed greatly across each effort.
But there is something that all of the successful case studies had in common: the agencies spent a lot of effort focusing on planning and measurement.
Wait. Are You Saying that Not All Marketers Plan and Measure?
In today’s world of businesses, many of us are wearing many hats. We may have less resources available to us than from a few years ago. We may feel more pressure from CEOs and VPs of Sales to get more campaigns out the door.
There may be nothing we can do to change those realities. Thus, it is absolutely possible that we may cut corners to simply get things “shipped”. We may start to simply view our marketing initiatives as one big checklist.
However, what truly matters in the end is not if we simply do things. But what matters is if we actually do things that make a positive impact.
How We Can Focus on the Right Things
The best way to create a successful campaign is to truly have a strategy and plan ahead of time (or, we could just hope to get lucky). We need to let our imaginations go a little wild. We need to think of our audience as more than a list of records in a database. We need to be willing to analyze what we hope to accomplish, what we could possibly accomplish, and then set a goal.
Then, we must be willing to spend time truly analyzing and measuring the results of our efforts.
While that may sound obvious, I’m sure that many of us would agree that we often need to quickly move on to what’s next… That might be the next channel, technology, or simply the next campaign. We miss out on identifying what has recently worked (or not), which means we lose out on finding valuable data that could improve our future campaigns.
Planning and measurement might never be sexy. But if the case studies presented at DMA 2011 were any indication, they are absolutely two of the most critical components of a successful campaign.
I had the chance to attend the DMA 2011 conference in Boston yesterday. I won’t lie — I enjoyed my time there!
I’ve been to a lot of trade shows over the past year in the role of vendor/exhibitor. Thus, it was quite interesting to be on the other side… to be walking down the aisles feeling exhibitors desperate to make eye contact with you or to tickle-your-fancy with a clever opening line. I also enjoyed simply being an attendee because I was actually able to attend some of the sessions.
While there were a lot of key points and trends floating around the conference, I will say that Facebook stands out among the top. It may sound ridiculous to label Facebook as a “trending topic” in the world of marketing. However, I still think there are plenty of B-to-B companies (and a lot of B-to-C companies, too) that have doubts as to how Facebook can help them.
There were a number of points made yesterday that should help companies decide whether they should be spending marketing resources on Facebook. Here are a few of them.
Reporting Enhancements
Facebook is launching a number of enhancements to their Page Insights tool. For example, they will be including a new measurement labeled “People Talking About This”.
That measurement will include the number of Likes, Facebook user comments around the brand, RSVPs, Places check-ins, “@mentions” and photo-tags. Along with providing that information to the owners of Pages, Facebook announced that regular users will be able to see them as well. That type of exposure should certainly cause all Page owners to find ways to increase awareness and engagement around our brand.
Recognizing the Potential Reach
Yes, it is true that many of Facebook’s 800 million users primarily use that social network to stay in touch with friends and family. However, a decent percentage of the interactions and content postings on Facebook could absolutely include product recommendations, brand perception comments, links to specials/discounts/events, etc.
Thus, companies must realize that in order to capitalize and increase the word-of-mouth opportunities that are inherent in 800 million people talking all day in the same place, they must be there too! This includes listening for happy fans and unhappy customers. It includes posting and promoting content that people will want to share. It also includes treating the audience there as a special one with a lot of power.
Some Plain Old Facts
Statistics can really only tell part of a story. But in the keynote address at DMA 2011 yesterday, Grady Burnett of Facebook shared a number of them that should cause businesses to take notice. Here were a few:
- “30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month”
- “There is a 2x increase in engagement when users are shown [Facebook] sponsored stories”
- “68% more likely to remember an Ad when associated to a friend’s name”
Moving Forward
There is no doubt that Facebook will continue to evolve as a social network. But it already has a tremendous and (willingly) captive audience.
Businesses need to be there to reach those folks. But Facebook must also continue to identify and create ways so we can all fully utilize its potential.
The Kern Organization recently released the results of a study that was designed to report on 2011 mid-year marketing trends.
While you may find that some of the results are less than surprising, I thought some of the trend feedback was important.
When asked about current trends, the two that ranked the highest in terms of importance were:
- 90% say better integration of online and offline data collection and analytics is essential.
- 84% indicate that aligning sales and marketing is important.
Yes, it’s obvious that marketers know that those are important items to solve. But is it possible that we as marketers also contribute to make those on-going issues?
The Sexiness of Doing it Now
When it comes to technology and marketing channels, marketers are (often wisely) early adopters. When we find success, we may push to implement further utilization of that solution in our business efforts. But sometimes we are so eager to hit “Go” that we fail to analyze how to effectively integrate its capabilities with our other marketing efforts.
This may come in the form of buying multiple software solutions that do not talk to each other; thus, resulting in us having multiple databases that store variations of customer and prospect information.
Also, Without proper integration, we may start harming our company with inconsistent branding and messaging rather than helping it by being an early adopter.
Alignment with Sales
When it comes to sales & marketing alignment, we may find that we are constantly focused on and caught up in creating and launching our next campaign.
In that scenario, we may fail to devote the proper time to ensuring that the Sales staff understands what data and follow-up actions are available to them from current or previous campaigns.
Thus, we limit the potential success of the marketing campaigns that we are executing.
Finding the Fix
Yes, it’s one thing to take the time to respond to a survey and prove that we understand what our issues are and where our priorities should be. But in regards to actually putting in the work to focus on creating solutions, that does not happen easily.
Is the solution to slow down? Is the solution to create more strategy and planning documents?
Most likely, the proper solution might vary across different companies. But this much is true – to increase productivity and success, we must find a way to solve those items.
Back here at the 21 Concord Street office, the majority of employees involved with Graph Expo 2011 have certainly deemed the show as a success (of course, they haven’t yet seen the final bill for the food and drinks I ordered for our Networking Event).
While I have no idea if the number of attendees or exhibitors was higher or lower than last year, I do know this — both interlinkONE and Grow Socially acquired more qualified leads at this year’s Graph Expo than in the past few years. If we can stay focused and handle our follow-up activities properly, then we will absolutely be earning some of our marketing dollars back.
Of course, it’s been interesting to look at where those marketing dollars were spent. And while I cannot share too many exact numbers and percentages here for you, I did want to share a few observations that I’ve developed after looking at the effectiveness of the various channels we used.
This is certainly a big one. Imagine if we did not use print in our marketing efforts to promote our appearance at one of the biggest shows in the print industry?!
- Effort: Before the show, we distributed direct mail pieces to prospects, customers, media members, and other print industry people that we hoped to see at the show. The direct mail piece talked about our show plans and promoted a contest that we were running for attendees. People could respond via a QR Code or a personalized URL. Also, we told them to bring the mailer to the booth to double their chances of winning.
- Observation: The direct mail effort was a success in regards to helping us create awareness and to build our database. In regards to entering our contest, 80% of the respondents entered by scanning the QR Code as opposed to entering the personalized URL! (The reasons for that could be multi-fold; for one, QR Codes are very hot in the print industry. People are familiar with them and curious. Also, the personalized URL was only listed on the back of the card and the QR Code appeared on both sides.)
- Effort: We were able to get some space in the Show Daily magazine that is published each day. This included product news and event news.
- Observation: This turned out to be awesome for us in regards to driving booth traffic. There were a number of attendees that came up to the booth with the Show Daily in hand pointing to the article or blurb that they read about one of our products.
Social Networks
There is no doubt that there are more folks in the print industry using social networks this year than last year. There seemed to be quite a solid amount of activity on the #GraphExpo hashtag on Twitter and I was quite impressed with the attendance and participation at the official Graph Expo tweet-up.
One of my favorite parts about this year’s Graph Expo was having the chance to meet so many of my online friends in real life. If the online relationship with those people had primarily only happened via another channel (email, for example), I do not think that my relationship with these folks would be nearly as strong as it is.
Yes, social networks have changed how companies are communicating with their prospects and customers. Rather than bombarding customers and prospects with countless emails each month, we can share quick-bites of relevant information with them via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other channels.
But this does not mean that we should neglect our email strategy efforts.
Yes, there are more printers on Twitter and Facebook this year than there were last year. But that does not they are using those channels to follow a lot of brands. In a recent article from Jay Baer, he listed statistics that show the average Facebook fan currently “likes” just 9.8 company pages.
While it’s certainly possible for your exciting, cutting-edge, revolutionary, and extremely awesome brand to become one of those 9.8, do you really want to bank your whole marketing budget on that?
Rather, we should be focusing on finding ways to increase the effectiveness of our email efforts by integrating them with social media tools and channels… and vice-versa! Social networks can be a great way to build up our email list; and email can be a great way to drive more traffic to our social networking pages.
Banner Advertisements
This is a tough one. How do you actually measure the effectiveness of your banner advertisements? It’s one thing to measure how many people click-through on them. But certainly, there is something to be said by the impression that a banner Ad could make on someone.
We ran a few banner advertisements on print-related websites before the show. The click-through numbers were not amazing. But that does not mean that we will not analyze our creative, come up with a better call-to-action, and pay for them again. Rather, we need to continue to think of better ways to measure their effectiveness.
Mobile
Mobile was certainly a very hot topic at Graph Expo. And I am quite pleased by the fact that many printers seem to be taking steps to figure out how it can help their business. I saw lots of folks walking around the show floor with smart phones. We had a lot of people scan the QR Codes on the banners that we had at our booth. And we had a few share their mobile # so that they could be alerted about upcoming events.
What’s Next?
There certainly were other activities and channels that we used before Graph Expo. Once again, webinars proved to be very effective for us.
But no matter what, this is true and will always be true — in order to make an impression and increase demand, a multi-channel marketing effort is absolutely necessary.
