QR-code Information guides

 

QR Codes & Mobile Marketing for the Small Business Owner: Connecting Merchants With Their Customers
by: Michael Weir
publisher: CreateSpace, published: 2010-11-08
ASIN: 1456347837
EAN: 9781456347833
sales rank: 473717
price: $17.90 (new), $17.97 (used)

This is a very timely book that shows merchants the importance of building a data base of their current customers in order to take advantage of the explosive growth of mobile marketing and QR Codes. The author shows the business owner how to build their customer data base by providing the tools and training that allows business owners (many for the first time) collect their customers’ personally identifiable information (email and SMS text numbers) so that they can later market to these existing customers with content rich emails and SMS texts that offer coupons and discounts for products and services. Throughout the book, the author gently prods the reader to use their smart phone technology to scan QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) embedded within the book to read articles on various websites, read portions of other books on Amazon.com, watch movies on YouTube, and read research reports on the explosive growth of mobile marketing. This book does an excellent job explaining the changes in marketing methods that will allow the merchants the opportunity to create additional profits by marketing to their existing customer base in a way that they have not been able to do so before. The QR Code technology is easy to use and implement. The author explains how to build this marketing infrastructure for the do-it-yourself business owners, and also shows the reader how to use his website (http://www.mobilemarketingqrcodes.com) to create the entire infrastructure within an hour. This book is a must read for any small business owner who is looking for more ways to drive foot traffic through the front door and add to the bottom line.

QR Codes: The Ultimate Guidebook
by: Chris Branden
publisher: QReative Studios, published: 2011-04-25
ASIN: B004Y0XN1U
sales rank: 172782

QR Codes
The Ultimate Guide Book

One of the best books on QR Codes, this authoritative guide by Chris Branden is packed full of everything you’ll ever need to know about these amazing barcodes.

QR Codes are set to revolutionise the mobile marketing world as never before. So, whether you want to be at the forefront of this remarkable innovation, or just want to gain a basic understanding of how these innocuous looking matrices are going to change the way we think about marketing, this book is for you.

Become the expert in your company and grab this informative and entertaining tome now.

* 50 ways to promote your company using QR Codes

* Discover why 85% of businesses in Japan use them

* Learn how to easily create one for free

* How to exploit the technology

* 7 Pitfalls to avoid

* Track your customers in real time

* Detailed Case Studies

* Which big companies are using them and how

* How to create a Dynamic Designer code

* What they cost and how to get free ones

* Discover the 9 different types of QR Codes

* PLUS *
All the best links, blogs and other resources; Projected growth figures; All the techie stuff, including a detailed anatomy of a QR Code; The best code generators and readers for your iPhone, Android or other devices;
QR Codes in the news: How to use QR Codes even if you don’t have a smart phone; The Perfect Storm that gave birth to them; Examples; Why they are going to change the face of marketing forever; and there’s even a section on QR as art.

QR Codes
The Ultimate Guide Book

Chris Branden reveals how to explode your marketing with his new book on QR Codes.

Discover all the tricks of the trade with this incisive 55 page handbook.

There’s a mobile marketing revolution going on and these two books ensure you first class tickets on the front row.

Bag your copy now to secure an early market lead on the competition.

How to Combine QR Codes With the Power of Facebook

Are you looking to leverage the popularity of QR (Quick Response) codes with the wide-spread adoption of Facebook?

Over the past several months, QR codes have inserted themselves squarely into digital media conversation (even appearing on late-night TV).

In this article, I’ll unpack how to get your QR codes to go viral on Facebook.

I’ll start by walking you through the process and an example campaign, and conclude with an analytical discussion examining five need-to-know success factors.

Setting Up a Viral QR Code Campaign
Step #1: Generating the QR code
For the uninitiated, QR codes provide a means to open a URL on a mobile phone.

However, a closer look reveals that most QR code generators provide functionality for executing a host of mobile phone actions, including creating a calendar event, sending an SMS or providing contact information.

Like all things viral, choose a QR code type based on what you think people will want to share.

For the purposes of our example campaign, we used scan-to-SMS. Once generated, keep in mind that saving the QR code in a user-friendly format (e.g., jpeg or png) will be useful when integrating with other applications.

QR codes can execute various phone actions. Scanning the above QR code sends an SMS with message "smexaminer" to phone number 44144.
Step #2: Customizing your Facebook post
The next step is to upload your QR code to a server that can communicate with the Facebook Share API.

Something you share on Facebook contains four components (see graphic below). All of these components are fully customizable for a viral QR code campaign.

A Facebook share has four customizable components: image (1), title (2), source (3) and description (4).
Some important points to keep in mind when customizing these elements:

Image: This is where you will put your QR code. It should be sufficiently large for people to scan easily.
Title: This is your headline. Crucial for grabbing attention in crowded Facebook feeds.
Source: A brand running a campaign should host the QR code on a URL that provides context for the campaign (for those scanning our example campaign, you’ll see a URL connecting to a generic “wmclientservices.com”).
Description: A great place to provide valuable and pertinent information about your campaign.
Step #3: Taking your campaign live
Once integrated, Facebook provides you with a campaign-specific Facebook share URL.

Use a URL shortener to make it more viral-friendly (trackable and easy to share). To ensure maximum uptake, test your code with multiple QR code readers before deploying into the wild.

Speaking of uptake, here’s the flow for our example campaign (with select screenshots below):

Users will see an ad for socialmediaexaminer.com with a QR code.
Users then scan the QR code and send the SMS.
They will receive two links, one to socialmediaexaminer.com and the second to share on Facebook.
When the second link is clicked, Facebook’s share prompt automatically opens.
Users can personalize the message and share.
The QR code is automatically posted to users’ Facebook wall and news feed.
Friends can scan the QR code within Facebook to share with their friends.

After the QR code is scanned and the SMS sent, this is the link delivered to share on Facebook (#3).

After the share link is clicked (or tapped), users can personalize and post to their Facebook wall (#5).

Once posted, others can scan the QR code within Facebook to share to their wall (#7).

The benefit of taking this viral approach to QR codes is easy to imagine: 10,000 people scanning and sharing the original ad equates to (from Facebook stats: 10K x 130 friends) 1.3 million additional pairs of eyes—and that’s before those Facebook users start sharing with their friends, and those friends with their friends, and on and on.

Five Need-to-Know Success Factors
Alas, if only it were that easy. Like everything in social media marketing, the process (sending a tweet, creating a Facebook page) is much easier than the actual execution (doing it well). Viral QR codes are no different.

Here are five factors that bridge the gap between success and failure:

#1: QR code reach
A commonly cited figure is that smartphone market share will reach 50% by the end of 2011. In a different light, that’s a minimum of 150 million people who won’t be able to scan a QR code through the end of 2011.

Maybe you’ve noticed, but our example campaign snuck in an alternative call to action that achieves the same result as someone scanning the QR code.

Alternative call to action included in the Facebook share.
As you can guess, this was intentional. Include an alternative call to action (SMS, for example, is accessible by 99% of phones) to considerably increases the potential of your viral QR code campaign without much additional effort.

#2: Incentives
Let’s say we were to take the above campaign live. At heart, its value proposition is, “Check out our website. It has great content we want you to share with your Facebook friends.”

Now let’s add a couple of phrases. “Check out our website for the chance to win a million dollars. It has great content we will reward you to share with your Facebook friends.”

I’d be willing to bet my winnings that more people will participate in the second campaign than the first due to better incentives. Though often overlooked in technology marketing, incentives shouldn’t be a surprise given that they turn up all the time.

What I think happens is that marketers mistake engagement resulting from “Wow, this is cool technology,” with engagement from people genuinely moved to action by a campaign. Social media marketing, like marketing in general (and maybe even more so), is a two-way street.

#3: QR code design
QR codes grab people’s attention due to their curious design. But assuming QR codes continue turning up in more and more places, the design’s intrigue may start losing its ability to captivate people amidst everything else bombarding them.

That’s why it’s important to make your QR codes unique. By customizing various features of your QR code, you can bring a sense of personality that will increase brand identity and engagement.

Customized QR code linking to a downloadable QR code eBook.
#4: Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value is simple to understand. Every marketer in the world would rather have a customer who spends $50 every day for the next two weeks than a customer who spends $100 today.

However, whether it’s due to the idea of purchasing television spots or just the word “campaign” itself, marketers have a tendency to adopt a one-off mentality when it comes to tools like QR codes.

The problem is that QR codes at heart are an interactive medium. Failing to develop lifelong, instead of one-time, customers is a missed opportunity.

Luckily, there are a number of ways to achieve this end, the most important being opting someone in to a subscription list. Two viral QR code examples:

Using a mobile application service provider, you can enhance your scan-to-SMS campaign with an opt-in that captures the mobile phone number.
For scan-to-URL QR codes, you can use a mobile landing page to add subscribers to a database.
#5: CRM
QR codes are made up of three different types of data. The first—scans—accounts for the number of times a person successfully uses a QR code reader.

The second—phone operations—describes what a user does after scanning (e.g., clicks, downloads, page views). The third—user data—describes the people actually doing the scanning and phone operations (e.g., phone type used, age, gender).

I’ve seen far too many QR code campaigns that solely focus on scans. That’s great for predicting the future of your QR code campaigns, but you miss a key opportunity to gather knowledge of how and what type of people interact with your brand.

Viral QR codes, given their ability to get in front of more people, make it even more mandatory to learn as much as you can about your customers in order to inform your future marketing decisions.

To quote Henry Luce, “Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future.” A QR code campaign that fails to address the entirety of data available misses this point entirely.

More than anything, viral QR codes demonstrate a simple truth. Success in mobile and social marketing requires a database strategy. Not a channel strategy. The reason being that a database strategy is customer-centric, which affords significantly more value creation opportunities. Developing this mindset and working with people who share this mentality will ensure that you see maximum value from your QR code campaigns.

And as a mobile and social CRM aficionado, I’d love to hear what other ways you use to enhance QR codes with a cross-channel approach.

Tags: call to action, facebook qr codes, facebook share api, incentive, kane russell, mobile marketing, qr code campaign, qr code design, qr code generators, qr code marketing, qr code reader, qr code strategy, qr codes, sms campaign, viral qr code

ABOUT THE AUTHOR,
Kane Russell is director of marketing at Waterfall Mobile. Waterfall's mobile and social CRM platform, Msgme, provides businesses the means to build and monetize a mobile subscriber database. Published August 18, 2011

“If you don’t take part in new technology, you’re not taking part in life.”
HG Wells So Grab your Copy of QR-code Information guides and set up a Viral QR Code Campaign.

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