Copywriting, blogging, white papers, social media, marketing strategy

The MarCompass.com is a marketing blog created by me, Joyce Dierschke. I am a freelance copy writer with a passion for promoting conversations between companies and customers via blogs and social media. If you need help with an integrated marketing strategy, contact me. If you'd like me to write about a particular related topic on this blog, drop me a line. Read more...

QR Code Tracking – What Can QR Codes Tell You?

October 27th, 2011 · Content Marketing, customer service, Integrated Marketing, marketing, Social Marketing, social media, Success in Business, Viral Marketing

Everything. Well, OK, not everything…but darn near! Here are just a few things that you can track when you use QR codes:

How many scans (unique and total)
Bounce rate – how many scanners only visited the main URL, site or page without clicking through to other pages
Time on the site – how much time the scanner spent on your site, page or Facebook Page
Hits and Goals – the number of returns to your site by the person who scanned the code
Location – where the scanner was when they scanned the code as well as how many scans were made from that location
Equipment – what time of phone was used to scan your code

If the code is connected to your Facebook page you can get even more information about the person who scanned the code

Depending on your provider, some QR code analytics are available real time and others over a period of time.

These sort of analytics are invaluable to measuring the effectiveness of a specific campaign and also in planning future campaigns.

Ideas for Using QR Codes Strategically

October 26th, 2011 · Content Marketing, customer service, Integrated Marketing, marketing, Social Marketing, social media, Viral Marketing

My past couple of posts discussed what QR codes are (see What’s a QR Code or What are those Weird Bar Codes I’m Seeing Everywhere?) and whether you should use them to promote your business or product. Assuming you decided that the people most likely to scan and use a QR code already do or may soon fit into your targe audience (see Should You Be Using QR Codes in Your Marketing Strategy?), you have to come up with a strategy for using the codes – and enticing people to scan them.

It does take a few minute to scan a QR code – you have to open the app, scan, download, read, etc., so in the end, your prospect or customer needs to be rewarded.

Here are just the beginning of ways you can use QR codes to reward current customers and/or attract new prospects:

Instant coupon
Special offer
Contests/sweepstakes
Exclusive information

Whichever promotion you choose, make sure the QR code works, the promotion or message is easy to download, and it rewards the person scanning in a meaningful way.

Share and Enjoy:

→ No CommentsTags: marketing to smartphones·mobile marketing·qr code·quick response code·smartphones

Should You Be Using QR Codes in Your Marketing Strategy?

October 24th, 2011 · Content Marketing, Integrated Marketing, marketing, Social Marketing, Success in Business, Work Life

By now you’ve probably at least seen a QR (Quick Response) Code like the one posted here or maybe even a fancy one – QR codes are now quite fancy with different colors and designs. Pretty amazing stuff considering it is just a glorified bar code … or is it?

In an earlier post I talked about what a QR code is exactly (see What’s a QR Code or What are those Weird Bar Codes I’m Seeing Everywhere?). Since then comScore (a digital communications research company) has come out with a very interesting report on just who uses these codes.

The study found QR code scanner (during the study period – June 2011) was likely to be male (60.5 percent), skew toward ages 18-34 (53.4 percent) and have a household income of $100k or above (36.1 percent).

This is valuable info for any active marketers because it will help you decide if you need to be using QR codes. Take another look at the demographic described above. Does this match your target market? If so, maybe you should consider integrating QR codes into your marketing materials and strategy.

If the above demographic does not match your target, this question of whether to use the codes may actually be tougher. Even if your target doesn’t match, you need to answer these questions about your target audience:

Are they early adopter of technology?
Do they expect your and your business to be on the cutting edge of technology?
Depending on what the code offered them, could you see your audience scanning such a code?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, you might want to consider at lease experimenting with QR codes. On of the good things about these codes is that they are highly trackable, meaning you can see such stats as how many people scanned the code and what source was the code scanned from. If you offered a discount or coupon via the code, you could easily see who took advantage of the offer.

How popular is code scanning right now? More useful data from the comScore report:

14 million Americans scanned a QR code on their smart phone during the month of June 2011 (that’s 6.2% of the entire mobile using population)
Nearly half of all QR codes were scanned out of newspapers and magazines.
Product packaging QRs were second in popularity at about 35%,
Website codes came in at 27% and,
Poster/flyer codes were scanned at about 23%.

Here are a couple of graphs courtesy of comScore that illustrates some of these numbers for clearer understanding (click to enlarge):