Wirral Mums Guide: QR Codes

Wirral Mums Guide Why and How to Make a QR Codes to Promote Your Business If you’re not familiar with QR codes, they make it easy for mobile users to find your website, ad or promotion. All they do is scan the code and they are immediately taken to the web page or information you want them to visit. They don’t need to try to remember or type in any website address, it’s all done automatically. So the next time they see your ad at a bus stop, in a flyer or in a magazine, all they do is point, scan and the marketing magic begins.

QR stands for “quick response” and they are two dimensional codes that you’ve probably seen on advertising. They look something like this:

You can use QR codes to promote your business in many ways. Here are just a few ideas:      

Use them in your print advertising, making easy for readers to find your website.

Create coupons. Once your user scans the QR code, they can access a coupon.

Provide access to interactive maps, so your customers can find your business.

Add QR codes to your printed catalogs, so your customers can make their order online.

Add a QR code to your business card, offering a special discount for scanning.

Does your business have schedules? QR codes are a quick way to access fitness, show and other types of schedules.

The possibilities are limited only by your marketing imagination. The gap between print and digital is closing quickly, providing you with so many options for using QR codes in your business.

But how do you make a QR code? Let’s talk about that next…

Make Your QR Codes for Free with Delivr Delivr is a free service that allows you to create QR codes for your website pages and more. For this tutorial, we’ll be focusing on making a QR code for a website page or URL, but we’ll briefly explore the other features too.

Go to http://delivr.com to get started.

While you can use the service without any account, we recommend signing up for a free account so you can edit your QR codes and access tracking/analytics capabilities. We’re going to use the service with an account in this tutorial, so you can see all of the features.

Step 1: Log into Your Account Once you’re logged in, click on the “Create New Code” box in the top right corner of the page.

You can create a QR code to a website, YouTube video, Flickr image or video, Google Maps and even just to display some text.

Step 2: Create a QR Code to a URL Creating a QR code to a website page is simple. Just enter your URL at the http://. Then click “go”.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a few options to share and save your QR code. Your sharing options include Facebook, Twitter and Ping.fm, but we want to get the QR code that you can use in your advertising and promotions. You’ll find the QR code on the far right side of the page:

You can save the file in a variety of formats including PNG, JPG and EPS. You may want to check with your printer on what format they’d like if you are hiring someone to do your promotional printing.

If you want to do a do-it-yourself promotion, you can try the “Print Flyer” option, but you can’t edit the flyer at all. It is simply a picture of your website and invitation to scan the code. Here’s an example of a QR code for YouTube.com.

If you make a flyer for your website, it would show a picture of your website instead.

Campaign Editing You have a few options when it comes to editing your campaign. To do this, click on “Dashboard” in the top menu of your account.

Then click the edit icon for the campaign you want to edit.

You can change the destination URL. This might be useful if you’ve created a special landing page or promotion that you would like to direct your visitors to. You can always change the URL again later.

There are also some more advanced settings like prompting for a GPS location and advanced tracking, but for our purposes, we don’t need this.

Campaign Analytics To access your Analytics, click on Dashboard again and then click on the “Analytics”. You can view daily, monthly and other reports.

The report will show you how many scans your QR code has received and other data as well. You can also what type of device users are reaching you with. Our campaign is brand new, so there is no data showing at this moment.

There is also a map that shows you where the geographic location of your visitors and what type of device they were using.

Other QR Tag Options As mentioned earlier in our tutorial, you can make tags for YouTube videos, Flickr photos and videos and more. Let’s briefly go over those options here.

YouTube Video (or Flickr) To make a code for a YouTube video, you can choose the YouTube option and enter the video URL or ID. The process is the same for Flickr, but we’re demonstrating YouTube below.

The URL is what appears at the top of your browser, like this:

Or just enter the video ID, which in the top example, would be: GDeCenium8

Once you’ve entered your video information, you can also add a title and a description.

Whenever someone scans your QR code, they will be taken to a page on delivr.com that includes your video and your personal message.

Google Maps If you’d like to provide your customer with an easy map to get to your store or office, you can also connect your QR code to a Google Map. On the Google Maps option, simply enter your address in the box.

After you click, “go”, you can personalize the map by including a title and a description. Click “Finish” when you’re done.

When your readers scan your QR code on a GPS-enabled device, they will be prompted to use their current location and they can easily get directions to your place of business.

Text If you’d like an easy way to share a simple mobile-friendly message with your visitors, you can also make a QR code to a page with some text. To start, enter a title for your message. Click “go” when you’re done.

Then you can edit your message. You can also insert photos, YouTube videos, a phone number, website links and more. Click “finish” when you’re done.

When someone clicks your QR code, they’ll be led to a page that shows your ad on a mobilefriendly page.

As you can see, creating QR codes is a fairly simple process and provides your business with plenty of marketing options. With the growth of mobile technology, QR codes make it possible for you to improve the response to your marketing efforts.