QR Codes seem to have come out of nowhere the past couple months, but they are quickly gaining steam. With a little thought, you can come up with a creative application for them. I still have mixed feelings about putting them on billboards, but there are certainly a myriad of other ways to use them.
The Wikipedia description of QR code is, “the code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.” Similar to barcodes, these codes can be read by camera phones which then direct the user to a specific URL.
One simple application for QR Codes would be for A/B testing of your marketing materials. Let’s say you want to track how your postcard mailings are working to drive traffic to your stie. Create a unique web page for each neighborhood that you send a postcard. Create a unique QR code for that page that you put on the mailer. Then, when people come to your website, since the QR code has a unique url, it tells you how they got directed to your site.
So in order to create QR codes quickly and easily, here’s a demo.