Marketing Tip
If you have an event coming up and there is an application form, or greater detail available online, you can use a QR Code which is a graphical symbol which a smart phone or tablet can scan, the scan function seems to be built into most smart phones. Just point your camera at one and it will automatically ask if you want to go to the website. You have probably seen them around, may even have scanned them in the past, but are not sure where to get them from.
I will quote this case, as it is a live example, of where having a QR code can be beneficial for you.
Home-Start Hampshire Charity Golf Day
Home-Start Hampshire are running a Charity Golf Day and asked me to add it to their website. Included in the package of information was a poster and two application forms, one in PDF format and one in MS Word format. (You need both because not everyone has MS Word).
I went to this website which you can create them for free: https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/ There are several QR code sites around, however as I found out some are after your money, so do take care, you can read what happened to me by skipping down this post to QR-CODE-GENERATOR.COM. I do however thoroughly recommend qrcode-monkey.com which is free to use, the codes do not expire, and there is no intermediate translation, and they can be used as many times as you wish.
I placed a wrapper around the QR code and produced the graphic below
The graphic I downloaded was very large, and suitable for print. I have had to shrink it here. You add this to a poster. Anyone that sees the poster can scan the code with their smartphone and go straight to the website without manually entering any addresses.
It also means of course that nobody has to enter a long and complicated URL to get to the page either. Do try it out if you have a Smart Phone.
Resources
If you go to QR Code Monkey website and create a QR code 1600 x 1600 pixels (very large) then you can download one of the two following graphics and paste your QR code graphic in the white centre area to create your own QR icon.
Click on one of the following images to open it full screen, then download it. The very pale QR code in the background is to show you were to position it. The first one is a PNG file with a transparent background, the second one is a JPG with a white background. You will need to resize them down to practically use them.
Call for Help Marketing
If you are going to tell the world about your event, you can also take the opportunity to ask people to reach out and help distribute it too, in printed format. If you go to this website (at the time of writing) there is the advertisement at the top, buttons to allow people to download the application forms in two formats, and a request for people to help them to market it.
The poster is already converted to PDF so all they need to do is click on it, save it locally and print it, and add it to a noticeboard, or forward to a friend.
So, the next time you advertise something, like a fundraising event, also ask people to help distribute your message in the same advert. As Tesco says, Every Little Helps.
Don’t forget to upload the URL or your post to your Facebook page as well, also to Twitter. Then social media will work for you too.
Rewriting this post because of qr-code-generator.com!
When I originally put this post together I was singing the praises of
QR-CODE-GENERATOR.COM. I have used QR codes before, and I have used free sites before. I came across QR-Code-generator.com while doing a search. It is heavily marketed at the time of writing, and if you search for “Free QR Codes” you will likely find this site near the top. But it is not free. It is “free to sign up” but later you will be caught out.
Firstly there is nothing wrong with QR-Code-Generator.com. They are not doing anything wrong, they are just trying to monetize their business. Here is what happened to me, it could have been a lot worse if I had just committed something to a print run, so it is worth bearing this in mind.
Searching for Free QR Codes, I came across this site, I had a look at it, and tried the user interface. It worked very well and delivered a large crisp QR code in an attractive wrapper with Scan Me in the graphic.
I used this four times on various charity sites to promote things that were coming up. I rebuilt posters and added the QR codes into the posters so that if anyone printed them, they could quickly scan the image from their phone and go to the relevant website. It worked very well.
Where’s your money?
I had just finished building everything, setting up the websites and packing up when a message came in advising me my free trial had expired. What was a little surprising was that the QR codes would now no longer work. To get them to work again I needed to pay around £5 per month for 1yr up front, so £60 to get two of them to work, and it just went up from there. The top tier was £37 a month for 250 QR codes.
For the 3rd sector, and even for commercial companies this is very steep. The system provides a short code URL which goes to another website, and translates the URL to the destination you were intending to go to. It does this because it logs that the QR code has been used. This is done for two purposes, one is the user can see how many hits the QR code is getting, the other is the provider of the system can disable it after you have had 10,000, and then force you to upgrade to get it to work again if you only paid £60 per year for your two codes.
Caveat emptor
(buyer beware)
I take full responsibility for not paying enough attention to this website. But it does show how easy it is to get sucked into something that “appears” to be free. Don’t forget I searched for free QR code generator when I started this exercise. It is fortunate I was not committed to a 10,000 copy print run with one of their QR codes in it. It would have been expensive!
If you have reached this blog entry because you are looking for a QR code generator, then take care which one you choose. You can do this largely for free with the https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/ site, there are many others out there. This will generate codes for you which do not expire, can be used unlimited times. They appear to be literal encoding of the data, without going through a 3rd party site. You need to put a graphic wrapper around it to use it, or make sure you have space around the QR code in its final application.
Take care with anything that uses a shortened URL, if that happens, it means your visitor is going somewhere else first. If they are going somewhere else, your QR code vendor might turn it off. If the QR encoding function follows the standard for a QR code, and goes straight to the website, you will be ok.