Why Marketers Use QR Codes for Promotions: All Questions Answered

You have seen QR Codes and might have even scanned one. They make an amazing O2O technology, hence, are being used for both operational and promotional use cases.

You would have often seen them on flyers and posters for promotions. And here’s the thing—while you understand how QR Codes work, you want to know why they’re used for promotions.

In this article, we will tell you six strong reasons why QR Codes are used for promotions. Keep reading to know more.

A. Using QR Codes for promotions

Let’s get started with the rationale behind the usage of QR Codes for marketing and promotions:

1. Bring life to your marketing creatives

While digital media is quite handy and actionable, it has a very short attention span. And no wonder why!

We all see at least 10 digital ads on various online channels every day. And how many of them do we remember? Well, not many!

On the other hand, print media has way longer attention span. However, it’s not readily actionable. For example, say you receive a flyer that’s promoting an e-commerce business with a trendy collection. The flyer mentions the business’ name and website link.

Now, to actually visit the required website, you will have to open the browser and manually type the entire link. How often would you do that?

To be honest, only a small fraction of people bother putting in the effort while the rest of them don’t.

QR Codes help bring life to such creatives. They make print media (with an already high attention span) actionable.

In the previous example, one can simply add a QR Code to the flyer. On scanning, this QR Code can take people to the required website. No need for anyone to type anything. Isn’t that great?

2. Attention-grabbing designs

Did you know that you can actually customize the design of your QR Codes?

Yes, they don’t need to be black-and-white like traditional barcodes. You can add colors and logo to them.

Hence, no need to worry if your QR Code will blend with the overall design or theme of the creative. You can customize its appeal the way you want. It can be done in two ways.

First, you can add a logo and colors to the QR Code. This logo can be an image or even text.

The second way involves adding a background image to the QR Code. In this alternative, you can’t change the color of the QR Code. This is done to ensure good scannability.

Customized QR Codes do much more than increase the visual appeal of your creatives. Wondering what else they do? Here’s a free e-book on how famous brands used QR Codes in 2022 for their print-media campaigns.

3. Better engagement and simpler user journey

With QR Codes, it becomes easier for your target audience to take the required action. For example, visiting your website, following you on social media, redeeming discount coupons, etc.

They just need to scan the QR Codes and see the encoded content. It’s as easy as clicking a picture.

Since the process becomes shorter and easier, it leads to an improvised user journey. And when that happens, your engagement rate increases.

In addition, customized QR Codes are known for getting about 50%-200% more scans than black-and-white ones.

They grab the users’ attention to maximize the engagement of your campaign. And that’s just what a marketer wants, right?

4. Keep an eye on your campaign performance

With the print media alone, it’s not really possible to understand how well your campaign performed. For example:

• How many people saw the ad?
• Did people take an action in response to the ad?
• How many people ended up converting from the ad?

But with QR Codes, you can actually monitor the performance of your print media campaigns.

QR Codes are of two types—static and dynamic.

Static QR Codes are permanent in nature and can’t be tracked for their performance. On the other hand, dynamic QR Codes are easily trackable for their scanning activity. Using them, you can see details such as:

• How many people have scanned the QR Code
• Where and when did they scan the QR Code
• The devices and browsers they used
• How did they interact with the content after scanning the QR Code? For example, did they click on the ‘Visit Website’ button or not

These analytical details can help you infer whether your campaign was successful or not. In addition, you can learn a lot about your audience using this data and optimize your campaigns in the future.

5. Content category for every use case

Did you know that there are more than 20 content categories for QR Codes?

Yes, a QR Code doesn’t restrict you to text and web links. You can share a lot more with them. Here are a few examples:

• Website URL QR Code: It helps you share web links with the end-users
• Text QR Code: As the name suggests, it helps you share textual details
• Google Maps QR Code: It helps you share your business’ location with the target audience. On scanning the QR Code, they see the encoded location on their phone’s maps application
• Document QR Code: Using it, you can share any document file with the end-users. It could be in formats such as PDF, DOCx, and XLS. You can add up to 20 files in a single QR Code
• Image QR Code: It helps you share images with your audience. You can add up to 20 images in a single QR Code
• Audio QR Code: It helps you share audio files such as songs, voice-overs, and podcasts with the end-users
• Landing Page QR Code: If you don’t have a website but still want to share information digitally with your audience, this is your way to go. It helps you design a mobile-optimized landing page
  
  You can do it by adding images, videos, text, files, and a lot more. When scanned, it shows the landing page containing all these details to the end-users.

These are just some of the various categories available. You can check out all the QR Code content categories here.

6. Flexibility in content

Say you create a Website URL QR Code that takes people to your website. A few months later, you wish to change the landing page link.

Here, you will have to create a new QR Code and even reprint the creatives.

Well, you don’t really need to do that. Dynamic QR Codes can easily be edited anytime you want. And yet your QR Code remains the same.

That means you don’t need to create a new QR Code every time you need to make changes to it. As you update changes, you’ll see new content encoded in the exact same old QR Code. Hence, no need to reprint the creatives either.

That’s all. You now know why QR Codes are so often used for promotions. Their ability to make every campaign readily interactive coupled with other benefits makes them marketers’ favorite.

Planning on creating QR Codes for your campaign? You can get started here.