Are You Using QR Codes in Your Advertising?

By Rieva Lesonsky

What’s the deal with QR codes? The little black-and-white codes that users scan with smartphones to visit a Web page have been alternately praised and criticized by marketing experts in the past year. But one thing is for sure: QR codes are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in magazine advertising.

A survey by mobile marketing company Nellymoser of the top 100 U.S. magazines (based on circulation) found that the number of QR codes used in both advertisements and editorial content surged in 2011–from 352 uses in the first quarter issues to 1,899 in the fourth quarter.

The percentage of pages with codes climbed steadily, from 3.55 percent in March to 8.36 percent in December. And the average number of codes per issues rose from 2.3 in the first quarter to 6.5 by the fourth.

The bulk of QR codes in magazines were advertisement-based. The number of QR codes in ads outweighed those in editorial content by a ratio of 25:1 by September 2011.

So what are advertisers doing with their codes? When QR codes first came out, most companies were using them to drive customers to their websites. That has since been found to be less than effective. As social media use has increased, along with mobile phone and tablet use, the way QR codes are being used has changed, too. Today, most QR campaigns link to product demonstrations, social media tools, contests or sweepstakes, and m-commerce.

Here are some popular uses for QR codes:

• 54 percent feature video to demonstrate products, provide a glimpse behind-the-scenes or explain how to do something.
• 30 percent were used for list-building (i.e. capturing consumer information).
• 23 percent allow users to share a video or product information with social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.
• 19 percent link to an e-commerce store.

The biggest users of QR codes, both in magazines and in retail store displays or windows, are beauty, home, fashion and electronics companies. QR codes are also predominantly targeting women; the top 10 magazines on the list, which accounted for 28 percent of all codes in 2011, primarily targeted women.

The way advertisers explain QR codes is also changing. In the second quarter of 2011, almost half of the codes had instructions for downloading a QR code reader. By the end of 2011, just 23 percent did—indicating that users are becoming comfortable with the technology and don’t need it explained to them anymore. Instead, by the end of 2011, 70 percent of codes were accompanied by information that explained what would happen when users scanned the code. Nellymoser says this type of call to action is a “best practice” for using QR codes.

Image by Flickr user Orangeadnan (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Branding, Marketing, sales process, Small Business, small business, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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